Yam November 2020 Roadmap Update

Yam Finance
Yam Finance
Published in
4 min readNov 28, 2020

Over this past month, Yam and its community have seen key developments, including updates to the protocol, deeper East/West community collaboration, treasury mobilization, increased governance functionality, and more. We’re particularly excited about the developments we’ve seen in Umbrella Protocol, the Yam DAO Set, and the Uma Derivatives Project, several of which will go live in the next month or two.

This is an exciting time for Yam, as it will be a period in which we transform from a well-funded DAO and rebasing token to an ecosystem with multiple innovative products ranging from DeFi protection to investment products and derivatives.

Accomplished since last Update (10/21) -

Protocol:

  • ETH/YAM Treasury Purchase on Sushiswap
  • 5k BoU/week Liquidity Incentives
  • Incentivizer farms SUSHI for Treasury
  • Rebase Sell Percentage Decreased to 5%
  • Developed Great YAM Wall Concept for ragequit functionality

Treasury:

  • Purchased $250k ETH + $250 DPI via custom OTC Contract
  • Farming INDEX with ETH/DPI
  • Working with Set Protocol for treasury management
  • SUSHI returns since 11/14: 13K SUSHI ($18.2K at current value.)
  • INDEX returns since 11/19: 1.5K INDEX ($8.1K at current value.)
  • Yam has generated $50k in revenue in November ($18.2k in SUSHI, $8.1k in INDEX, $23.3k yUSD interest)
  • $210k paid to 28 contributors to the YAM ecosystem and community.
  • Treasury Value: $3.1M, up 5% over last 30 days

Product:

  • Umbrella Protocol near testing phase

Governance:

  • LPs can participate in governance through incentivizer
  • Created new Governor contracts for compensation

Organization:

  • Developed Mission Statement and Brand Pillars
  • Implemented on-chain infrastructure for contributor compensation

Protocol:

Great Yam Wall

Status: Concepting

Priority: Low

Summary: The Great Yam Wall is a mechanism to create a Yam price floor by keeping the Market Cap above the value of the Yam Treasury. This is a similar result of “Ragequit”. This will directly defend the price of Yam as it is falling and will bring up the price as the Yam Treasury grows.The Great Yam wall utilizes treasury funds to purchase YAM on the open market, raising market cap to reach equilibrium.

Next Steps:

  • Ratify via Snapshot proposal
  • Engineers develop
  • Audit
  • Onchain proposal

Treasury:

Yam DAO Set — Treasury Management

Status: In Development

Priority: High

Summary: The Yam DAO Set is a collaboration with Set Protocol to allow DAO governance a way to actively manage their treasury. Using onchain governance we are able to assign a Set Portfolio Manager with specific guardrails to manage the Set.This allows us to retain trustless decentralization, but within a more flexible and reactive framework.

Next Steps:

  • Complete TreasuryManager Contract
  • Vote on TreasuryManager
  • Vote on allocation to Yam DAO Set
  • Execute Onchain Proposal to fund Set and begin management

Product:

Yam DAO Set — Investment Product

Status: In Development

Priority: Low

Summary: YDS will have a built in function to charge a management fee for Assets Under Management. YDS will be a marketable product that we can use to target other DAOs with treasuries and retail users to generate additional revenue for the Yam ecosystem.

Next Steps:

  • Operate YDS with treasury funds to prove out functionality
  • Onboard other DAOs with treasuries
  • Onboard retail users

Umbrella

Priority: High

Summary: Umbrella is a DeFi protection protocol allowing users to earn a return for providing protection or obtain protection in exchange for premiums. It features permissionless metapool creation and protection on any DeFi protocols.

Next Steps:

  • Complete alpha code development
  • Begin internal, capped deposit testing
  • Begin roll out of first public pool

UMA Onchain Metric Derivatives

Status: Concepting

Priority: Medium

Summary: Utilizing UMA’s financial contracts and DVM, Yam will create a product suite of onchain metric derivatives such as gas price futures, TVL futures, AMM trade volume derivatives, and more. This is an exciting product class with speculative and hedging use cases, and currently is not served by any existing DeFi platform. Additionally, UMA is offering developer mining rewards for those building on their infrastructure, allowing Yam to immediately begin monetizing this product line.

Next Steps:

  • Begin building gas futures minting and trading interface
  • Promote and test with February gas futures
  • Begin concepting and developing additional contracts
  • Build out broader product line

Yam Factory

Status: Concepting

Priority: Low

Summary: The Yam Factory is a protocol studio or incubator. Teams that would like to build products can apply to receive funding and technical/marketing/design support from the Yam ecosystem. This partnership will be designed to generate value for all parties involved.

Next Steps:

  • Create framework for how the Factory will operate
  • Begin marketing to the DeFi ecosystem as a VC alternative

Governance:

No major governance changes planned at this time.

Organization:

On Board Full-Time Contributors

Status: In Development

Priority: High

Summary: Utilizing our new contributor governance contracts, we will begin compensating Yam’s ongoing contributors to support their development and organizational efforts. There is currently discussion regarding payment amounts and asset (YAM vs. stablecoin from the treasury) happening in the forum.

Next Steps:

  • Determine payment structure and amounts
  • Vote on chain for individual contributors
  • Begin payment schedule

This roadmap has also been cross-posted to the YAM forum, please join the discussion here.

This is an exciting time at Yam Protocol. We advise that you keep up with these updates as we push towards the full launch of this wave of Yam Products. Be sure to follow us on Medium, Twitter, or Reddit for news. If you have questions, please feel free to reach us on Discord!

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