Stag DAO and Elk Finance: The Beginning of the Elk Consortium

The idea for Stag DAO came to me after having spent weeks going from Ohm fork to Ohm fork and watching each one raise millions of dollars on…well, I’m still not exactly sure to be honest. Kudos to those projects though. Sometimes it’s better to seize the moment and figure out the details later. I only mention it to make Stag’s different approach stand out by comparison.

For a while now, Elk Finance has been one of the fastest and most inventive bridging solutions in the DeFi space. In fact, it’s so novel that even calling it a bridge may be doing it a disservice. Elk Finance and their ElkNet are so much more than a bridge — they connect chains in a much deeper and more comprehensive way. (If you’re new to Elk, I encourage you to take a look at “Beyond the Bridge: Exploring Use Cases for the Elk Network”)

A lot of the features discussed in that article are right around the corner. At which point Elk is primed to take off, and not just in terms of price action, but use cases, utility, number of txns per day, number of unique users — all of it. From its launch in March through the 6-month beta phase that is nearly at its culmination, it has proven to be one of the most reliable plays anywhere in DeFi, such that I have high confidence that Elk will see tremendous growth when all their features are in place.

Now imagine you have this knowledge: you are seeing Ohm-like projects with little or nothing more than a revamped visual theme explode in market cap, only to slowly deflate. You think to yourself, if Elk Finance could capture some of this Ohm hype and market cap, we could further increase its utility even ahead of these upcoming features. Then I thought a little more about Ohm forks who use their treasury for funding new projects or farming yields. What if bonds were sold in Elk LP? What if the act of someone investing in a profit-generating treasury fund added value and utility to Elk? I started to realize that there was a tremendous chance for a positive feedback loop here.

I reached out to Baal, Elk’s founder and, as best as I can tell, the magician of ElkNet. I proposed my idea and asked if he was open to me pursuing it further. Not only was he open to it, but he was enthusiastic about it. That evening Stag DAO was officially formed, with the blessing of Baal and a few people in mind who could help.

Over the next several days we assembled a team of people with experience and connections in the DeFi world. We ended up with an incredibly talented and diverse group of people, comprising a mix of people with connections to the Elk team and community and the broader web3 universe.. A perfect team to lead a DAO that is designed not only to turn a profit for everyone involved, but also to unleash the utility of ElkNet.

We all realized that the more utility the ElkNet has, the more transactions will flow through ElkNet, and the more valuable the $ELK token will become. The more we can build our treasury with yield-bearing ELK LP, the more of that value we can capture and pass on to the Stag DAO investors. Where other Ohm forks are built off the perceived stability of stablecoins (pegs or regulatory risks notwithstanding), Stag DAO is built from conviction about the inevitable direction of DeFi and the underlying conviction that utility drives value.

ElkNet will become a powerhouse in the DeFi space. They are approaching things in a way no one else is, at a pace no one else can match. Their solution is the solution. They will enable projects to succeed in cross-chain expansion in ways once believed to be impossible. Assuming DeFi continues to grow over the next 5 years, ElkNet will become a major part of that growth. I am certain of all these things.

Stag DAO is here to accelerate that timeline, capturing some of that utility and value for our investors along the way.