Journey to $100M Volume, bringing non-liquidatable leverage to life!
Timeswap started 2 years ago, with the idea of building the ‘Uniswap of Lending/Borrowing’ from Day 0. The vision was to create a money market which works for any tokenised asset onchain, allowing any asset to earn yield or access leverage. This vision was born to reality with the deployment of Timeswap V1 — the first ever Oracleless lending/borrowing protocol. Since oracleless markets are non-liquidatable by design, we saw robust demand for non-liquidatable loans within our community during V1.
After considering capital efficiency, scalability, and community feedback, Timeswap V2 was born. Timeswap V2 is the most capital-efficient, oracleless money market in DeFi. Timeswap V2 has isolated pools which offer non-liquidatable loans to borrowers in return for a fixed interest cost. Lenders on the other hand earn a fixed APR on their assets while selecting the risk profile of their choice. After being live on mainnet for a year, Timeswap V2 surpassed $100M in Lend/Borrow volume, making it the first-ever oracleless money market to achieve this feat.
Let’s take a look at the journey of Timeswap V2 so far, and where we are heading next! [HINT: It’s about TIME ⏳]
Going zero to one!
Building the ‘Uniswap for lending/borrowing’ was a 0 to 1 task — both from a technical and adoption point of view. It took a lot of education and ecosystem development to bring this product to the masses. This is primarily because non-liquidatable lending requires lenders to understand and manage different risks, compared to the current model of liquidation based lending markets.
While users had to go through a short learning curve, we were able to execute this with the help of a bunch of community members and through onboarding multiple communities (more on this later!).
Timeswap V2 went live in February 2023 and to date has served over $100mn in volume, $15Mn+ TVL, 60+ unique assets, and 35+ partner projects/communities.
Growth catalysts
To grow the protocol usage and the TVL, we focused on 3 things:
- Onboarding longtail assets — latching to the narratives
Since Timeswap’s main edge over other lending markets is it’s ability to accept any token to be lent/borrowed or used as collateral, we leveraged it to make Timeswap composable within the existing meta.
For example: when GLPfi and LSTfi were trending in the Arbitrum ecosystem, we onobarded a bunch of LSTs and Pendle’s PT assets. This provided an additional edge to all the yield traders within the ecosystem. At the moment, people are using Timeswap to earn points from multiple Liquid Restaking Token projects (LRTs) and leveraging memecoins. - Expanding to newer chains
Emerging L2 ecosystems and chains lack proper oracle infrastructure and liquidity on DEXes, this makes it difficult to launch a safe lending market. Lending markets getting hacked on new L2s is a very common incident. Timeswap pools can be deployed without any dependency on DEXes and Oralces, making them the safest possible money markets in an immature ecosystem. Timeswap is live on 9 chains, providing leverage, yields and safe lending markets to their community.
Alpha Deployments: Timeswap is now LIVE on Injective’s inEVM and X Layer L2 (By OKX exchange). Degens can now access leverage on INJ and OKB, without any fears of liquidations. - Onboarding communities
Timeswap is not just a protocol, it is a platform where different communities have their own market. Creating pools with governance tokens and native tokens of other protocols are probably the best way to onboard their community — which also makes them a part of your community. Onboarding these communities is probably the best way to acquire new users.
For example: We have integrated governance tokens, yield bearing assets and locked tokens from many different communities including Pendle, TraderJoe, Polytrade, Vaultka, DEGEN, etc.
Key drivers!
Arbitrum Season — STIP rewards!
Recognition came our way as Timeswap qualified for Arbitrum’s Short Term Incentives Proposal (STIP). The STIP has been one of the most competitive grants program of 2023, where over a hundred teams were competing for 50M ARB in grants!
Timeswap’s proposal, was one of the top 10 most voted for, bringing in 182M ARB votes in favour. This led us to secure 200k ARB token incentives for lenders and borrowers.
Incase you missed out on the STIP yields, then you’re just in time for the LTIPP!
Timeswap has also applied for the Arbitrum’s LTIPP (Long Term Incentives Pilot Program), which will potentially bring additional ARB rewards for Timeswap users.
Premine season
In order to do a fair token distribution, we thought it would be best to do it via token premine — where users can lend/borrow in the pools to earn $TIME incentives. The premine token incentives began in Oct 2023, at a 40M FDV which is same as our previous fundraise. While the markets have surged over the past few months, the premine valuation has remained the same for Timeswap users.
Premine was a very important driver of protocol growth, which didn’t just help accelerate the TVL and Volumes. It also played a key role in onboarding new users, which have now become active users of the protocol.
Next up: Aiming for the infinity!
Today, Timeswap pools are being actively used by communities like Pendle, TraderJoe, Arbitrum (Lodestar, Vaultka, etc), Etherfi, and more…
Bringing Timeswap to the masses and growing the protocol to 100M volume is the stepping stone for what’s coming next. We will be building an ecosystem of products which help users to manage their tokens and NFTs through TIME. Timeswap V2 is one of the umbrella products, allowing users to choose time preference over their tokens. We’ll be sharing more info these as we head towards our TGE.
Time Is Money ⏳
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Discord: https://discord.gg/timeswap
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimeswapLabs
Medium: https://medium.com/Timeswap
Telegram: https://t.me/Timeswap
