GM, everyone, and welcome back to your favorite series titled “Nolus: What’s Happened?” episode 3. In these articles, you can expect a summary of all Nolus-related information released in the last couple of weeks, providing you with a one-stop shop to #GetToNolus.
A lot has happened since the last episode, so grab yourself a glass (or bottle) of wine and buckle up — things are about to get wild. I will recount the last few months’ events in chronological order, concluding with the launch of the first-ever DeFi Lease!
Pre-seed funding announcement
To start things off, Nolus announced that they had successfully concluded its pre-seed and seed funding rounds, raising an impressive $2.5 million at a $20m valuation. This funding marked a significant milestone for Nolus and set the stage for its bright future in the lending/borrowing space. We are grateful to have the support and backing of esteemed investors such as DoraHacks, Everstake Pool, Cogitent Ventures, TM Ventures Fund, Token Metrics, GT Capital, W3coins, Autonomy Capital, BlackDragon, and others. Their confidence in Nolus reflects the platform’s potential and the innovative solutions it brings to the market. With this strong foundation, we are excited to continue building and expanding Nolus to provide even greater value and opportunities for our valued customers.
Leasedrop Conclusion
The Leasedrop event concluded last month, and in less than three weeks we witnessed over 5,000 leases initiated and more than 100,000 transactions performed on the Rila Testnet. The cumulative value of staked assets exceeded $8.5 million, based on the eligibility criteria of having at least $100 worth of stake on any of the 9 Cosmos chains, with the top three stakers being $ATOM hodlers. Notably, $OSMO, $JUNO, and $KUJI also had strong representation. Impressively, 65% of participants were $STRD hodlers, making them the fourth-largest group after $ATOM, $OSMO, and $JUNO. Additionally, nearly 80% of participants found the time for cross-chain transactions satisfactory, and 80% expressed ease of use! We are grateful to all beta-testers for their invaluable contributions in improving the Nolus Protocol, their feedback and support was instrumental in shaping the platform.
First Blocks on Nolus Blockchain!
On May 23rd at 3 pmUTC, the first-ever blocks of the Nolus chain were produced. This was no easy task, and we’d like to personally thank each and every one of our amazing genesis validators for their work throughout this period. It could not have gone any smoother, thanks to you!
Cosmos Community Content
Next, I’d like to highlight some wonderful work the wider Cosmos community has done. First off, KingWabi produced a stellar thread where he introduced Nolus to his audience, how DeFi Leases work and the integration with Osmosis, and the various ways Nolus maximizes capital efficiency while mitigating risks. I strongly recommend reading through it all! Furthermore, Nolus Co-Founder Kamen appeared on Imperator’s “Fast and Crypto” to share his insights on Nolus and its unique features. There are also some more personal anecdotes hidden in there, and the video is only 8 minutes long, so be sure to give it a watch.
Nolus Joins Cointelegraph Accelerator
For those of you who don’t know what the Cointelegraph accelerator is, allow me to quote their article:
The Cointelegraph Accelerator program took off in 2023 to provide Web3 projects assistance in reaching their true potential. By joining the program, Nolus will have the opportunity to present to the broader Web3 ecosystem its innovative approach to crypto lending, attracting users from other blockchains and wallets to its Cosmos-based chain to interact with its DeFi protocol through a simple interface. As a participant in the Cointelegraph Accelerator program, Nolus aims to become the one-stop shop to park all crypto transactions for Web3 users.
So put simply, this allows Nolus to tap into Cointelegraph’s global resources and established leadership to spread awareness around Cosmos and boost the adoption of our novel money market. Perfect!
Nolus Team Public Appearances
To really market the launch of DeFi Leases on Cosmos, both Co-Founders (Kamen and Ivan) took to the stage to present their ideas to a live audience. First, the Neutron Hacker Lounge at the Gateway Conference saw Ivan on stage with Cosmos heavyweights Spaydh, Jelena, and Matthew Pace to discuss the ATOM Economic Zone. Later on in the event, Kamen and Jeroen from Persistence were on stage to discuss the “Latest in Liquid Staking” which can be watched by clicking on the hyperlink. Huge shoutout to Gateway Conference for making this all happen and for allowing them to speak to the hundreds of attendees!
In fact, Nolus also sponsored the Atom Berlin event on the 11th of July, and Nolus’ BD Bilyana presented on stage the topic of “Empowering DeFi in Cosmos with Nolus”.
Nolus Article Content
The wonderful content writing team at Nolus (completely unbiased opinion) have been producing written content throughout this period too, with articles titled:
- Tips to Mitigate Risk in Crypto Lending and Borrowing: How Nolus Provides Safety and Security
- The Future of IBC
- Nolus’ Mainnet Launch
- Nolus Audits Report
- The Role of Network Governance on Nolus
- How does Nolus solve the issue of liquidity?
We’ll continue to keep you engaged with the required knowledge to expertly navigate all of our products!
Successful StreamSwap Sale
During the $NLS token launch, $319,000 USDC was spent purchasing 6 million $NLS tokens over a 2-day period in an extremely successful sale! The proceeds of the raise were to deploy an LP on Osmosis to allow efficient trading of $NLS on the platform, which you can find here.
Nolus DeFi Lease Live!
As of June 19th, the Nolus Protocol is live with DeFi Leases available for all our users. This allows users to borrow and lend the following assets:
- OSMO
- stOSMO
- ATOM
- stATOM
- wETH
- wBTC
This also means that lenders depositing stablecoins are now earning a juicy yield on top of some additional $NLS incentives. At the time of writing, there have been x amount of DeFi Leases opened, and the current TVL is x — an impressive feat! In fact, one of our legendary advisors and inspirational Cosmos figures Zaki Manian opened up a DeFi Lease himself to borrow some OSMO. Let’s hope he doesn’t need to demonstrate how robust our liquidation mechanism is!
Nolus Live on Pulsar
Pulsar is a portfolio tracking platform that has now integrated with Nolus, allowing our community to track the value of their $NLS tokens, their staking positions, and their DeFi Leases in one place. We’d like to extend our gratitude to the Pulsar team for their wonderful work on this!
Nolus Live on Leap Wallet
Nolus has now been integrated with Leap Wallet, too, allowing users to interact with our protocol on their mobile wallet. This is important, as the ability to manage DeFi Leases on the move is incredibly useful, and we are very grateful for this partnership.
Conclusion
And here we are! Finally, at the end of what has been a rollercoaster ride through the last 2 months of Nolus developments. As you can see, the building doesn’t stop here, and we are incredibly excited to continue progressing now that Nolus is fully launched and underway. This is just the beginning, though, and the next episode of Nolus: What’s Happened? Will be just as action-packed as this one. Thank you, as always, for reading this episode, and I hope to see you all again next time. Take care!
