saveDAI progress update

And a special announcement! 🥳

Published in

saveDAI

3 min readOct 13, 2020

The saveDAI team is delighted to share that we have received a grant from the Maker Foundation to continue building out saveDAI! We are honored to receive this grant and excited to join the Maker community as grantees :)

saveDAI Today

When we originally formed our ETHDenver team all the way back in February (has it really been only 8 months?), we had a simple vision for saveDAI: create an easy way to open an insured, high-interest savings account. Our plan to bring that vision to life by wrapping cDAI and ocDAI together into a single easy-to-use token.

We still believe in that vision. Since then, however, we’ve had to adjust our approach in response to a number of developments and ecosystem changes:

Interest rates have fallen, putting pressure on saveDAI’s model of paying for insurance using a portion of the interest.
The cost of insurance (the price of ocDAI) has been quite high.
The Opyn protocol experienced a hack. While the hack did not effect the ocDAI protective put options used by saveDAI — and while we remain strong advocates for the Opyn project and team — the hack was a good reminder that relying on any single input carries risk.
The introduction of COMP brought a welcome boost in cDAI interest rate (i.e., including the COMP APY) but necessitated some architectural changes to benefit from it.

saveDAI Tomorrow

To address these challenges, we’ve made some changes to saveDAI that have expanded our scope. This is why we sought out a grant, and we are thrilled that MakerDAO agreed with us on the benefits of saveDAI to the Maker and Ethereum ecosystems!

Here is what the saveDAI project will be focusing on:

Milestone 1: Rewards Farmer

Rewards Farmer is our approach to allowing saveDAI users to benefit from the additional yield from COMP and other rewards tokens by simplifying the accounting required to track rewards tokens owed to each user.

Since other protocols and apps will face the same challenge as saveDAI — especially as more and more liquidity mining and governance token distribution programs come online — we’ve also released the Rewards Farmer library as an NPM package for anyone to use.

Introducing Rewards Farmer 🧑‍🌾 🏊

Facilitating rewards token distributions from pooled liquidity

medium.com

Milestone 2: Self-Insured Asset Factory

This is the big boy. We’re expanding the concept of saveDAI from a single combination of insurance and interest-bearing tokens to arbitrary combinations. Using our factory, anybody will be able to wrap together any token.

We will be using our factory primarily to expand our offering of saveDAI tokens. In addition to the original cDAI-ocDAI version, we hope to also offer an aDAI-oaDAI version and perhaps others. The only limit is on the number of DAI-based assets and the existence of tokenized insurance for each.

We will also use our factory to make easier rolling over to the next term of insurance.

We’ll be releasing more information as we make progress. In the meantime, check out a recording of our September 15th visit to the Maker Community Call:

Milestone 3: Audit

The Self-insured Asset Factory (with Rewards Farmer integrated) will undergo an audit to make the protocol as safe as possible. The audit will be conducted by Quantstamp.

Milestone 4: Refactor front-end application

We had a near-production-ready front end application for the original version of saveDAI, but we’ve paused development there to focus on addressing the challenges that have arisen. We’ll return to the application soon and refactor it to handle the multiple flavors of saveDAI made possible by the factory.

If you’re interested in helping test out our application, please get in touch by joining our discord server.

Milestone 5: Launch! 🚀

Plans are not yet concrete, but we will very likely be conducting a phased launch to further reduce risk.

If you’re interested in joining an alpha or beta program, please get in touch by joining our discord server.

Thank you so much to the Maker Foundation and community! A big thank you as well to everyone who has contributed to our Gitcoin Grant over the past few rounds. Your generosity means a ton to us. 🙏