Introducing PL^Gnet 2.0
Hello Plug Power Rangers, DeFi advocates, and decentralised technology partners and friends! We’re pleased to share the next step on our journey: PL^Gnet.
What is PL^Gnet?
PL^Gnet is an advanced Multi-Chain Synthetic Assets Protocol.
We’ve built it to provide three core benefits: the ability for asset holders to mint synthetic assets (and use them in DeFi), pooling of liquidity for Custodians, and the ability to more easily access and onboard customers using identity attestations.
Creating Synthetic Assets
PL^Gnet enables the creation of synthetic assets from multiple chains, to operate together and leverage DeFi in one network.
Asset owners can mint synthetic assets, based on the assets they have on deposit, these are then locked until they are paid back with the synthetic.
In PL^Gnet, they do this with a simple interface from their existing trusted provider (a centralised crypto Exchange, for example) who has integrated PL^Gnet. They don’t need to create a new account, or learn a new product… this minting ability shows up as a feature within the platform they know already.
Once the synthetic assets have been created, the customers can see their original asset balance locked with their custodian, and their new synthetic balance. They can use this synthetic balance to access a range of DeFi products.
Key Benefits
Using a synthetic asset on a smart network to activate a DeFi product has a range of benefits to customers, custodians and product creators.
Safety — Asset owners don’t need to transfer and lose control of their underlying asset in order to gain the benefits of placing them with a DeFi product. They are working with a custodian they trust, can place assets in DeFi confident that they’re safe from hacks and scams. Lower trust requirements and higher security will bring many more customers to DeFi.
Interoperability — It’s difficult to create direct connections between networks, and even more difficult to maintain these connections as they grow over time. PL^Gnet provides a network that enhances interoperability via the existing infrastructure your provider already has.
Liquidity Pooling — Many digital asset custodians have limited pools of smaller assets. But taken together, they rival or exceed the pools of large CEXs like Binance, or the liquidity in major DEXs like Uniswap. PL^Gs synthetic asset pools join up this liquidity, allowing custodians to keep their unique offerings and customers, and not suffer over time as liquidity flows to larger participants.
Wider Customer Bases — From the DeFi product creator side, it’s a lot of work to promote your product to a wide audience, and gain their trust. Integrating with PL^Gnet means the ability to offer a DeFi product to the verified customer bases of multiple custodians.
Share Verified Customer Identities — PL^Gnet has a unique permissions design, connecting synthetics securely with a verified customer. This enables DeFi creators to inherit KYC/AML verifications and other trusted identity attestations, leading to super-fast low-onboard experiences, that meet regulatory requirements.
Why are we doing this?
DeFi is a fast growing part of our financial world. Already, millions of people worldwide are buying, trading and investing digital assets. This number is set to scale massively in the years ahead… but that growth relies on individual users being able access DeFi safely, using familiar tools.
To date, adoption of DeFi by digital asset holders is below 10%. We want to make it easier for those new to DeFi to experience the benefits of transparency, interoperability and composability in a safe way.
Another outcome of consumers desire for safety and familiar interfaces is an aggregation toward market leaders, who do a great job at this. However, that can unintentionally increase centralisation and decrease innovation.
PL^Gnet exists to provide another core rail of the decentralised web, offering new levels of security, identity and access. We aren’t trying to replace other layer one networks, but instead to make their assets more useful to a wider range of users.
Put another way… our competition is not with other projects in the blockchain ecosystem! It’s with the entrenched legacy financial systems which exist today. Our approach seeks to increase user adoption of digital assets, and introduce new capital and users across a broad spectrum of networks.
The path from here
We’ve already built out our powerful PL^Gnet Toolkit, including the patented Doughnuts protocol for stateless permissions.
In the months ahead, we’ll be launching liquidity mining, launching PL^Gnet main, transitioning the PL^G ERC20 token to a native token, and integrating PL^G Partner Alliance members (more on that soon).
If you’re a token holder, or just interested in the future of DeFi, give us a follow here and we’ll keep you up to speed each step of the way. Updates will be frequent and detailed as we move into this next rapid stage of development. We’re excited to have you on this journey with us.
Phil Williams
PL^G Team
