Zircon Finance: Ecosystem Grant Draft Proposal

[shvandrew_Zircon_Fin]

@GAMA

People that publicly shame Moonbeam and their ecosystem incentives should be rejected.

Could you please point the specific phrases that can be considered “shaming”? I am not seeing anything that isn’t a mere statement of facts and of our own intentions. We have a duty to be transparent to our community and explain radical changes in roadmap with more than empty words and lip service.

The truth is that many projects have left the Moonbeam ecosystem since the last grants. Off the top of my head Moonsama, Firefly and Lido have been the toughest blows. Some of it might have been unrelated, while others must have felt what we did: that there was no way to compete when your rivals get millions in liquidity incentives.

[Referendum: 87] Revised Grant Program

Hi, this is Andrey from Zircon. Wanted to pitch in to the discussion, also because we’ve been mentioned by name. Overall I think this grant is definitely better than before: shorter duration grants, limits to max grants, removing the first-come-first-serve system. As for voting system, I’m definitely not a fan of leaving conviction voting in. While it sounds like a nice idea in theory, in practice it makes the voting that much more plutocratic, since only the largest of whales have the luxury …

We generally believe that truth is important, even if it hurts, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. In the most constructive, respectful but at the same time direct manner possible.

Burying your heads in the sand and attacking anyone who dares say that things maybe aren’t going in the right direction doesn’t do a community or organization any favors. Ask Russia how that’s going for them.

Replies in quote:

@turrizt

Can you provide more details on the use cases for connected contracts?

• Generally this is not a connected contracts use case beyond our use of xc tokens. Honestly we’d rather leave the cross-chain DEX stuff to others — for us this is likely to remain a niche use case for the foreseeable future due to significant issues with loss of price execution efficiency and MEV.

What security measures do you have in place and how do you ensure user fund safety?

• While we have been audited before launch, our main focus was on our anti-manipulation systems. Most DeFi hacks are some form of flash loan manipulation, which is mostly a tool for speeding up or forcing outcomes that can occur “in nature” as well (the recent Euler hack is the quintessential example of it). So we actually have two systems inside the contracts that detect sudden changes in price or liquidity, and lock down the pool in these cases.
  We are also set to be working soon with a partner providing a “firewall” service that detects hacks and pauses contracts through aggressive MEV-related techniques, but this one is sadly not available for Moonbeam yet.

How do you plan to innovate and stay ahead of the competition in Moonbeam DeFi ecosystem?

• We have a long roadmap full of features such as using impermanent loss to provide an option trading platform, potentially perpetual swaps, launchpads and other services. Our DEX core is already the most innovative in the entire crypto space.

How would your development plan be affected if there were no incentives for your project?

• We would likely delay our launch on Moonbeam until we have enough own resources to tackle the market anyway. While our development would be largely unaffected.

How often do you audit your code for vulnerabilities or weaknesses, and who do you use as an auditor?

• Our initial audit was conducted by Chaintroopers. We’ve since had to introduce some changes to the code to improve some of the economic models inside the contracts. While ideally we’d have re-audited the changes, the market situation was such that we couldn’t really afford to do so. We are currently looking to engage with a few auditors to cement the modifications by the time the Moonbeam launch comes around. As I’ve mentioned before though, audits are not our only or primary security model.

What updates or developments can users expect in the near future?

• In the nearest future we’re working on a cross-chain interface similar to Sushi, where people would be able to use a mixed bridge interface to transfer assets around, as well as see the pool opportunities from all our deployments in one interface. We also expect to improve our farming incentives scheme, adding a staking and rewards bonding component to discourage mercenary farmers from joining our pools.
  Later in the year we plan to work on the Perpetual Move (options platform) and Pylon V2 (mostly an optimization of our existing platform)

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@turrizt

Moonbeam has established numerous HRMP channels with other parachains. I’m curious to learn more about Zircon’s future plans in this area, as it’s crucial for Moonbeam DeFi to become a central hub for creating use cases for tokens from other parachains. this will enable these tokens to be utilized within the DeFi Moonbeam ecosystem, including for trading, farming, lending & borrowing.

I’m also interested in whether Zircon intends to submit grant proposals to other parachains to receive liquidity incentives. This could create more opportunities for users from different parachains to interact and explore other projects within the dotsama ecosystem, thereby avoiding fragmentation and encouraging users to discover the advantages and opportunities of other parachains.

1. We fully intend to list xcTokens of major parachains, beyond that we do not have XCM usage plans just yet (keen to use something like OAK Network’s scheduling to maintain contracts, but it is not a core user-centric feature)

2. We would expect to submit proposals to support liquidity for tokens from other parachains, but we don’t expect to launch on any of them. We also would rather focus on providing a useful platform for users, so we could also just launch a pool ourselves and see if it sticks without rewards afterwards.