Announcing the Ripe Beta and Private Testnet

The first step in our journey to Mainnet

We are excited to announce Ripe is ready for showtime. After months of development and testing, the time is ripe (pun intended) to open the doors to our community.

The long-term vision is that Ripe will let you earn yield on everything. Initially, the way this will manifest itself through our own web app, but this won’t be the exclusive way. The goal is for the Ripe protocol to become a critical infrastructure piece of Web3, powering many different businesses and applications.

However, today the Ripe web app will be the primary way for users to interact with the protocol and will give access to all of Ripe’s innovative functionalities and use cases. These include:

• Earn: where users can deposit and earn yield on digital assets through different strategies and pools.
• Borrow: where users can borrow jUSD — Ripe’s stablecoin — against collateral that still is earning (i.e. productive).
• Bond: where users can purchase jUSD at a discount via our bonding mechanism to allow for the protocol to bootstrap the Endaoment.
• Staking: where users can earn rewards for helping manage, and govern the protocol, and also providing the ultimate backstop to our system.
• Juice score: where users can get rewards and perks if they perform actions that benefit the protocol.

The Ripe Beta Program

Why a Beta Program?

We know that Ripe’s mission is big and radical, but it’s also a very important mission. And we also know, that if we were to achieve it, this would have an incredible impact and unleash incredible economic opportunities all over the world. But this will take time, patience, and as Dre (now doxxed Mick) strongly outlined a few months back, humility. But most important, it will require working together, with our users, our community, and our ecosystem.

For this reason, we’re kicking off our Beta program with the main goal to:

🍋 Learn, iterate, and improve through the participation and feedback of as much of the community as possible.

How will the Beta work?

This will happen in two phases:

1. First, providing batched access to our private testnet. This will happen in limited cohorts to allow proper management of feedback and efficient scaling of the system’s performance.
2. Second, providing access to all on our public testnet, deployed on goerli.

When will it start?

Monday, February 13th starts our first cohort. Then the goal is to double our batch size weekly, but this can potentially be faster (or slower) depending on how our Private Testnet can support it.

Who will have access?

The goal is to support everyone that wants to participate, but we know that might take some time, so we’re trying to make it as fair/equitable as possible. We’re open to all ideas our community may have, but our current thinking is:

• A very simple survey: this will act as a waitlist and people will be given access in order of submission. It is also a great opportunity for us to learn more about our community and what they’re looking for from Ripe and DeFi protocols.
• Allowing you, our community, to ‘elect’ who has had the most positive impact and brought the most value to the community.
• People who participate and engage in our community events (eg. Banana calls)
• Invitees from our existing beta users.

What will users have access to and how can I join?

Everyone will have the opportunity to signup for our private Beta Program. The only requirement is that Beta users join the Ripe Discord server because we will be leveraging Discord authentication and roles.

🍋 Users will be able to join the Beta Private Testnet app at: app.ripe.finance

Through that link, you will be asked to:

1. Authenticate via your Discord account (make sure to use the same name that you will use in the Ripe server)
2. Join our server (if you haven’t already done so)
3. Complete the survey that will act as a waitlist (details above)
4. Once you reach your turn for access, you will receive the Beta Discord role.
5. This will give you automatic access to the Ripe web-app.
6. Invite you to our private Beta Feeback Discord channel.

Next Steps: feedback, feedback, feedback

It’s impossible at this stage to think of all the unknown unknowns we’re looking for, but at a high level, our feedback goals are:

• Refine UX/UI: are users loving our product experience? Any flows that could be optimized or made better?
• Stress test tech: do we have any bugs, issues, or anything that is broken or didn’t work as expected?
• Crystallize value props & use cases: are we delivering value and satisfying user needs? Anywhere where we’re going above and beyond expectations?

To provide feedback, users will be able to use the following feedback methods:

• In-app Feedback Form (best way)
• The private Beta Feedback Discord channel
• Participate in our upcoming user interviews

The Ripe Live Demo

We recommend people who weren’t able to attend the latest Banana Call use this video to get started. You can also jump to each section if you need a refresher on how specific features work. These include:

• Mick Intro
• App and use case overview
• Getting started
• Earn
• Borrow
• Staking
• Bonding
• Dashboard
• Redemption
• Juice score
• Q&A

If you prefer to read, here is an overview of what we covered in the video.

Getting started

🍋 Once you’re given access to our Beta program (through the Beta Discord role), you can access the Beta Private Testnet app at: app.ripe.finance

On the first login, you will be asked to:

1. Connect your wallet: we recommend using/creating a fresh test wallet
2. Switch to Ripe Test network: The testnet is running as a fork of Mainnet, so, in order to access it, you need to add the network to Metamask and switch to it.
3. Fund your wallet: we created a faucet to receive funds to use our testnet.

Earn

Allows users to earn yield by Depositing and Withdrawing assets to different Earn Opportunities that can be filtered by different Strategies, Pools, and Assets offered by DeFi protocols Ripe is integrated with. Keep in mind our first integration will be Yearn, but more can be added in the future.

