Introducing Badger DAO
For many of us it’s been a long 2.5 year bear market, especially for those new to the space. Those focused on building during this time are starting to see the fruits (no pun intended) of their labour. Many of the things that we all believed would take center stage are now what everyone is excited about and DeFi is at the top of that list.
The total value locked in DeFi protocols has increased from approximately $650M on January 1st 2020 to $8.5B today. Projects like Uniswap are now dominant players frequently eclipsing large centralized exchanges in daily volume. Aggregators like YFI have exploded onto the scene and other leading lending/borrowing protocols like Compound, Synthetix and Aave have built 2 year+ battle tested protocols managing billions of dollars. It’s safe to say DeFi is here to stay.
That doesn’t come without the “get rich quick” attempts popping up as well. New food coins with anonymous founders like pasta, noodle, hotdog, kimchi etc, are launching unaudited forked codes from popular DeFi protocols and garnering hundreds of millions of dollars in the span of hours. These projects for the most part have no intrinsic value or purpose and will inevitably fade into irrelevance.
There always is some good to come with the bad. Projects like Yearn.finance have sparked a shift from VC or investor-backed projects with centralized control to a “fair token launch” with the community owning control of the project from the onset.
Another major progression in the last year has been the demand for Bitcoin to be used as collateral on other blockchains, especially Ethereum.
On January 1st 2020 there were 1000 Bitcoin on Ethereum. Today there is 56,000+.
Bitcoin is the soundest money ever invented. Many would argue the best collateral the world has seen. Today there are limited ways to use your BTC for decentralized finance, especially on the Bitcoin network. This is why an increasing amount of Bitcoin holders are wrapping their BTC on Ethereum to use finance protocols for earning interest, borrowing against their position etc.
The problem is the infrastructure, products and protocols for enabling BTC on other blockchains are very immature. Most BTC bridges have centralized parties we must trust to custody and mint the equivalent BTC on ETH. There are only a couple large liquidity pools for trading synthetic BTC. Although many of the lending/borrowing protocols have enabled these wrapped assets as collateral, there are only a few of these trusted protocols in the market right now.
With the maturity of smart contract infrastructure, the rise of DeFi, demand for fair launches, the potential of BTC in DeFi and the desire of community ownership of products, we decided to create the Badger DAO.
What is the Badger DAO
Badger is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with a single purpose: build the products and infrastructure necessary to accelerate Bitcoin as collateral across other blockchains.
It’s meant to be an ecosystem DAO where projects and people from across DeFi can come together to collaborate and build the products our space needs. Shared ownership in the DAO will allow builders to have aligned incentives while decentralized governance can ensure those incentives remain fair to all parties. The idea is less competing and more collaborating.
That’s why it’s important that it starts as a community-led initiative from day one. Any decisions are made through a governed vote including what, how, and when Badger DAO products are created. Equally important is ensuring there is a fair distribution of $BADGER to give all participants the opportunity to get involved and benefit.
This forms the pillars of what ensures Badger always remains community first, fair and transparent.
- Badger Builders
- Community created products
- Dedicated Badger operations team
- Fairly initial distribution of $Badger Tokens for governance
- All code open-sourced
Badger community members can propose new product ideas to the DAO, pitch the proposal to the greater community over video and finally take the proposal if it passes these stages to an official vote for approval. Once approved the Badger DAO ops team will collaborate with them to build it, fund it and market it. Of course the intention is that it’s not a singular community member proposing these but instead many contributors coming together to create the best products we can.
Badger builders are open and willing to collaborate with anyone wanting to build with together. It would be amazing to see leading developers and DeFi protocols participate in this program.
This structure is meant to give everyone an opportunity to build what’s needed regardless if they are an individual developer, blockchain company, dev shop or just a person with an idea. Anything launched by the Badger community should be inherently fair, transparent and rewarding all those involved in bringing the product to life. This includes shared fees, token rewards etc.
We believe that together the community can build the products that our industry needs more effectively, compared to single centralized entities building fragmented solutions.
How is Badger Token Going to Launch?
*DISCLAIMER: BADGER IS STRICTLY A TOKEN TO GOVERN THE DAO AND ITS ACTIVITIES. IT HAS NO MONETARY VALUE. *
Badger will follow in YFI’s footsteps with a fair liquidity mining launch. We are attempting to innovate how fair launches are actually conducted.
- Zero individual or centralized control of smart contracts upon launch.
- Fixed supply with mint function being burned at launch.
- All smart contracts and systems audited pre-launch.
- No surprise launch date and list of assets for staking. The entire community will know weeks in advance all these details.
- No investors or capital raised.
