Announcing the Quicksilver Launch

What is Quicksilver ?

Quicksilver is a sovereign Cosmos-SDK zone providing liquid staking for the Interchain, and unburdened by the constraints associated with the existing approaches to Liquid Staking. Thanks to its design, it can scale to onboard a limitless number of zones with zero onboarding effort required from zones and validators.

Quicksilver’s entire feature set was designed to keep users empowered and provide them with a smooth UX, without compromising on chain security and decentralization.

Quicksilver is controlled by its token holders, and all the decisions pertaining to the future of the Protocol (control parameters, onboarding of new zones, distribution of incentives, etc.) are determined by the community.

Launch Vision

Following the chain’s Mainnet Launch, the development team is making the strategic choice to release the Protocol in a phased manner in order to deliver Quicksilver’s Liquid Staking solution to Cosmos in a measured, secure and flexible manner.

As Quicksilver will be bringing about a novel approach to Liquid Staking, the development team wants to ensure that some of these mechanisms have the net benefit on the ecosystem they were intended to have.

To better understand the team’s vision, it is important to keep in mind that a successful Launch is one that delivers on, and keeps strong synergies between 2 main verticals:

• Feature Release
• Liquidity and Incentives

Let’s take a closer look!

Feature release

The team wants to deliver Quicksilver’s features in an environment where their impact can be measured and understood. For example, Quicksilver will be the first liquid staking protocol in any blockchain ecosystem to let users signal their intent for the protocol to allocate their stake accordingly. The Protocol is also expected to enable users to change that preference while their assets are being used in other Defi protocols. It would be useful to measure the economic impacts of such distribution before rolling out incentives to get users to delegate and change validator intent en-masse.

Liquidity and Incentives

The market conditions are currently uneasy and full of uncertainties. And while it isn’t possible to predict or mitigate all these uncertainties, it would be highly unwise and inefficient for the protocol to support large amounts of liquidity with incentives at the moment, especially with the LSM still not supported on the major Cosmos chains.

With the protocol and the ecosystem’s long term interests in mind, we are crafting a liquidity plan with the intention for it to go live on qAssets in January 2023.

The team’s intention for liquidity bootstrapping and the overall strategy is for it to be oriented towards the long term sustainability of Quicksilver, with the belief that responsible and forward looking roll out is the best way forward for Quicksilver.

Additionally, the LSM is poised to launch early next year on the Hub, which will be followed by other Cosmos chains. The LSM has always been a key part of Quicksilver’s design and vision, and the team has always believed this piece of technology will be fundamental in unlocking Liquid Staking on Cosmos, and improving the liquid staking experience for users. With the LSM launch scheduled so soon around the Protocol’s Launch, the team believes it is the perfect opportunity to further align Quicksilver’s progressive Launch, with that of the LSM.

What will that look like ?

The Quicksilver chain will go live next Friday, December 16th with an expected total of 100 Genesis Validators.

A proposal to onboard the Cosmos Hub on the protocol will follow and the hub is expected to be supported by Quicksilver on December 22nd, at which point users on the protocol will be able to stake their Atom and mint qAtom.

Stargaze is expected to be onboarded a few days later, and the team is planning to pick up the chain onboarding cadence after the holiday period. The long term vision however, is for the Quicksilver Governance to decide on chain onboarding without any supervision from the development team, leading to a self sustaining ecosystem.

Additionally, early Q1 2023, users on the protocol will gradually be able to take advantage of the full extent of Quicksilver’s features, and unstake their qAssets to exit the protocol, signal and update their Intent, claim participation rewards, and later on, vote on governance proposals with their qAssets, etc.

The initial Asset:qAsset pools on Osmosis are expected to go live in January and will be incentivised in a way to best drive usage for the Protocol and for the Liquidity Staking Module.

The key notion here will be remaining adaptive in order to navigate market constraints and external dependencies with a maximum flexibility.

Airdrop Wen?

In coherence with the plan for a measured feature release, the team intends for the Airdrop to start in Q1 2023. Apart from the timeline, the plans and intentions for the Quicksilver Airdrop remain unchanged. Over 50% of the Genesis supply will be going to incentivising the Community and driving usage.

With decentralization in mind, the protocol will weigh the way users stake, and not just how much, in the airdrop formula. The goal of this airdrop model is to ensure the Quicksilver protocol is in the hands of its present and future community, and QCK tokens are spread as far and wide across the Cosmos ecosystem.