Jet’s 2021 in Review
Now Boarding
As 2021 winds down and we as a team take some time to rest from an incredible maiden flight, we want to reflect on what the year has brought us and what to look forward to. When the Jet’s journey began changing from a hackathon project in late 2020 to an open-source, secure, and polished protocol in 2021, we focused on rapidly scaling up our engineering team from the start.
Jet was formed to build better debt capital markets products. At a macro level, lending drives global economic growth. At a micro level, crypto-native institutions now rival or surpass many of their tradfi counterparts. The capital markets needs of crypto-native institutions has become significantly more nuanced, and the Jet product suite is built to offer these institutions high-flying market oriented products.
Wil, our CEO and co-founder, made the decision early on to develop Jet as open source software, and also to build all our code from scratch without forking existing reference implementations. The Jet codebase utilized the Anchor Framework from the very start. Building good technology takes sustained time and effort. And developer engagement has been strong, we’ve begun to see other devs use and reference the code patterns we created for our alpha product, and we continue to push the envelope on how we use the runtime to our advantage.
Since April, Jet has grown from 2 co-founders to 22 total employees, along with several key advisors in the realms of cybersecurity, global exchanges, DAO formation, and recruiting. The team raised over $11 million USD from some of the most well-known investors in the space. Our investors are thoughtful partners who promote decentralization, coherent growth, and help connect us with institutional contacts that are already interested in our upcoming products.
We Have Reached Cruising Altitude
Momentum is building as we gain altitude and reach the apex of our course. Since the protocol went live on mainnet in October, the value of all assets deposited on the platform, also known as Total Value Locked, or “TVL”, has grown without incentives from zero dollars at ground altitude to as high as $50,000,000. In addition, over $10,000,000 has been borrowed. In October, the JET token was announced and debuted through an Initial Exchange Offering, or IEO, in collaboration with our partner, Ascendex.
Something that the team is particularly proud of is our cabin service — we monitor and address bug reports, user interface and experience suggestions. We appreciate the feedback and needs of our evolving community. Many of our UI/UX updates have stemmed at least in part from user interactions in our #ux-ui-improvements channel in the Jet Discord. We have been elated by the praise and encouraged by the suggestions and criticism received, so please stop by sometime if you have anything to say!
Here’s a comparison between our original interface and the current one, to see how drastically our app has evolved:
We are also on the cusp of adding a “risk indicator” with more position detail to the C-Ratio display section in the upper right of the main app — this will allow users to see their position health with a quick glance.
And we have much more to come. Here are some details about what’s coming next to the user interface based on user feedback:
- Navigation bar that matches every navigation bar for all of our apps/website, and solves the window sizing and accessibility issues that have been reported.
- More detailed account health indication with Copilot (health bar, in depth detail about current standing and snippets of advice).
- More sufficient warning messages about when and how liquidation works.
- More slider granularity so users can use the slider to select any percentage from 0–100%.
- Colors and dark theming updated for accessibility.
- And much more!
Newest Cabin Crew Addition
Jet has steadily interviewed and welcomed top-quality candidates aboard our team. We are pleased to have hired Max Webster as our new Head of Marketing. Max has a long list of accomplishments building and running marketing at crypto companies, most notably his work as Uphold’s Director of SEO. His deep experience will help push Jet’s content creation and overall marketing strategy to the next level.
Adding New Destinations
Our growing development team has been working hard. Multiple new products are under development — we will begin teasing some of this very soon in a series of blog posts and announcements.
Aside from new products, we will release a series of improvements to our current app in the short term. We are further developing the “Copilot” feature of our app, which we want to build out as a tool to help beginners to DeFi understand what the app is and how it works. Copilot will also guide users on how to more effectively use the protocol by utilizing the yet-to-be-released features under development.
Additionally, we will release a series of improvements to the current borrowing and lending application. New assets will come soon, pending approval from governance. We have focused solely on SOL, WBTC, and USDC as “blue chip” collateral types up until now. Other Assets such as Staked SOL, USDT, and even a Euro stablecoin have been proposed as additions in the Jet Governance Forum or our Discord channel. We envision supporting several assets grouped by category and risk in the first half of 2022, pending governance approval.
We recently announced the JET airdrop, which is a key step to broader token distribution as we work towards increased involvement in community driven governance of the Jet DAO. As announced, our from-scratch governance module will be released around the same time, enabling voting and staking at the same time. The airdropped JET will be delivered and autostaked in the module. Further details about staking and voting will be communicated over the next few weeks going into January, including our first governance vote. We will also release more information regarding the structure and function of the Jet Protocol Association based in Switzerland that will play an exponentially-growing role as we bank towards decentralization and the DAO increasingly steps into the chief pilot’s seat in the cockpit.
Please remain calm and in your seat while aboard the aircraft. We are writing a series of detailed blog posts to be released over the next weeks. Stay in touch and we can’t wait to arrive at our next destination together. Happy New Year!
