Snowball was one of the first DeFi protocols built on the Avalanche blockchain in March 2021, bringing with it many other firsts. Snowball was the first DAO, the first auto-compounder, and the first stable-asset exchange. Since then we’ve continued our legacy of developing innovative products in the space, cementing ourselves not only through the products we’ve launched but the community we’ve created.
As of one year after its launch, Snowball has become a true venture studio where the community can come together and lean on each others’ expertise in order to launch the best possible projects to fit the needs of our rapidly growing ecosystem. This was made possible through our incredibly decentralized governance systems.
Snowball Governance
As the longest running DAO in the space, it means we give immense value to our community and thus the decisions we make together. To that end, our xSNOB token has become one of the most robust and rewarding governance tokens out there.
Not only has the token granted our community voting power in our 20+ proposals to date, but it also has allowed us to decide on SNOB incentive allocations to our many yield strategies in a fair and decentralized manner. This means our community has had complete control of how and where 14.5M+ SNOB tokens have been distributed.
Our governance systems have also become a way for us to share the DAO’s success with those that contribute. Snowball has distributed 30% of all its revenue directly to xSNOB holders, as well as a percentage of every new project’s token emissions it has launched. To put this into perspective, it has resulted in a historical APR of over 85%, by far the best of its class.
It is no surprise that xSNOB clearly demonstrates our community’s commitment to the DAO. Just shy of 60% of all SNOB tokens (10M+) are staked to that end, for an average lock time of 16 months (1.35 years).
Our Projects
Snowball continues to offer yield strategies and auto-compounding, on top of the best opportunities Avalanche has to offer, having served thousands of users millions in yield, as well as distributed over $3.5M in SNOB incentives for such strategies. Our decentralized venture studio has also been busy launching Axial, integrating Teddy, and preparing to soon launch Lava.
Axial Exchange
Axial was launched as a spin-out of Snowball’s StableVault. It was voted on through proposal #15, bringing stable asset pools with great yield and minimal slippage and swap fees to Avalanche.
Since its launch in November, the project has accrued a peak of over $90M in TVL and over $100M in swap volume in a single week. The project has enabled over half a billion in volume to be swapped easily between stablecoins in the ecosystem and has plans to further decentralize its pools, as well as introduce pools for value-pegged assets other than stablecoins.
Teddy
Since it’s launch in August, Teddy has been a majorly successful borrowing protocol, allowing users to mint TSD by utilizing their AVAX as collateral.
Through proposal #20, Teddy has joined the Snowball ecosystem, adding their team’s experience to ours and allowing Snowball’s DAO experience to further decentralize the protocol and its governance systems.
Lava
Lava is approaching its launch, bringing with it the best implementation of liquid staked AVAX the Avalanche ecosystem has yet to experience.
The protocol has been in development ever since proposal #8, where liquid staking was identified as an area worth exploring and building upon.
Education & Safety
Throughout our first year, Snowball has put immense efforts into maintaining our clean exploit-free record and ensuring the safety of user funds, as well as making sure our users are as well-informed as possible about our platform and Avalanche’s DeFi space.
DeFi University
Our documentation has been consistently been improving with increasingly more educational content for our community - from the very basics of blockchain technology to the more complex underlying DeFi functionality and mathematics behind many different investment types. This allows us to give as much information to our users as possible, and share knowledge on how to avoid scams and keep assets safe in this ever rapidly expanding space.
Opt-In Infinite Approvals
Many exploits involving other projects and/or blockchains in the past year involved abusing unnecessarily large token allowances. While our ecosystem hasn’t been much affected by these, Snowball is proud to have always offered infinite approvals as an opt-in feature, not by default.
The Road Ahead
With this first year full of many successes and our team and community larger than ever, it is easy to envision an even brighter future. Our roadmap is filled with exciting ventures and improvements to the Snowball ecosystem, which include, but are not limited to, the following highlights:
- Axial V2- This newly updated UI will bring even more functionality and strong brand identity to our app, as well as display a lot more information to our users.
- Snowball UI V3- This updated UI will add more functionality to the app, display more information about user activity, and provide easy access to the many projects coming in the near future.
- Liquid Staking - Lava is the most anticipated launch coming in the near future, and for good reason - keep your AVAX ready for the next level of staking on Avalanche!
- Notification Service - This goal has only been accelerated due to the efforts of many developers from the community participating in the Moralis Avalanche Hackathon, and we hope to include similar functionality in our upcoming updates to Snowball.
- Delegated xSNOB Voting - We’ve already achieved over 40%+ utilization of voting power through xSNOB, but by allowing for delegations, we believe this number can be even higher. Delegations allow that voting power to be assigned to like-minded individuals, for those with not enough time to read upon and fully participate in every DAO proposal.
- Subnet Integration - Subnets on Avalanche will be the next big thing for protocols to take advantage of and scale their activities. We intend to fully make use of these new opportunities.
- Referral Program - By introducing a referral program, we can more easily and organically grow our community.
We hope you’ll stick around to see Snowball grow into its full potential, and participate in all the other events, features and projects we have planned! Cheers to another year, and stay safe out there Snowballers!
