Evolving Snowball

It is with excitement that we announce in continuing its goal of expanding DeFi on Avalanche, Snowball has 4 separate projects under its venture studio brand. These protocols and projects are:

• Axial — the 1st Stableswap on Avalanche. Launching a more fully featured decentralized product soon with veAxial, sAxial, new staking pools, and Avalanche Rush incentives.
• Teddy — the 1st algorithmic Stablecoin ($TSD)using a Liquidity Fork on Avalanche. Working to launch a stablecoin subnet
• Lava— a Liquid Staking solution that is focused on bringing together the Validator community and providing decentralized solutions for delegating and validating. Audit of smart contracts complete. Frontend in progress.
• FiHub — an Aggregrated DeFi Dashboard for interacting with all protocols integrated with activity based rewards to onboard the next million and more DeFi users. Our 1st venture backed initiative.

To best execute the expansion of the ecosystem, Snowball’s current team of 20 full-time contributors will be assigned and distributed across the ecosystem of products as needed. This transition will reduce the overhead for Snowball while still providing the resources necessary for the continued governance and operations.

Over the past 4 months Snowball has internally launched:

• Optimized pools which adjust earning strategies every 1–2 days based on the best rates
• Tracking of earnings
• Multiple new assets (Vector Finance, Lost Worlds, Fief, Platypus.finance and more)
• NFTs for Lost Worlds Scavenger Hunt at Avalanche Summit
• Redemption of our limited edition NFT beanies(claim here)

Optimized Pools are one of our most significant innovations to the Avalanche ecosystem by providing the only platform which allows governance to get the best rates any given day for an asset from select platforms. (E.g. If platform A is 5% and Platform B is 7%, the strategy will choose B.)

The tracking of earnings was one of our most requested offerings and was implemented this week. This feature shows the increase in the asset deposited. If you deposit LP tokens, it will track the growth of LP tokens over time.

These functions create a distinct offering from competitors on Avalanche. To finalize the fully featured implementation of Snowball’s Earn strategies we will be adding the ability for anyone to call harvest. With the addition of community based harvesting, the yield optimization and auto-compounding arm will become even more decentralized and robust. This will allow Snowball to focus on what it has really done best- nurturing the best talent on Avalanche and building out novel and impactful work.

This transition will shrink the full-time team on Snowball down to focus on governance operations and the addition of new pools and API additions as needed. The goal is to move other team members primarily to Axial, FiHub, Lava and Teddy.

The Snowball Earn arm of Snowball has been quite favored to fund the team over the last 4–5 months, despite reduced TVL and revenues due to market conditions and difficulty attracting new users. So while xSNOB holders have continued to receive APRs greater than 50% for locking snowballs, this has been primarily due to the demonstrated value of the Snowball Venture Studio arm deploying the Beta version of Axial and receiving distributions. Therefore, resources will be deployed and focused on the Snowball Venture projects to support as many of the contributors as possible and continue the leadership of Snowball, as a DAO. Snowball has already demonstrated immense value for the Avalanche Ecosystem and as community there is a lot more we will be bringing.