🍋 Ripe’s future strategies potential
One of Ripe’s core characteristics is that it has built-in extensibility to add as many opportunities as the community wants AND support all the digital assets the community votes for, whether these are crypto, yield positions, NFTs, or even tokenized versions of real-world assets like houses, cars, etc.

For each Earn opportunity, users can view the:

• Asset supported
• APY: total + breakdown between base APY + boosted APY

🍋 Boosted APY — Ripe’s unique value-add: what it is and how it works
Ripe’s main goal is capital efficiency, and the way that is achieved is that the protocol acts as a trusted borrower against the ‘unproductive’ user collateral. The amount that Ripe borrows then goes and is put to work in the protocol’s treasury, called the endaoment, to generate yield that in turn is distributed partially back to depositors.

Therefore, a user who deposits in Ripe will be getting the same base APY as they would by depositing directly in the same protocol PLUS the boosted yield generated by the protocol.

Risk Score: a custom formula that includes factors like liquidity, volatility, etc. calculates how much risk (but also potential reward/upside) the Earn opportunity presents.

• APY + TVL Score: pulled directly from on-chain data sources, relative to other Ripe opportunities.

🍋 Why scores?
A core belief we have is that to reach more mainstream audiences, DeFi needs to have better and more accessible UX. For this reason, we thought of giving users a simple, visual way to contextualize specific strategies.

Borrow

Allows users to borrow jUSD against their deposits, up to their Credit Limit. This is determined by the aggregate value of your deposits and the related LTV.

🍋 Capital efficiency — with Ripe, your deposited collateral continues to earn and still be productive

Liquidation has similarities to other protocols like Compound. When the total borrow amount (including interest payments) reaches the liquidation point, the whole collateral is liquidated.

The liquidation point varies as the collateral value changes based on the type and volatility of the underlying assets.

Users can add more collateral (i.e. by doing more deposits in Earn) to improve their debt health and reduce the chances of liquidation or pay back the total or part of their loan.

Staking

Allows users to earn staking rewards for providing backstop liquidity to the protocol.

Currently, the protocol supports only single-sided jUSD, but in the future, users will be able to stake Ripe tokens as well as the LP tokens (likely jUSD/3pool).

🍋 Staking is a key feature of the protocol design
This represents the main jobs users will perform, that is manage and govern the protocol, and act as backstop mechanism. In exchange, users will be rewarded with staking rewards, paid out of proceeds from the Endaoment.

Bonding

Allows users to purchase jUSD at a discount and redeem after a vesting period.

Bonds can be purchased for a predetermined period of time (epoch time), for specific assets, at limited capacity.

The rate changes through time, increasing as the capacity diminishes. This incentivizes users to ‘sell out’ the bond, but also can lead to risk of missing the ‘bond emission sale’.

🍋 Why Bonding?
Bonding is a way for the protocol to grow the Endoament. Until our stablecoin jUSD has reached a level of liquidity that allows independent markets to exist (eg. on Uniswap), bonding allows the protocol to exchange minted jUSD for investable assets (eg. USDC) that then go to the endaoment to generate yield. For more details, see our blog post here.

Dashboard

Allows a complete overview of:

• The user’s financial health across the Ripe protocol
• The protocol’s financial health and key metrics (coming soon)

🍋 Transparency, Accessibility, and Trust
A core goal is to make as much valuable and actionable information as transparent and accessible as possible to everyone. This is so all users, degens or not, can build greater trust in the system as well as immediately make better and faster decisions to improve their financial positions.

Redemption

Allows users to redeem jUSD for USDC (or other assets in the future).

The are also two ways to redeem, either:

• From our Curve pool: most convenient for both protocol and users (no fee)
• Directly swapped by the Endaoment: where users are charged a redemption fee.

🍋 For jUSD to be useful and valuable for users, it needs to be liquid. Ideally, users don’t feel the need to redeem (or dump) jUSD all the time (and instead stake!), but when they need to, Ripe offers them the option.

The Juice Score

Allows users to get rewards and perks based on their behavior using the protocol

Users can increase their Juice Score through 3 main actions: Borrowing, Bonding, and Staking.

The following formula will determine the users’ Juice Score, a dynamic value from 0 to 100.

The higher the Juice Score, the better the perks (i.e. protocol parameters) will be:

• Better Borrow rate
• Higher LTV
• Lower Daowry rate, our loan origination fee
• Lower fees like Liquidation or Redemption
• Greater Bond discount

🍋 Juice Score is built to be equitable and for benefits to be accessible to all
The Juice Score is a powerful tool that uses economic incentives to drive user behavior towards actions that are valuable to the protocol design (eg. stability) while delivering value to our users. At the same time, because actions are calculated in proportion to the Earn Deposits (denominator), any depositor, from small to whale can achieve a perfect Juice Score of 100. Ripe is not meant to be a system where only the whales can benefit, where only the rich get richer.