What Has Xend Finance Been Doing The Last Six Months? More Than You Know!

At Xend Finance, two months after our engineering team deployed version 1 of the Xend Finance protocol, which became the first and only DeFi platform for credit unions and cooperatives, we immediately started thinking about more advanced systems that would make DeFi more scalable. Our goal has always been to think bigger and aim for mainstream adoption.

With current yield-earning systems, including version 1 of Xend Finance, we spotted a major gap and opportunity, which is being able to maintain good yields as adoption increased and more capital flowed into DeFi.

The question that made this very obvious was this; “If we onboard about one billion people into DeFi right now with the aim of earning up to 10% APY, will the current technology support such yields?” At that point, we realized that Xend Finance had to build much more improved systems in DeFi to handle this future problem, because the answer was obviously “No”.

How Does Xend Finance Help DeFi Scale And Hit One Billion Users?

The next question was, “how the heck do we do this?” We have always been inspired by Yearn Finance and what they have created on Ethereum blockchain. If we could somehow improve the current infrastructure of DeFi it would definitely be done by leveraging multiple DeFi protocols in ways no one has ever done. Getting excited and afraid at the same time, we started doing a lot of research and working on designs on how this could be possible. We also had to start hiring more “good” blockchain engineers, which is one of the hardest things to do.

During this same time, the crypto market went down so much that we started facing multiple attacks from different parts of our community. Focusing on building complex, time-consuming systems like this AND attempting to keep the community calm was very difficult. At some point, we had to choose the former and de-emphasize trying to consistently please the community, because we were building for a better future of DeFi and Xend Finance. The bigger picture will have greater rewards for all involved.

The first research paper documentation started on the 2nd of May, 2021. We were working on two protocols concurrently:

• x-Vault (first on BSC and then Polygon)
• Automated Yield Aggregator (first on Polygon and then BSC)

x-Vault

The x-vault system is a system that implements multiple yield generation strategies that automatically seek out the highest yields available in DeFi. These x-vaults accept your deposit, then the vault system distributes the funds through multiple strategies, which automatically seek out the best yields (inspired by Yearn).
See System Design Documentation Here

Automated Yield Aggregator

The Xend Finance lending protocol aggregator — unlike other DeFi protocols who only list other Layer-1 DeFi protocols — will automatically shift funds across different lending protocols to provide very high yields without any input from the user.
See System Design Documentation Here

Bringing Mainstream Adoption And The Hurdles Presented

While working on the two protocols, we also realized that for mainstream adoption to really happen at scale, we had to build a convenient way to bring the everyday user onboard.

We had just deployed our SDK in June to make it easy for developers to build on Xend Finance V1 protocol by abstracting the blockchain complexity. This was our first step in the direction of making sure the end user could access DeFi without the stress of downloading and using complex tools and exchanges.

With the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) also preventing blockchain startups from having bank accounts, this caused some delay in onboarding real-world users, as the existing onboarding channels faced a major shut down. This challenge was a good one as it put us in a position to build a fully decentralized onboarding channel: The peer-to-peer fiat-to-crypto on-ramp and off-ramp. We lost time. but we gained something even better — longevity.

While we were on the right track by deploying our SDK, we could not rest because the next steps were even more important:

1. Creating a Peer-to-Peer Fiat-to-Crypto On-Ramp and Off-Ramp: We had made some partnerships to help with easy implementation of the fiat-to-crypto on-ramp and off-ramp. Little did we know that these partnerships would not really come to life within our expected time frame. We had to assemble our engineering team to create a peer-to-peer fiat-to-crypto on-and-off-ramp from ground up, as well as set up an operations/customer service team to help with dispute resolutions that might arise. As we developed this system, it became clear how fast we could onboard non-crypto users with our P2P platform and this even gave us more drive to build. The development of the P2P system now lead to the next phase of building a product for adoption.
2. The Xend Finance Mobile App: In July, we realized that we had processed over $6M in savings and had over $1M TVL (Total Value Locked) — and this was mostly from people in Africa who understood crypto and the complexities of using wallets like MetaMask. We had unending requests from people saying that they wanted to save on Xend Finance, but they could never use the current web platform due to being too complex and requiring so many steps (i.e. converting cash to crypto on exchanges, moving stablecoins and BNB/ETH/Matic to MetaMask, getting to know the amount to pay for gas fees, and more). With all the engineering work going on, it was almost impossible to start building a mobile app, but we pushed on.

