September Hydra & LockTrip Ecosystem Update + Community Vote
It is already September and there are numerous exciting things going on in the Hydra ecosystem.
This post will outline the status of the key strategic projects:
- Hydra Blockchain Protocol Planned updates (EVM version upgrade, Block Time Reduction, Bitcoin Core and Qtum version upgrades merges)
- DeFI: Dex & Pools, Bridge, Liquidity Mining
- Prototype Projects: LockTrip Travel NFT Matrix, Social Media DAO
- LockTrip Marketplace: Affiliate league, Integration with Webjet, New features, Stability Improvements, Economy migration & Important Economy Community Vote
First things first…
1. Hydra Chain Protocol Update
The last 9 months were pretty intense on the Hydra blockchain side, as our engineering team was engaged in critical development sprints that were necessary to build the laying fundaments of the ecosystem.
Tasks that might be seen as peripheral, but in fact were of critical importance to get the whole ecosystem up and running:
- Upgrading the Explorer with vital API endpoints to support data aggregators such as Coingecko and Coinmarketcap
- Building and deploying a browser-based extension to facilitate user-friendly transactions and interact with DAPPs and DAOs
- Submitted a community app for HYDRA to be supported by Ledger — Pending review by the Ledger team
- Issuing multiple hotfixes on builds for all 8 Operating Systems including fixes on issues with transactions fees
- Conducted joint integration work with the team of 5 exchanges where Hydra has been listed
- Supported 2 exchanges with the launch of community staking pools
- Conducted the Hydra main distribution event
- Supported the LOC swap from ERC20/Ethereum to HRC20/Hydra
- Deployed and Supported Webwallet with fixes/improvements
Now that the ecosystem periphery is relatively structured, our team will be focusing more energy and resources on core upgrades that would enhance the blockchain performance and user experience.
There are three epic items on our road-map, which at this point we will present short teasers (stay close, as we will be making standalone posts covering each of the planned upgrades):
- EVM version upgrades — in order to improve the user experience of Developers and Projects as well as to unlock more advanced capability of Hydra. Smart Contracts will get a boost by offering a greater variety of functions and capabilities
- Block Time reduction — reducing the current 128 sec block time to 32 sec. This is perhaps the most critical task. To achieve this, there will be multiple modifications and the deployment will be rolled out via a planned well-synchronized hard-fork in a certain block ahead in the future. The reduction of the block time would affect the entire experience and would strengthen the impact of all applications that are being executed on-chain. Including, but not limited to Defi, Dex Swaps, Bridge Swaps, Token transfers, Hydra transfers as well as exchange deposits and withdrawals times. At the same time this would be a great catalyst towards more nodes being set up, as more frequent block times means that the luck factor for small stakers will be cut down by a factor of 4. Or in other words, the currently recommended “minimum 600 HYDRA” could be reduced to “minimum 150 HYDRA” for setting up your own node.
The summary of the modifications will involve various changes to the protocol. Among the more notable settings: Reduction of the minimum step time by a factor of 4x to become 4 sec instead of 16 sec, change of average block time setting to 32sec, an increase of maturity to 2000 blocks, and reduction of the block reward by a factor of 4x to match exact current levels. The rollout will be made with a community bounty program for testing the network publicly and simulating the hard-fork release.
- Bitcoin Core and Qtum version upgrades merge — to inherit multiple improvements that optimize speed, security, user experience as well as utilize hardware resources more effectively.
All three sprints are very powerful in terms of upside potential, as they would significantly boost the already impressive technical capacities of Hydra. It is most likely for all changes to be merged into a massive release rolled out in a single hard fork.
2. Hydra DeFi & Decentralized Exchange
The potential of the Defi is so powerful, that it deserves its own standalone category. Our team has a solid determination to continue building up the momentum that we already have.
As of this moment, the status of Hydra Defi is as follows:
Dex Under heavy work:
- v 0.9: HydraDex.org has been deployed successfully and is already making its baby steps as users are starting to experience it. More than 200 users have already downloaded the Hydrawallet browser extension which is currently being used for Dex swaps.
- v 1.0: Would enable Data, Charting and API Endpoints — This upgrade is critical as it will enable all the rich data services that make it possible for a user-friendly interface with charting capability, sorting, APY context, as well as API endpoints for integration with data aggregators such as CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. This is an important background service that enables discoverability and also facilitates arbitrage trades.
- v 1.1 Ethereum/Hydra Bridge — Will feature a user-friendly single-click bridge. An important feature that will create a seamless way for capital to migrate from ETH onto the liquidity core of Hydra. This is an important step in our liquidity mining plan.
Both of these sprints are in full swing and we hope to be able to deliver functional early deployments by the end of September / early October.
Planned as next steps afterward:
- v 1.2: Liquidity Mining — Liquidity Mining is the essence/driver of a DEX’s adoption. It incentivizes users in an inverse exponential way — stimulates usage and acts as an engine to attract capital into its unique liquidity ecosystem
3. Prototype Projects
- LockTrip NFT Travel Matrix: In case you’ve missed it, we released a slides presentation with a concept of an NFT marketplace that could revolutionize the way travel inventory is distributed. The concept was presented also to our partner Webjet (2nd biggest travel supplier in the world) during a 3-day meetup with their senior management (including the CEO), which was held at the beginning of June in Istanbul. Both of our teams are very excited, yet also respectful to the challenges such a radical technology would pose in terms of adoption. At the moment, we are working on the architecture and also, with the help of our partners, making inquiries to potential suppliers and hotels that might be interested to experiment with the model. It is extremely soon to make any deductions, and we don’t want to get your hopes too high, but still, this update is just to confirm to you that this is a high-priority long-term project, that we will be pursuing together with our partner.
