January 2024: Important Announcements and Updates

Tl;dr —

1. Overview of project developments in 2023
2. Updates on Insurance, SOC, TaxWraps, scETH ETF, and Real-World Assets
3. Introduction of Opus
4. Proposal to burn 30,000,000 QUARTZ
5. Concerted marketing effort to spread awareness of Sandclock’s benefits
6. Update on 2024 roadmap featuring multi-chain support, yield streaming, DCA and more tailored strategies.

As a team, we focused on substantially upgrading our core architecture and launching our yield-bearing vaults in 2023. The rebuild of our core architecture into tokenized vaults was a major undertaking. Deciding to do a full overhaul rather than tweaking the existing code base slowed our pace to launch features/upgrades for users, but this was done intentionally. We believe our pivot to a more modular, easily upgradable foundation positions Sandclock well both for a fast-moving 2024 and years to come.

When we published our roadmap, we had one strategy (Liquity’s stability pool with a trailing loss) and planned on launching a diversified pool of newer 4626-compliant strategies. We also described our core mission:

1. Generate real yield on-chain through smarter strategies
2. Bring crypto to the masses by abstracting complexity away and creating a bespoke experience
3. Introduce DeFi-friendly insurance

In the following section, we give you an update on all the projects discussed in the roadmap (and more!)

Recap of Projects 2023:

1. Active Vaults — Our tokenized, 4626-compliant vaults: ScEth (Emerald), scUSDC (Opal) and ScLUSD (Amber) are all LIVE.
2. Coming Soon — Staking, Yield Streaming, DCA, testing ScETH on Arbitrum, bridging to Starknet, front-end and back-end upgrades all moved forward in parallel and we anticipate they will go live in Q1 of 2024.
3. Security (Internal) — We performed additional audits and formally verified our code.
4. Security (Global) — Our security team published security tools for the broader ecosystem to help protect their smart contracts
5. Insurance — After an extensive dialog with insurance industry professionals, lawyers, and other stakeholders, our insurance registration documents are now officially submitted to the regulators. Our goal is to insure the funds being used on the Sandclock platform. In our submissions, AIG is our insurance manager and we have an AIG representative as a board member for the insurance corporation.
6. SOC-2 — SOC-2 compliance has also been an on-going process, and an accurate SOC audit required our vaults to be live, our team to complete required training and certifications, and collecting evidence of compliance internally as well as for our third party vendors. The audit’s finish line is in sight, and we anticipate having a completed SOC-2 compliance report Q1 of 2024. To our knowledge, we will be the first Defi platform with a SOC-2 certification.
7. TaxWraps — In December of 2023, we described our work on TaxWraps in an article on Coindesk. If successful, TaxWraps will be a novel type of wrapper that will enable tax deferral of income generating assets like dividend-bearing stocks via tokenization. We are working with outside counsel to develop a viable strategy for this, but anticipate a bumpy road on this due to the complexity of tax codes and other relevant regulations.
8. scETH ETF — We are not shy about thinking big. As such, we have met with a couple of large ETF creators to explore developing ETFs that would track price movements of ETH and leverage Eth-Yield strategies via scETH. This is still very much in the discovery phase, but throughout 2023, we established relationships with regulated service providers, custodians, account administrators, and other stakeholders, and believe that ETFs could establish a gateway for the broader institutional interest in accessing Web3.
9. RWAs — We partnered up with a large real-estate developer who submitted a mortgage tokenization proposal to regulators and are waiting on updates.

Opus:

We hope you have been following Opus Twitter page for important updates. It is starting to be Starknet season and the hype for projects built on Starknet is on the rise. Opus will be a highly adaptive credit protocol that will seamlessly allow cross margin–borrowing against multiple assets at once. We believe the platform will be a game changer for user experience and risk management and will be significantly intertwined with the existing Sandclock ecosystem.

30,000,000 QUARTZ Burn:

Our beliefs are deeply rooted in the greater good. Sandclock started with a vision to support charitable organizations and NPOs. Over-time our vision expanded and we repositioned ourselves as a wealth management platform. Previously, we published this article on the topic of Charity Mining. From our experiments in October of 2022, when our TVL rose to $1.68M within a week or two, we noticed that none of our users allocated a portion of their yield to be streamed to a charity. There could have been many reasons but one that stands out, is the fact that the Web3 ecosystem is not established enough to support Charity Mining and its growth. The focus of many ecosystem users is quick gains, not sustained philanthropy. Therefore, 30 million tokens that were assigned to Charity Mining will be considered for burning. A proposal will be submitted to the DAO for voting.

Marketing Efforts

We have acquired the services of a Web3-native marketing agency and they will be leading most of our marketing efforts in 2024.

An Exciting 2024 Q1:

Irrespective of market conditions, we continue to keep our head down and build. We believe that our deliberate pace and security-focus over the past year have built a strong foundation for us to be able to respond with agility and quickness to opportunities that may arise over the coming year. We look forward to a year full of growth, improvement, and a growing community, and are excited to go on this journey with you.

With that in mind, our priorities for Q1 of 2024 are:

1. Full mobile support
2. Marketing
3. Staking and Yield Streaming
4. SOC audit
5. Expected response from regulators on our insurance filings and follow ups
6. L2 + Starknet
7. Discovery work to integrate Opus

We know DAOs struggle to allocate capital. It’s cumbersome and requires a lot of internal collaboration. Additionally, countless funds looking to get into web3 struggle with risk management and capital allocation. They need more powerful tools. To on-ramp, manage risk, view disclosures… a one-click solution to manage the whole process, from deposit to redemption. Such an offering requires a strong grasp of the web3 ecosystem and high technical prowess that only specialists can provide.

Custom strategies fix these pain points by making the process of multi-strategy allocation frictionless, with all the risk disclosures you deserve, all to empower users, organizations, and DAOs to fine-tune their risk appetite for optimized risk-adjusted returns.

Multichain support opens us up to more potential liquidity and reduces transaction costs for our users, but more importantly, it enables the creation of such a strategy builder.

Alongside the strategy builder, our Starknet integration will allow us to deliver lossless DCA, a requested feature that’s repeatedly appeared in our community 1-on-1s. Anyone will then be able to allocate yield to alternative digital assets. Will this supercharge your APY or destroy it? You’re in charge, but no matter your choice, only yield is at risk.

Cheers to a 2024 that is hopefully full of growth, gains, and good times for all!