Steadfast and Ambitious: Our 2022 Recap and 2023 Roadmap
A note from our founders, @kentonprescott & @jparklev
It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone, but what a year it has been for Sense! We made tremendous progress last year building out the foundation for the Sense ecosystem, and we’ve already hit the ground running on an even more ambitious year.
Below, we reflect on 2022 and share a sneak peek at what we’re prioritizing in 2023.
Reflection on 2022
The year of launching & learning
Despite the challenges that crypto faced, with the collapse of FTX, TerraLuna, and 3AC, DeFi stood its ground and continued to operate unscathed. Sense was no exception, and this stability allowed us to continue building towards the vision of permissionless infrastructure for fixed income.
First and foremost, we’re immensely proud of the Sense core team in successfully launching Sense Protocol. Some of us helped launch Maker’s Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD), but it was no match against the highly ambitious Sense launch, which included the Core, AMM, and (now deprecated) Fuse borrowing/lending pool. Thankfully, the team’s attention to detail and hunger for excellence filled any gaps in our experience.
After three weeks of last-mile adjustments, private mainnet deployments, and 14 hr+ days, we launched the Sense Protocol on March 24th and hit our guarded launch cap in 22 days!
What an achievement! Shortly after our joyous hoorays, the team jumped back into post-launch ops, tackling bugs, educating the community, and responding to a wave of questions. It was a thrill, and something not easily replicable (outside of mainnet launches, of course).
With the protocol humming along in production, we began our efforts to scale Sense. Throughout the year, we:
Delivered key infrastructure innovations that enabled:
- Higher fixed rates ← Capital efficient YT swaps
- Rapid onboarding of assets ← ERC4626 adapter factory
- Passive Liquidity ← Rolling Liquidity Vaults
Partnered with some of the fastest-growing DeFi protocols, such as:
- Morpho Labs to onboard their Morpho-Aave tokens
- FiatDAO to onboard Sense’s PTs for levered fixed rates
- Idle Finance to onboard their high-yielding stETH junior tranche,
Consistently improved the Portal & launched products, giving users visibility into:
- Before/after effects of their transaction ← Transaction Review
- Yield curves created by Sense ← Web3 Yield Curve Dashboard
- Sense Protocol analytics ← Sense dune dashboard,
Paid out sizable bounties and praised whitehats who reported the:
And launched numerous community efforts, such as:
- Contests (SenseShift, header design, sticker contest)
- Engagement roles
Moreover, 2022 is when Sense hired its first Head of Growth (aka Mister) and first Community Manager (aka David). At 7 full-time contributors, we’re a small team with big ambitions, so their inclusion helped push many releases past the finish line in stride!
Metrics
We launched Sense into the bear market, knowing that DeFi usage was dropping across the board. Numerous protocols, stuffed with hopium-inflated token incentives, saw a precipitous drop in TVL and fundamental metrics. Despite that, Sense’s TVL & volume metrics have steadily grown in ETH terms and have yet to reach their inflection points in 2023.
As a project without token incentives, we’re relentlessly focused on building products that users want, not vehicles for free money.
It’s the only path where we can gather feedback on key value mechanisms and iterate toward PMF with high conviction. Hence our strategy is to build products with high stickiness, even at the expense of rapid growth.
A look into 2023
The year of scaling and innovating
Looking ahead to 2023, we have a number of exciting initiatives in the works. We’ll continue to innovate in the contract layer and solve hardcore engineering problems for the fixed-income space. However, this year, we’re following a more user-centric design process that’ll help us find & keep PMF, indefinitely.
Below are our priorities:
- Go hands off — Sense-v1 was designed to be fully permissionless, guarded only by a simple flag in the Sense Core. With our 4626 Adapter factory and our soon-to-be-launched adapter/series management UI, the DeFi community will have what it needs to fully leverage the utility of on-demand fixed income. More details to follow.
- Product UI/UX redesign — Sense needs to be 10x simpler for casual savers who don’t care about protocol mechanics and 10x more informative for professional yield traders who need the right information in the right presentation to make the best possible trade.
- Handle size — to serve large capital allocators, we’re investing heavily in R&D to improve price execution for markets atop Sense-v1 (cough block trading). Moreover, we’ve already begun work towards our next-generation fixed-rate AMM, which provides a step-function improvement to anything in the market to date.
- Borrowing/Lending — Borrowing/lending of PTs, YTs, and LP shares leads to greater capital efficiency, liquidity, and price discovery in the Sense markets. It’s an essential augmentation to any asset, and it’s a prerequisite to mature capital markets. The Sense Fuse Pool was our first borrowing/lending integration (now deprecated), and the FiatDAO integration was our second. We’ll continue to iterate towards the vision of seamless borrowing/lending for all Sense assets. More to come soon!
- Establish a Blue Chip Community — We believe that community is a crucial component of any successful DeFi project, and we’ve been fortunate to have a supportive and engaged community throughout 2022. This is the year that the Sense community levels up.
To the team, users, and community, thank you again for your hard work and commitment. We can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together in the coming year.
Next up
As we roll through January, we’re excited to announce Yield your thoughts: A DeFi Fixed Income Feedback Initiative. All submissions are appreciated and critical to the development of Sense, so please take a moment to fill out the survey!
Finally, if you’re excited about the vision of permissionless yield curve generation and want to help build it — join us! We’re actively hiring for a full-time Designer and Smart Contract Engineer, and are always looking for top talent.
Join our community on Discord to get involved, and follow us on Twitter for updates!
Thank you
Kenton & Josh
