November Tapio & Taiga Newsletter

Tapio and Taiga Friends,

The last couple of months have been quite choppy and unpredictable, but with hard work from our team, and amazing support from our community, we’ve managed to make it through and better than we could have ever imagined.

September and October have been 2 months of solid building and business development for Tapio and Taiga but here’s a brief recap:

• $4M Seed Round for Tapio, backed by the likes of Polychain, Arrington Capital and several other VCs and angels
• Stage 2 Web3 Foundation Grant approval for our XCM-enabled “Stable Asset” Pallet to being making tDOT and taiKSM multi-chain
• The release of Tapio V2!
• tDOT, taiKSM and 3USD have been integrated into Multifarm.fi — a farm aggregation platform which can be accessed here for Tapio and here for Taiga.

We’ve got a number of updates so let’s dive right in👇

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The Acala aUSD Issue

This is by far the most significant event to have happened in the Dotsama ecosystem the past few months and we of course, had a front row seat. While rough several weeks, our faith in the Acala team hasn’t wavered and we’re still working closely with them and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

We covered this in detail in our dedicated article which can be read on Medium here however this is a quick recap:

• Normally, we endeavor for a 30–40% DOT composition of tDOT, with the remainder being LDOT. During the early hours of the aUSD exploit however, bad actors drained the tDOT liquidity pool, resulting in DOT only making up 2.7%, with LDOT taking up a staggering 97.3%.
• Despite this however, at it’s most imbalanced, tDOT was still overcollateralized with 140,000 tDOT in circulation being backed by 148,000~ DOT.
• This also resulted in a significant arbitrage opportunity whereby you could swap 1 DOT for more than 1 DOT worth of LDOT (as a result of the stable asset mechanism automatically adjusting exchange rates to sway the pool to more favorable composition).
• In a matter of hours, the pool quickly rebalanced to about 20–25% DOT, where it now sits and is back to slowly growing.

While the issue having taken place with Acala Network affecting tDOT was not expected nor beneficial, it did serve a bittersweet purpose of proving our hypothesis not only sound, but exceptionally effective when it came to maintaining the security and stability of the pool.

To view indepth data about tDOT, taiKSM and our 3Pool, check out our detailed dashboards by visiting the Tapio and Taiga dApps.

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Tapio Protocol has successfully raised $4M from various investors including Polychain and Arrington Capital!

As some of you may have seen in the media/Twitter, we have indeed finalized a decently-sized raise from several notable names within the industry. This is definitely a welcome addition to our coffers and will allow us to really push our missions and initiatives forward, such as becoming multi-chain ASAP, and pumping out integrations over the short to medium term.

Our fundamental goals with tDOT and taiKSM are to address the siloed DOT/KSM liquidity on the various parachains by standardizing it within a synthetic asset protocol, and we’re pushing this wholeheartedly by hiring new team members, establishing partnerships, and revamping our communications. In due time, we will also be looking to onboard institutional and TradFi holders of DOT (and by extension LDOT), and ensure our infrastructure and applications are up to par.

While we’re not slowing down on our synthetic asset ambitions, we are, however, also developing other initiatives and products that will bolster our standing and reputation, as well as establish Tapio as a fundamental pillar within the Dotsama ecosystem in the coming years.

Feel free to read our official press release here.

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Tapio Protocol’s “Stable Asset” pallet has been accepted for a Level 2 Grant from Web3 Foundation!

While we’ve been working hard in streamlining Tapio and Taiga on Acala and Karura, currently, the native DOT liquidity still does not have the means to be transferred cross-chain, which has become a top-priority for us. As such, we’ve been working tirelessly to develop an XCM-enabled Stable Asset engine, or more specifically: allowing the minting, redemption and liquidity pooling of tDOT and underlying DOT assets, across multiple chains within Polkadot — seamlessly incorporating Substrate’s Cross-Consensus Message Format (XCM).

Put simply, this will allow parachains to not only interact with tDOT easily by redeeming tokens minted on Acala, but also enable the functionality to allow a guest chain to mint tDOT natively with local DOT-xDOT liquidity pools, truly establishing Tapio as a multi-chain application. Our grant proposal for this pallet was submitted here and we’ve already completed the first milestone, with the second and third on the way.

We cannot thank Web3 Foundation enough for their assistance and support of not only us, but the entire ecosystem as a whole and hope to continue manifesting their vision of an interconnected relay network.

Read our official announcement here on Medium, and check out our Stable Asset pallet on Github.

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Release of Tapio V2 Application!

Finally, the new and improved version of the Tapio dApp is finally here and introduces the ability to natively mint tDOT, as well as redeem DOT and LDOT without having to go through the Acala user interface. You’re also able to see the breakdown of where the tDOT yield is coming from and to what degree. We’ll have additional features like automated claiming come soon so stay tuned!

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About Tapio

Tapio is a synthetic asset protocol enabling efficient liquidity for staking and crowdloan derivatives. It is designed to remove liquidity silos by synthesizing different formats of derivatives into a highly usable synthetic asset on Polkadot.

Our team is composed of engineers, financiers, security experts and serial entrepreneurs, and we’re focusing on improving and unifying the entire Polkadot ecosystem.