Announcing xBank’s Official Launch on zkSync Era

Dear xBankers,

We have an exciting update for the xBank Finance community. For the past months, our team continued to push along on the development front while also refining the strategy and prioritization for xBank. After much deliberation, today, we are thrilled to announce that xBank will be launching on zkSync Era, one of the leading ZK-rollup platforms.

In this article, we will walk you through our reasonings behind the move and provide you with an overview of our progress, timeline, and future plans.

Introducing zkSync: Why We Chose zkSync as our Platform? 🤔

The xBank team strongly believes in the ZK-roll up technology. That’s why we were one of the first protocols to start developing on Starknet in Feb 2022. At the same time, we also believe in the multi-chain future. Even from the beginning, we planned to grow and become a multi-chain protocol and our team always kept our eyes open for the right opportunity that may arise.

With the recent surge in zkSync adoption, we believe it’s the right time for us to reprioritize our plan and launch a production version of xBank first on zkSync. We explain our reasons below:

• First mover advantage: zkSync is still relatively small. Launching xBank on it now would establish our brand amongst the early adopters of the chain. Building traction and growing our TVL together with the chain would be much easier now vs. later when strong incumbents are already established.
• Team Morale: xBank has been in development for a long time. Having a live product with strong traction would go a long way in boosting the working team’s morale. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing your work making real impact and your efforts coming to fruition.
• Runway: xBank has so far been entirely self-funded with no investors. The founding team strongly believes in the product and has been bootstrapping the development with personal money. Having a live product with traction would open many options for us to extend our runway and grow the team size to deliver more features faster — e.g., token launch, fundraise, protocol revenue, etc.
• Solidity Compatibility: The ability to program with solidity on zkSync greatly reduces the development learning curve and allows our development team to leverage existing libraries and framework to expedite the go-to-market time. In fact, we are very close to being ready for launch! The recent upgrade of the Cairo language to version 1.0, unfortunately, was significant. The change would require us to re-work a lot of our code for compatibility. Our development team estimated that xx% of the code would need to be changed, which means a longer time to market.

Given the factors above, we believe shifting our priority to focus on launching a money market protocol first on zkSync is a rational decision.

Will xBank still launch on Starknet?

Yes, we are still very optimistic and confident on the future of Starknet and believe it will become one of the prominent Zk-rollup chains. As mentioned above, we are just reprioritizing our short-medium term effort to deploy on zkSync given the external factors in internal constraints.

Our Progress: Getting Closer to Launch 🚀

We are happy to say that we are now in the final stage of preparation for the launch. All the smart contracts are completed and we are working on the final parts of the front-end as well as testing and code review to ensure the highest safety standard. We are scheduling the launch to be in June 2023.

Benefits to Users 👤

We are looking forward to welcoming our existing and new community members to try out our product once it goes live. Some of the key benefits to our users will include:

1. Potential Token Launch 🚀

xBank intends to launch a governance token in the near future. The exact launch timeline will be based on the usage metrics — e.g., TVL, # of users, etc. However, as an early adopter, you will receive an on-chain IOU tokens that can later be converted / vested into the Governance token. We believe this method provides the most fair and transparent process that rewards our community. The exact details of the token launch will be provided in the launch plan article.

2. Potential Airdrop of zkSync’s Governance Token 🪂

Since Arbitrum Foundation recently airdropped $ARB token to its users and leading protocols operating on Arbitrum, there has been an ongoing speculation that other L2 chains, such as zkSync, would follow along in the same path. While Matter Labs has not confirmed that they will do an airdrop of their native tokens, they have confirmed their plans to launch a governance token in the future.

In the event that xBank receives a share of this governance token airdrop, we are committed to distributing them to our community as bonus incentives, with a significant portion directed retroactively to our early adopters. The details of the mechanics on how xBank will track participation will be announced at a later date and provided along with the launch plan.

Next Steps 👣

Be on the lookout for our next article in the next few weeks which will go into details on the product features, launch date, and other relevant information.

Closing Remarks 🙏🏻

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the xBank community for your unwavering support. Your trust and engagement inspire us to strive for excellence and innovation. Our launch on zkSync will mark another major step for the protocol. To stay up-to-date with all the latest news and updates, please follow our social links and join our community groups below.

🔗 Official Links

Below are the official links for xBank:
Website: https://xBank.finance/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/xBankFinance
Discord: https://discord.gg/Ywh9hJg6xv
Telegram: https://t.me/xBankFinance
Github: https://github.com/xbank-lab