Minterest #BUIDLing Week Series: Keep Calm And Carry On #BUIDLing (Q1 2022 Recap and What’s Ahead)

We can’t deny the volatile market conditions that rocked the crypto market recently. In all long-term market cycles, you will see booms and busts but eventually, companies with strong fundamentals and network effects survive and emerge stronger than ever.

To remind you about how far we’ve come, we have put together a #BUIDL week to showcase the great strides we have made and how we continue to create and deliver a best-in-class DeFi experience with long-term sustainable growth.

Why MINTY is built for long-term sustainability

Minterest aims to deliver a product that will sustainably serve the market by delivering the highest long-term yield in DeFi. We achieve this by:   

  • Leveraging the flywheel effect, where all the surplus generated by the protocol is used for the buyback process and then distributed back to the protocol participants.
  • Auto-liquidations* done by the protocol to capture liquidation fees. 
  • The token emissions mechanism is designed to incentivise protocol participants which brings a higher degree of capital efficiency.

What have we achieved in Q1 2022

We started #BUIDLing nearly 20 months ago and have achieved numerous milestones since then. During the process, we learned that flexibility and adaptability are key attributes when it comes to delivering a great product. We listened to both our community and the market to gather important information and feedback to improve our product.

What Minterest accomplished in Q1 2022: 

  • We successfully closed a Community Allocation Event (CAE) and a Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) event. 

The CAE attracted over 20,000 subscribers in just the first week and the LBP event raised $5.52 million on Copper for the protocol treasury. 

The CAE and LBP events revealed a high level of support from both our community and institutions. 

  • Launch on Ethereum.

Following the highly successful LBP, Minterest received significant market feedback expressing support for the proposition to prioritise Ethereum for its initial launch phase, with Moonbeam and other EVM-compatible networks coming later. 

If you want to learn more about why we chose Ethereum as our first blockchain, check out this article

  • Two successful security audits.

Minterest views security as its top priority, which is why we have hired several top-level security companies to review our entire development process. We commissioned Trail of Bits and Hacken to ensure that our code meets the most stringent standards of code security.

Trail of Bits audited Minterest’s smart contracts across several categories for technical and economic review, namely:

  • Access Controls 
  • Auditing and Logging 
  • Authentication 
  • Configuration 
  • Cryptography 
  • Data Exposure 
  • Data Validation
  • Denial of Service 
  • Error Reporting
  • Patching 
  • Session Management
  • Testing
  • Timing 
  • Undefined Behaviour.

After initial feedback from Trail of Bits, Minterest implemented the fixes and mitigations they suggested, and the protocol was given a thumbs up. 

If you want to learn more about how Minterest fared in the audit, check out Trail of Bits’ audit report

Hacken security audit used the following methodologies, focused on smart contract code review and security analysis for commonly known vulnerabilities:

  • Architecture Review
  • Functional Testing
  • Computer-Aided Verification
  • Manual Review.

In the initial audit, security engineers found 2 high, 4 medium, and 4 low-severity issues. These issues were quickly resolved by the team during the second audit. The security score after the second audit was 10 out of 10.

If you want to learn more about how Minterest fared in the audit, check out the Hacken audit report.

  • Minterest Beta launch.

The beta launch was split into two phases, namely:

  1. Phase one – Internal access went live on 9th of May 2022. This first phase is only accessible to the internal team.
  2. Phase two –  In phase 2, the protocol will be available with limited functionality to early-stage supporters. The dates for the second phase will be announced when all the testing has been completed.

The beta launch allows the protocol’s functionality to be technically and economically stress-tested in a safe environment before launching publicly. 

If you want to learn more about Minterest’s beta launch, check out this article.

Minterest Development: Behind The Scenes

Aside from the most significant milestones that we have achieved during Q1 2022, the Minterest development team has been busy optimising smart contracts and adding new functionalities to the protocol, while at the same time, improving the UI and UX to deliver a seamless customer experience. 

  • Improvements in Smart Contracts

A new set of features were added to the smart contract; they were needed for the stable growth of the total value locked (TVL). One of those features is ‘Business Development’ which is meant to incentivise business developers to find and bring liquidity providers and reward them for participation in the protocol functions. 

We’ve built an extensive Gatekeeping module to keep the protocol safe, but still have it as decentralised as possible. 

We have also developed sophisticated NFT and Booster systems to track the reward boosting for our users.  We also completed the on-chain part of our liquidation engine. This piece of software is backed with extensive mathematical and modelling work which contains non-trivial logic, as automated liquidations have never been done before in DeFi.

  • Minterest dashboard and risk assessment tools

We understand that users want to take leveraged loans without excessive liquidation risk.  

This is why we implemented features such as notifications, collateral ratio gauge, liquidation risk gauge, as well as the portfolio back-test risk analysis feature. 

  • The production version of the Minterest UI

We tested on many target audiences and launched a production version of our UI. The application is not only loaded with data, but it’s also user-friendly, thanks to our Indexer – a special service that scrapes data from chains and displays it to the web pages of each user. 

  • The successful architectural design of Guardians. 

We have designed the inner workings of several Guardians – the web services that will support the Minterest protocol. Some examples include the Liquidation Guardian for off-chain calculations of liquidation, and the Restaker Guardian that keeps users’ weight up-to-date in Buyback- to optimise their earnings. These services are not yet in development, but the architecture design and polishing of details are ongoing.

We Continue #BUIDLing

With the first quarter behind us, here’s what you can look forward to. We are focusing our efforts on UI and UX – i.e., new wallets, scrapping more data, showing more charts, sending messages through Telegram and emails, and building the Risk Management tool. We are also planning to build the Guardians, with the primary ones being the Liquidator and Restaker Guardians. Each Guardian is a big sub-project that involves developers, designers, mathematicians, and many other specialists in our team.

Closing Thoughts

With much of the groundwork being done, we are now close to delivering a product that we can all be immensely proud of. We are delighted to have reached this stage of development and we couldn’t have done it without the support of our amazing Minterest community.

Keep Calm and Carry on #BUIDLing.

*Note that Minterest’s Autoliquidation Engine has been renamed to Solvency Engine.

23, May 2022