New Order DAO: A First Year Retrospective

We feel privileged to have launched New Order one year ago. Our DAO first began with the goal of constructing cutting-edge DeFi products, which is precisely what we did. Within our first year, we’ve greatly increased our ability to deliver innovative projects stemming from an idea within the DAO. This process starts with multiple rounds of curation before being given resources and talent required for completion; a lengthy yet successful process as seen by the growth in our ecosystem throughout 2022:

• 18 projects have been incubated and accelerated across multiple verticals in DeFi and Web3.
• ~ $85M fundraised for teams.
• ~ $30M in total-value-locked across incubated projects.

We’ve come a long way since we first started our incubation and acceleration efforts, and it’s all thanks to our supportive community of builders. As we head into Year 2, we plan to extend New Order’s reach even further. However, before talking about future plans, we should take this opportunity to look back on past achievements within the ecosystem.

The Birth of New Order (December 9, 2021)

It all started when we launched New Order on December 9th, 2021. We successfully raised $6.8M via Miso and the response from the community was overwhelming. They embraced the idea of being at the forefront of DeFi and Web3 innovation, and it hasn’t stopped since then. An idea was now reality.

Redacted (December 15, 2021)

Redacted, our first incubated project, was an instant hit. During this time, Olympus DAO and the Curve ecosystem saw extreme growth — the former for its innovative bonding mechanism, the latter for its veTokenomics and the battle for CVX/CRV. This presented a unique opportunity to leverage Olympus’s bonding mechanism in order to become a massive player in the Curve ecosystem, and this is exactly what Redacted aimed to do. Only six days after launching New Order, Redacted began its treasury bootstrapping event and raised over $70,000,000 in CRV, CVX, and OHM.

Redacted has come a long way since it first started and now leads the market in governance infrastructure solutions after expanding its reach into multiple DeFi ecosystems. For a deep dive on Redacted’s journey, read here.

H2O (April 27, 2022)

In recent years, data tokens have increased greatly in demand. However, the idea of on-chain data assets is still very new and is missing key components to become mainstream — one being a stable asset used as a medium of exchange. The goal here was simple: how can we bring a decentralized stable asset to the Web3 data economy?

We discovered our solution by partnering with Reflexer Finance and Ocean Protocol — the creators of the non-pegged stable asset known as RAI and the leading on-chain data ecosystem. That solution was H2O, a non-pegged stable asset that utilizes mechanisms from RAI and OCEAN data sets as collateral. Only four months after Redacted, we launched H2O and successfully raised $1.25M.

DeFi Base Camp Cohort 1 (May 24, 2022)

We initially only had one way of growing New Order’s reach, which was incubating projects. But then we realized that if we want to build and ship at scale, it would require an insane amount of resources and talent that may take years to obtain. We also understood that there are plenty of early-stage startups that only need guidance during the go-to-market phases.

Alongside Outlier Ventures, we created an accelerator program called DeFi Base Camp. The program specifically focuses on guiding early-stage startups through the go-to-market stage and helping them reach their full potential.

Our first cohort concluded in early July with the graduation of six projects: Obey, Sumeria, IdentDeFi, Kima, Bright Union, and LazyTrade. These six teams were selected out of over 290 applicants and raised a combined $3M in just under 12 weeks.

Frogs Anonymous (May 26, 2022)

In contrast to our usual incubation efforts, we launched a public-facing research hub called Frogs Anonymous. Decentralization is the core of our industry and it affects how applications are built, how organizations are structured, how funds are raised, and so on. However, the creation and distribution of information/research has always been centralized — until now.

Unlike any other research hub, Frogs Anonymous is a collective of multiple anonymous writers and their work. We believe that platforms for anonymous research and thought-leadership are essential to decrease the amount of information bias and barrier to entry for anyone that wants to write about DeFi and Web3.

veNEWO (June 15, 2022)

After months of research and development, we launched veNEWO — a system that fairly distributes governance power and rewards to users that lock NEWO based on their duration instead of simply the amount of tokens they have. This transformed NEWO into a yield-generating index of our incubated/accelerated projects. As a result, NEWO lockers are now able to take part in pre-seed stage rounds and have a say in value creation for the New Order ecosystem.

At the time of writing, 100M NEWO has been locked for an average duration of 2.3 years. This is nearly 50% of the circulating supply.

Y2K Finance (October 31, 2022)

Although stablecoins have a current market cap of $142B and show no signs of going anywhere, they still face several issues, such as peg volatility, liquidity issues, embedded centralization risk, and more. As we all experienced, this past year saw a lot of uncertainty and many stablecoins failed to hold their value. For example, Terra and its stablecoin UST lost over $40B in value, leaving a permanent mark on our industry.

A fully transparent, on-chain insurance solution was needed for users, DAOs, and others who wanted to protect their pegged asset positions from these types of events. Thus, Y2K Finance was born.

Y2K Finance is our newest incubated project that allows participants to hedge or speculate on the risk of a particular pegged asset (or basket of pegged assets), deviating from their ‘fair implied market value’. In only weeks after launch, Y2K reached $10M TVL and has generated > $380k in revenue.

DeFi Base Camp Cohort 2 (December 6, 2022)

Last but not least, we’ve recently announced the second cohort of DeFi Base Camp. The cohort consists of seven DeFi and Web3 projects that we believe have massive potential. We can’t share too many details yet as it’s still early, but stay tuned. Cohort 2 includes:

• 0xKYC
• Casten
• Smilee
• Starfall
• SuperHedge
• VyperProtocol
• Caviar

Closing Thoughts

A quote from Eden Dhaliwal, the Founder of New Order:

It’s been an incredible journey so far and we’re only just getting started. In its first year, New Order has grown from a small team of passionate builders to a full-fledged platform for incubating and accelerating the future of our industry. We’re looking forward to continuing this mission and can’t wait to share details on what’s to come.

Build tomorrow, today .