Visor Finance raises $3.5M in funding to develop the next phase of its Active Liquidity Management Protocol
Visor is proud to announce a strategic fundraise led by 1confirmation, followed by Digital Currency Group, Blockchain Capital, 1kx, DeFi Alliance, Decentral Park, Electric Capital, Maven 11, Spartan, Tribe Capital, and GSR.
This major milestone will enable Visor to develop the next phase of its Active Management Protocol. We’ll be focusing on UI and protocol upgrades, L2 deployments, two exhaustive audits, additional liquidity venues, strategic capital partners to increase TVL and innovative tools and strategies to drive higher returns.
Visor’s Momentum
Visor Finance has come a long way since forming in January to create an active management protocol. We launched with our unique implementation of the UniversalVault which is an NFT vault that allows for staking assets and now permissioning assets to DeFi protocols. The first and perfect use-case for Visor was obvious when Uniswap released their white paper and core contracts for Uniswap v3 in March.
Uniswap v3 mandates that all LP’s choose the price ranges that liquidity is provided within, for each pair. But this takes consistent monitoring and is costly to change price ranges and re-invest fees — especially for multiple pairs.
Through the NFT vault and the Visor’s smart contracts, also known as the position manager ‘Hypervisors’, DeFi participants can permission their assets for use on Uniswap v3 through Visor. Visor allows anyone to become an Active Liquidity Provider on Uniswap v3 without the normal time and cost constraints of an ‘Active LP’.
Starting May 5th, when Uniswap v3 first went live on Etherum Mainnet, Visor Finance has progressively listed and actively manages 15 pairs. Currently Visor is listing new pairs every few days.
At the beginning of our Uniswap v3 active management, we decided to focus on implementing protocol revenue for VISR stakers adding an additional utility aspect adding to governance features.
In addition to the Visor positions that initially returned 100% fees to stakers, we have rapidly approached a TVL of $5M with 10% of Uniswap fees being distributed to all VISR stakers.
Over the course of the last one and a half month Visor has returned more than $500,000 in Uniswap fees all of which has been distributed to community members who have staked $VISR.
Thanks to the constant feedback of our engaged community, the Visor web app has been improved over the last few weeks to display detailed performance analytics. It currently offers detailed insights for each pair supported. The Total Locked Value (TVL), fees generated, APR, and current and historical price bands are all calculated and displayed for LP’s. We are working hard to provide additional performance transparency through our analytics dashboards and analytics endpoints.
Gamma has done an extraordinary job as the ‘Supervisor’ of all of Visor’s listed pairs. Since inception, Visor’s largest position (USDT-ETH Pair) has generated higher returns than any other Uniswap v3 Manager, the USD value of holding ETH, and a corresponding Uniswap v2 position (ex fees — in order to simulate holding 50% of both assets). View the chart below to see Visor’s charted performance.
Visor Finance helped setup Gamma, an organization dedicated to funding ‘Active LP’ strategies and research. So far three key pieces of public research reports have been conducted and three ‘pair discovery’ dashboards developed.
Gamma Research Reports:
- The Costs of Uniswap v3 Active Management on Ethereum L1 vs Optimism
- Impermanent Loss Insurance (Protection Markets) for Uniswap v3 LP’s
- Expected Price Range Strategies in Uniswap v3
Gamma Analytics Dashboards:
- Uniswap v3 Volume and Fees Collected (Dune Analytics)
- Uniswap v3 Last 2 Days Fees and LP Positions (Dune Analytics)
- Uniswap v3 Pair Discovery Datatables (Flipside)
In addition, Gamma writes a weekly newsletter on Substack called ‘Active Assets’ and maintains an Awesome-Uniswap-v3 Github repo containing all materials and tools relating to Uniswap v3.
All of the research that Gamma participates in and sponsors ultimately re-enforces the discovery and development of sophisticated strategies that govern the active management of assets on Visor. Gamma has received and accepted grant applications with backgrounds at a number of high-profile quantitative hedge funds, market making and active management firms including Blackrock, UBS, Citadel and Two Sigma.
Moving forward into the arena of complex and high frequency strategies that L2 will support, Gamma is fostering a foundation of active management experts who will be able to contribute their domain and development expertise.
Using the capital from this strategic funding round, both Visor and Gamma will be able to focus on developing the next phase of its Active Management Protocol.
Supervisor Package
The next delivery of Gamma will be a complete package of open source tools for the purpose active management without having to know solidity. This will be the default way to interface with our Hypervisor contracts and allow any traditional finance data scientist to spin up a docker instance and write into an endpoint to deploy an active management strategy.
L2 Deployments
Visor will be launching on both Optimism and Arbitrum in the coming weeks in order to start managing positions as the inevitable volume grows on Uniswap v3. Due to lower gas costs we believe that swapping will become much more frequent on L2 and thus more volume will contribute to more fees from Uniswap v3 LP positions.
Liquidity Mining
Uniswap has recently deployed their liquidity mining contracts. We will be adding a liquidity mining layer to our existing vault/hypervisor structure so that select hypervisors can participate in upcoming external liquidity mining programs.
Additional Audits
With these specific upgrades in mind we are also pursuing two additional audits with tier one auditors for our Vault and Hypervisors. We expect to have these audits completed in Q3 and Q4 of this year.
External Capital Adapters
In conjunction with the L2 deployments, we are working on the development of adapters to utilize capital flows from external DeFi protocols. Partnerships are in the works and we are excited to announce shortly.
A major focus of ours has also been the onboarding of strategic partners to provide capital for use in active management positions on Visor, increasing TVL. This funding round solidifies partner’s capital commitments and allows us to maintain a solid network of capital providers contributing to TVL growth.
New Liquidity Venues
An active management protocol not only needs to be able to utilize capital from multiple cohorts but also the ability to manage liquidity on multiple venues. With that goal in mind, we are closely following the developments of AMM’s with the purpose of expanding the list of liquidity venues over the coming quarter.
Thank you all Visor supporters, community members and partners. We could not have come this far without you!
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