I jumped on a call with one of our lead engineers, who was already fully engaged and we talked through the mobile backend design, while the Head of UI/UX did his magic on a simple mobile app design, which would incorporate the P2P on-and-off-ramp described in phase one.
These discussions started in the last days of July, and in September we had our MVP (Minimal Viable Product) ready to be tested internally with release scheduled for October.

Marketing The Largest Blockchain Hackathon In Africa’s History

While all product development was happening, we also synced with the marketing team at least twice a week to plan international growth and local growth in Africa. Everyone was working close to max capacity, but we would eventually pull this off.

In July, while we were thinking of the best ways to make the product appeal to both developers — who will build on our Layer 2 DeFi protocols and SDK — and normal users — who will use our mobile app — the idea for a Hackathon came up and we jumped on it immediately.

Having met the DoraHacks team in Miami, Florida, at the Bitcoin Conference, it was easy to remember that they were organizing great blockchain Hackathons with Binance, Polygon, Filecoin, and others. We felt they were the best team to work with for this. We started conversations and then we had to build a website for our vision, that has now become the largest blockchain Hackathon in Africa’s history, with Binance Smart Chain, Coindesk, Google Africa, Huobi’s HECO, and Polygon all serving as judges. The incredible Mike Novogratz delivered our Keynote speech for our Opening Ceremony.

While we had all this going on, we did our investor/advisory token release for Q2, which took place during the bear market. We got hit real bad because of the token price drop. Kevin, our Head of Marketing, had to jump on this real quick to give an elaborate breakdown here of what happened. We had to make tough decisions like locking up all investor tokens for the rest of the year while we achieved certain milestones.

Product Wrap-Up For The Last Six Months

I think this product development story is getting quite long, but I will wind it up by saying that since the launch of the Xend Finance mainnet, the team has always continuously built and shipped code. It has been a great learning period and we are still building, still shipping code, still driving adoption by making products that are easy-to-use and driving marketing decisions as well. We hope to continue to attract world class engineers to Xend Finance as we have a lot of great products to still build in our pipeline.

In summary, we built the following between April and October:

1. New and Improved UI for Version 1 of our Dapp
2. x-Vault Protocol on BSC (Audited by Omniscia)
3. Auto Yield Aggregator on Polygon (Audited by Omniscia)
4. Mobile App on Android
5. Mobile App on iOS
6. Node SDK
7. SDK-UI
8. Peer-to-Peer fiat-to-crypto on-ramp and off-ramp
9. Layer-2 protocol Dapp
10. Hackathon Website
11. x-Vault Protocol on Polygon (Under development)
12. Auto Yield Aggregator on Polygon (Under development)
13. Governance System

Building over 10 new products in six months with a small team of 20 engineers makes me really proud of the Xend Finance engineering team.

If you have a GitHub account and would like to have early access to the repositories, kindly share your GitHub account on our Telegram Channel and we will add you. Most private repositories undergoing audit will be made public after the audits are done. This is another layer of security and due diligence that we take with all of our products to ensure the utmost quality and confidence.

We are engaging multiple audit firms to ensure we have different experienced security experts analyzing our protocols before we go live, as these protocols are expected to hold billions of dollars in TVL. We have to be extremely careful to ensure we are not prone to any form of security vulnerabilities.

Our roadmap will be updated with all these products in the last days of October when 80% of the products will be live.

Thanks everyone for your continued support and patience!
Let’s keep #BUIDLING!

Sincerely,
Ugochukwu Aronu
CEO of Xend Finance