As discussed in main chat, we held off on releasing the joint statement with our new dev partners last week as we made the decision to rebrand SmartStake and wanted the announcement to include the new name. The reason for this was twofold.
Firstly, what we’re building isn’t really a staking platform per se. The current focus is on yield farming, but the end design is constructed in such a way as to be compatible with any type of yield-generation DeFi service, current or future.
The second reason is that there has been some negative press around regulators targeting DeFi staking tokens, and by removing the word “stake” from our offering we eliminate any association with future FUD around this topic. For the sake of a simple name change, this seemed a no-brainer. There were some solid community suggestions on what change to, and eventually we opted to go with a pretty minor alteration with the new name being “SmartYield”. Better to stick with the familiar.
SMARTYIELD PROJECTED TIMELINE/Q4 2021 ROADMAP
With Firstbridge on board as development partners, we’re pleased to say that the Q4 delivery time projected in the roadmap is on schedule. Although the agreement covers a fixed-term, fixed-cost development cycle of 3 months, both Firstbridge and ourselves agree that delivery before Christmas would be beneficial to all parties and we are therefore working to a slightly condensed timeline, with a projected completion date of December 24th. The focus for the team will therefore shift to promotional activites between now and this date, with multiple marketing channels/partnerships lined up to promote Sensi and raise awareness of SmartYield and the other utilities we have surrounding it. We additionally plan to onboard a third wave of alpha testers, followed by an updated public beta version to bridge the gap between our present position and the full release. This will allow new and existing holders to see that we already have a viable, functioning product as well as the one in development.
NEW CONTRACT
The new v3 contract is progressing well, and one of its key features will be an auto-liquidity generation function to increase the percentage of SENSI’s trading liquidity. This will involve the automated sellback of tx fees at the point of sale, with the BNB added to SENSI’s PCS liquidity. This is a feature used successfully elsewhere and will allow us to set and maintain a specific liquidity percentage within the contract itself, above which those BNBs can be diverted for use elsewhere.
This point brings us to a significant positive development, which is the decision to take those extra BNB from the autoliquidity function and use them to build up a pool of project-controlled BNB within SmartYield (alpha testers have already been party to this discussion). The returns from this will then be used to market buy SENSI (roughly every 24hrs, or whenever someone triggers it by paying gas), which can then be divided up between burns and topping up locking rewards. This is essentially a sustainable spin on the present buyback token trend; rather than adding BNB to liquidity forever or storing them up for a one-time buyback (which ultimately has a net-neutral effect on price), we’re instead investing them and generating external income to persistently buy back our own token. This is in addition to the % already being taken from the platform yields for buybacks as per the original design. To our knowledge, this is a market-first idea, and will offer Sensi token holders additional long-term value beyond simply the amounts invested into SY by the community.
It is still our intention to introduce elements of community governance into the SENSI locking platform, and the v3 contract is being written with this in mind. The general idea here is to have a base set of tx fees controlled by the team as we have now, with another portion of fees above this that can be set by the community (via voting rights attached to SENSI locking) and allocated to things like burn/locking rewards/marketing/liquidity etc. The total fees/what they are used for would be an average of the vote across all community members with locked SENSI. This isn’t a top dev priority compared to the other utilities, which means there is plenty of time for a discussion within the community about the exact implementation (which makes sense, given that the point of community governance is to give some control to you as holders on how the token functions). Transaction taxes are somewhat a matter of opinion, with some favouring high fees to incentivise holding and generate rewards within the ecosystem, while other prefer lower fees to incentivise volume. As a team we are open to moving in either direction over the long run, however in the near term fees remain an important source of income for funding future dev/marketing work.
MARKETING
Everybody’s favourite topic! Without giving away specifics (for obvious reasons), here is an overview of the plans/channels in place:
- Multiple DeFi-centric influencers agreed, with more in discussions
- Sponsored articles on crypto media sites
- Voice AMAs on crypto TG groups
- Pinned promos on crypto TG groups
- Banner ads
- Reddit campaigns across top crypto subreddits
- Social media giveaways
- Social media shilling contests (community shilling, particularly on tiktok, helped to drive our earlier ATH)
- Negotiations ongoing with crypto marketing agencies
We had some good suggestions from the comunity recently for influencers to contact, and will shortly be operating a suggestions form for things like marketing/utility ideas too.
NEW UTILITY
We also have some brand new utility lined up for SENSI that is not seen elsewhere in the market at present. We’ll be waiting until a little closer to the SY launch until releasing details about this, and the reason for this is that we don’t want other tokens piggybacking on our innovations in order to get buys. We were made aware of a couple of other projects who copied chunks of our old whitepaper unedited (as well as parts from other projects too), including one that used it to market their presale, and we’d rather not allow shady dev teams the opportunity to pump and dump investors using our ideas (that they likely have no intention of/ability to deliver on anyway). But what we can say is that this new product will be NFT related, adds utility to the SENSI token, and will provide a service not currently offered in the NFT space.