- DeFi v1.3: Single-Sided Liquidity — After the liquidity bridge and liquidity mining programs are effectively deployed, the target goal is to launch a pivotal upgrade that would make single-sided liquidity possible. A technology that would enable LPs to provide liquidity without suffering impermanent loss. As of this moment, there is only a single project that has partially achieved this (on a global scale). The design work we’ve done is fundamentally sound and all simulations provide us with a fairly high level of confidence to believe that we may actually pull this off. Development on this will begin after all other milestones have been completed.
- Social Media DAO — This is a completely new project on the pipeline, focusing on the marketing side of things and automating campaigns effectively and collectively. The goal is to manage marketing budgets for each subgroup (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) and reward actively promoting community members as well as external influencers with performance-based royalties. At the final stage of this project the DAO (decentralized autonomous orgnization), which will be self-governed by HYDRA owners, will collectively shape the campaigns and decide on the budget allocation. We are currently working on the concept, which will be rolled out in multiple phases.
4. LockTrip Marketplace
LockTrip.com has matured significantly over the course of 2021 and is showing signs of user approval, as the bookings rates and metrics are showing growth. Our team is focused on the following strategic sprints:
- Affiliate League — We have completed the final phase of the front-end development of the Affiliate League Engine and we are currently conducting internal QA and functional tests. It may sound as if this is just a regular system, but in reality, it is very complex. It involves complex accounting logic with multiple dependencies that interact on all layers of the platform and intertwining features such as landing pages, discount codes, teaming capacity, scoring algorithms based on which leaderboards are affected. Depending on the Covid-19 situation, the rollout will be planned. We are considering to hold a 3 month mini-trial campaign that would be used for debugging
- Integration with Webjet — Work is in full swing and we have enabled the core functionalities in an API environment for Webjet to test their systems with. Both of our teams are communicating and maintaining a relatively good pace of work.
- Expanding with 2 additional very strong wholesale suppliers — Growing the current number of suppliers with two additional and very powerful suppliers. We have a policy of not mentioning brands, but we can confidently say, that signing these 2 was harder than usual. The integration should bring further improvement in the diversity and coverage of the product.
- LOC Economy migration onto Hydra — As bookings are starting to grow, we are putting a higher priority on the LOC burn logic. Our team is working on it as part of the current sprint and we hope to roll out the first version in the next couple of weeks.
- Planned Search experience improvement — We were able to optimize our technology without hurting the value of the product and as a result we will be boosting the speed of the current search, potentially cutting the wait time per search as much as almost half of what it currently is.
- Search price discrepancy improvement — We made a strong effort of optimizing the technology throughout the entire vertical (including working with our API partners). As a result we have reduced search price
- Technical support scaling — As the number of bookings grow at a rapid pace, we are expanding our support staff and extent the support coverage towards 24/7.
- Homepage Redesign — Improving the first impressions customers get when they land on LockTrip.com
5. LOC Economy v2.3 Upgrade Suggestion & Community Vote
We firmly believe that the current standpoint of LockTrip and Hydra is an iteration of the collective wisdom that the LockTrip team and the LOC/HYDRA community have formed as a team.
In fact, many of the features currently present on LockTrip were inspired or completely proposed by community members. Certain members of our community act as a unique extension of our engineering team.
LOC’s economy underwent a critical and successful refactoring with the v2.0 which turned it into a deflationary powerhouse over the initial lockup/release cyclical token economy. It was a psychologically hard move, which was made as a result of a community approval vote. It took us out of our comfort zones but in the end, it proved to be the right move.
With v 2.1 update the 5% burn / 1.1% affiliate/sharing economy fee were adjusted to 3% burn and 3.1% sharing economy fee. Another successful and critical change validated by the significant increase in interest across all of our affiliate members.
Following the same re-assessment process, we did a series of new simulations where we experimented with entirely removing the lockup part of the economy and focus entirely on the burn. The assumption was that this would ensure that at the initial phase of the growth, when LOC’s price is relatively low and bookings growth momentum is strong, the burnt amount would make a maximum long-term impact, by stimulating deflation as much as possible.
Surprisingly, the data shows that this would improve the outcome by a factor of 20–25%.
How is that possible?
Think of the lockup as an actor that would purchase LOC and then sell it in 6 months cycles. Since it is a trustless process with no variance in behavior, the lockup happens exactly 6 months in advance of the release. And upon release, the same amount would be liquidated. Any attempt to micro-manage this part would technically be speculation.
In a successful mass-marketing launch, imagine bookings growing by a significant number in a sequential way. Six months timeframe can be a considerable period of time, especially considering the Affiliate League setup.
The lockup mechanism would act as a buyer who would accumulate LOC at potentially low rates (thus applying short-term price upside), and then applying selling pressure at potentially higher rates by again releasing the same amount of LOC back in circulation.
Based on the simulations, we solidify with a high level of confidence that the deflationary model is superior to the lockup and we want to propose an elimination of the last piece of the lockup in order to facilitate a true deflationary model.
As a summary the identified advantages are:
- It would improve the upside potential as much as 20-25% compared to the current model
- It would turn LOC into a completely deflationary economy with no cyclical buy/sell transactions
- It would simplify the economy and would make it easier to understand and track for new community members
- It would also reduce the impact of the company as a centralized entity holding control on the lockup and buying/selling of relevant balances.
- A logical continuation/conclusion of a verified restructuring of the economy into a completely deflationary
- Less overhead in maintaining the system as well as potentially faster migration of the LOC economy onto HYDRA (comes as a short term benefit)
Based on the above, we would like to propose a community vote for LOC Economy Upgrade v.2.2
Please use the following Google form to cast your vote:
If you aren’t able to place your vote, please click here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18gZr1ETlB-bQB0KlgtGqfkJY3T_z92n7J-rZDsCqB3Y/edit