- Team is publicly known and involved in ongoing operations.
- Time-locked founder rewards + whitelist functionality to enable performance based unlocking of rewards voted by the community.
- No seeding of liquidity on exchanges by Badger.
- Leaving control and decisions to the community of how to best distribute and utilize a significant portion of token supply.
Unlike the trend of products launching without audits and anonymous founders, the founding team has ensured a 3rd party firm (Zokyo)has audited any and all contracts for Badger and Digg before launch. We as founders are also not hiding and are going to be very public about our involvement. We aren’t here to launch and leave but instead intend to lead the operations team and stick around for the long haul.
Shortly we will release the audit report well before launch and over the next week we will share all the details of the stakeable assets.
Introducing Badger DAO’s 1st Product, Sett
Firstly, why the name Sett? Badgers make their homes by digging tunnels and caves and use grass and leaves for bedding. A badger’s home is called a SETT.
Setts are so strong and protective that they can be centuries old and are used by many generations of badgers. Exactly what we’re doing for crypto holders.
Badger is a DAO that creates Bitcoin focused products, and it’s important that when $Badger distribution occurs there is an actual product to govern. Beyond governing it, Sett will be the only way for people to earn $Badger.
Sett is an automated DeFi aggregator focused on tokenized BTC assets. Inspired by and based off the Yearn.Finance vaults, users deposit assets to earn a yield, our smart contracts then put those assets to work executing a variety of strategies across DeFi protocols. Through this, users optimize the yield they get out of their positions without having to do all the heavy lifting (multiple transactions, gas fees etc.).
To review our Sett code please go here
At launch for a limited number of weeks, anyone that deposits in our Setts will receive the appropriate yield + $Badger. The longer users stake in the Sett the increased multiplier of $Badger rewards they will receive (ie. 1x, 2x, 3x).
Users can withdraw their assets at anytime, upon withdrawal there is a 0.5% fee and an additional 4.5% fee from the profit generated to cover gas and transaction costs.
The 5Setts at launch are;
- Curve_sbtc_lp tokens: Compounding strategy
- Curve_renbtc_lp tokens: Compounding strategy
- Curve_tbtc_lp tokens: Compounding strategy
- Badger <> wBTC Uniswap LP: Compounding Strategy
- Badger: Stake Badger and earn Badger
This is just the beginning for Sett. As strategies develop and the community comes together we hope for additional innovative Setts to come to the market.
- Native BTC deposits
- Single asset vaults with multiple strategies
- Additional compounding strategies
- Aggregator to aggregator to help preserve value in their GOV token
- Impermanent loss mitigators
- BTC neutral strategies (deposit BTC and prevent against price swings)
- Rebasing management and optimization
Introducing Badger DAO’s 2nd Product, Digg
It’s important to set precedence on how products should be developed and launched. With that, in conjunction with the $BADGER token, there will be the launch of its second community owned product, Digg.
Digg is a non-custodial synthetic Bitcoin on Ethereum. It’s an elastic supply cryptocurrency that’s pegged to the price of Bitcoin. Every day the supply is automatically adjusted across all wallets based on the USD value of $DIGG vs $BTC. If Digg’s price is higher than BTC, your wallet balance increases; if it’s lower than your balance decreases.
The goal of this product is to remove the need for centralized parties to custody our BTC and instead rely on the elastic parameters in the token smart contracts to maintain the peg. Every day at the same time the system calls a price oracle to provide the USD value of Bitcoin and if there is a need to increase the supply meaning (Digg is higher than BTC) it should drive sell pressure on the token since holders now have a higher quantity of the Digg in their wallet. The same works on the inverse in driving demand.
The parameters of Digg were created this way to encourage changes. We believe there is lots that can be done to the protocol to bring it closer to peg like rebasing every block or creating additional incentives to drive buy and sell pressure. After launch the community will control this protocol and we hope to see these changes put forward.
The Digg token will launch midway through the $BADGER distribution. Similar to Badger, it will have an independent liquidity launch where users will stake in our Setts and the Badger DAO token holders will have complete control of the protocol. The Badger DAO will also control the remaining 50% of the $DIGG supply not distributed during liquidity mining, further driving community ownership.
What’s Next?
We will announce the exact date of Badger launch soon with a blog post outlining everything in relation to the launch. We’ll also be releasing subsequent blogs detailing the audit reports and transparency details mentioned above (source code reference proof)and list of initial Verified Badger Builders.
In the meantime, join the conversation, provide any feedback and come say hello.
How Do I Learn More?
There are many ways to engage the Badger DAO community and educate yourself on the use of our protocol.
