Meet Nereus, the people’s protocol.
Lots of DeFi protocols claim participatory governance…but you know as well as we do that this just ain’t true.
In reality, a few big players control most of the votes and makes decisions for everyone else. Venture capitalists, whales, whatever you want to call them, wield greater influence simply because they can afford to.
We’re Nereus — a new DeFi protocol built on the Avalanche network. We plan to put an end to the Big Players’ reign by directly involving the community in governance, building a platform that allows everyone to fully participate in — and benefit from — decentralised finance, wherever they are in the world. We dream of a fully independent, Web 3.0-ready protocol in which every participant has an equal voice.
The world is changing fast. Legacy payments infrastructure won’t cut it anymore; it’s time for DeFi to step up. Every day, millions of people all over the world live their lives without access to secure, inexpensive ways to manage their capital. Without easy money transfers. Without bank accounts. But guess what? Almost everyone has access to a smart phone with an internet connection these days — and that means access to the benefits of DeFi.
The plan
We’re not completely crazy, so there’s no plan to start from zero. We’re designing Nereus to build on the work of some of the best staking/lending protocols that already exist, to improve user experience, add better characteristics and sort out the governance problem.
The Nereus team is made up of a small group of former Wirex employees, inspired by ground-breaking work of AAVE, Compound Finance and MakerDAO. Even though everyone currently lives in a world dominated by fiat money, we’re pretty sure that’s all about to change — so we decided to bet big on the future of finance being DeFi. We stand for truly independent decision making, democratic access and empowerment.
Nereus will primarily employ Wirex Tokens (WXT) to facilitate lending, borrowing and staking within the protocol and users that stake or lock WXT will be rewarded for providing liquidity. Essentially, WXT acts as the native token for revenue generation. Here’s where it gets really exciting — staking WXT with Nereus pays out 50% of all revenue generated through lending in the protocol to users, so revenue is always shared with our community. No wonder some people are calling Nereus ‘the People’s Protocol’…
Both lenders and borrows will generate WXT rewards, which can be redeemed straight away with a 50% penalty — or users can wait out a three-month lockup, after which the full amount will be available. There are two ways participants can get rewarded: by staking WXT to receive protocol fees and by locking WXT to benefit from the ‘exit’ fees of users who choose to redeem their rewards immediately.
You can get into it all a lot deeper — and read about our full vision — in the Nereus whitepaper.
Why Nereus? Why now?
Nereus, eldest son of Gaia and Homer’s Old Man of the Sea, was an Ancient Greek sea god renowned for his truthfulness and honesty. He had the gift of prophecy and the ability to change his shape at will — and as such is an apt representation of our view of the future. In 2020, there were about half a million DeFi products on the market. As of 2021, there’s more than 10,000,000. Concepts like the metaverse, DeFi and Web 3.0 were not in popular use as little as a year ago, yet find themselves quoted in mainstream media on a daily basis in 2021. Change isn’t around the corner, it’s happening right now.
In amongst the chaos and confusion of a world in which regulators cannot keep up with the pace of progress and the rip tides of change, Nereus stands for honesty, transparency and flexibility.
Nereus is not just an idea. We’re already funded, it’s happening. The idea for Nereus was first pitched to the senior team at Wirex, where some of us had worked since 2015. We didn’t want our P45s — we wanted their investment. As soon as they understood the value of the protocol to WXT holders — as well as the options for broadening Wirex products — they bought in to the tune of 5bn WXT.
For us, the benefits are obvious. We can immediately launch a protocol built around a credible existing token that’s available on exchanges and already used by an established global crypto leader. The Wirex user base consists of millions of people who already hold WXT, so we’ll start with an immediate target market of participants. Even better, Wirex has also committed to building Nereus-compatible products within their future roadmap. Will we be independent? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’. A condition of accepting the investment from Wirex was that Nereus must be able to build an independent governance model which suits its users, not its investors. While we will accept input, constructive feedback, support and advice during the launch phase (we’d be stupid not to!), maintaining full financial independence from any single investor is non-negotiable and integral to the protocol.
We’ve got to move fast if we want to bring the benefits of DeFi to the millions of people rapidly losing hope with legacy finance, which is why we don’t want to waste time building a brand-new, designed-from-scratch currency with no rep and no credibility. Using WXT will fast track this process and allow us to focus on what we want to do — building the protocol itself.
Get involved
Want to get involved with Nereus? Stay tuned — we’re in stealth mode now but won’t be for long. Community input is the core of our roadmap and governance model — we want as many users as possible to join us in shaping this project. Join our Discord channel, follow us on Twitter and get ready for everything to change. Do it now!
