Dot Pulse #15 — Moonbeam Joins the Fold & Kilt Deep Dive
Learn about the Kilt parachain, Moonbeam’s parachain bid and progress, Karura & Moonriver farms and governance watcher! 📣
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We’re now up to slot 6 of the Kusama parachain auctions, the first of the second batch! As you may remember from our edition at the time, this one was quickly snatched up by a bit of a dark horse, Kilt Protocol. The project is not exactly DeFi-centric but it’s still important for us because of its interesting implications for the space.
Kilt Protocol: The Identity Blockchain
Kilt is a generalized protocol for issuing self-sovereign identities for Web 3.0. It aims to change the way we deal with personal data, so that companies can’t use it without our permission or lose it to hackers.
You may be thinking “it’s just KYC but on-chain,” but Kilt is actually much more flexible than that through its Credentials system. Each user can request to generate a set of Credentials based on whatever data they may wish to divulge (so not just government ID and the like). These Credentials are created by an Attester, an entity that is trusted by service providers and the community for whatever it is trying to attest.
The hash checksum of the Credential is stored on the Kilt blockchain, while the Credentials themselves are kept safe by the user. From then on the user can prove that their credentials are valid with anyone requesting them by revealing some or all of the Credential and comparing its checksum with the data stored on the blockchain.
The Kilt white paper makes a useful comparison with the way we process government IDs for something like an age check at a club. We (the user) generate a Credential (license) from an Attester (the DMV) that we then have full control over. To prove our age we can show the ID card and the Verifier (the bouncer) can check if the person is over the age limit. With documents we can also choose to hide some information that is irrelevant to what is being requested, for example by putting our finger on our name when showing the ID. The Kilt system allows for something very similar!
How is this useful, you may ask? Kilt actually aims to use its credentials in the place of a username and password combo, rather than a replacement for a KYC procedure. But the system is really flexible — you can create whatever kind of credential you want with whatever attester you wish. This even goes beyond what you’d associate with credentials! Thanks to the Token-Curated Attester, we can create any arbitrary entity that would be able to enlist and remove Experts (who are motivated economically to not screw up) to verify or execute certain actions.
The implications of such a system could be huge. TCAs could for example power “truth oracles” where the blockchain could learn about a major event (for example, who won the US elections) or even some sort of crowdsourced survey like “where can you find the best pizza in the world?” (duh, it's Naples, Italy).
Kilt envisions TCAs as a kind of bridge between the blockchain and the real world, where for example DAOs can be recognized by a government if they get certified through some conditions outlined in a particular TCA.
In short, Kilt enables lots of cool things for the future, though right now it’s all very early stage!
KILT in the DotSama Ecosystem
The Kilt Protocol demonstrates exactly how flexible parachains can be. You have your DeFi, NFT, or asset parachains that form the backbone of economic activity. But each of them may need verifiable identity in some way, for example DeFi protocols may want to only give one airdrop to one person, or even introduce some sort of democratic governance! Kilt will be there to serve these parachains, who can then verify a user’s attributes through the XCMP system.
For Kilt, staying on DotSama allows them to pay much less to operate a blockchain with excellent security, while its block space isn’t cluttered by MEV bots and NFT mints.
One unique thing about it is that there’s just one Kilt — no canaries or double parachains! The platform is live on Kusama right now, but the community may decide to port it to Polkadot when the slot expires.
The KILT token is the shared currency for all interactions in the ecosystem. Mostly you’d use it as a Claimer to pay for attestation, though this isn’t mandatory. Attesters do need to use KILT for the Angel’s Share, basically a fancy name for the Kilt gas fee.
The token launched just a few days ago, with only one exchange where it’s available. At a price of $10, KILT contributors already made an 80% ROI!
As expected, Moonbeam officially took the second parachain slot! After last week’s race to the top with Acala, Moonbeam was still in the top-2 by a wide margin. The battle is now between Astar and Parallel who are currently neck and neck with 8.2M and 8.7M DOT, respectively.
On Kusama, auctions are smooth. Genshiro won this week’s slot with just 47k KSM, once again the cheapest anyone paid for a slot so far. This is actually the last parachain of this batch, so we have roughly a week’s respite until the next set of 5 slots launches.
Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)
TL;DR: Offering a nice 20% of the supply, Astar is the main network for the Shiden canary we covered in the past.
TL;DR: Bidding for 15% of the supply, your bonus is 25 PARA per DOT on the standard interface and 33 PARA through Parallel’s Auction Loan interface. Parallel is a DeFi parachain planning to run AMMs, money markets and more.
Active Farms
Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX
Yields are now 23% APR (or 46% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM.
KSM/LKSM farm has 14% APR (47% with loyalty)
KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 65%, 93% with loyalty.
Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC
APR is 120% with loyalty, 36% without.
Sushi farms on Moonriver are quite stable, most farms have dipped below the triple digits but still a few solid choices with >100%.
Solarbeam farms remain strong with a lot of triple digit Pool1s, often beating out Sushi for the same pools!
Moonbeam became the second parachain to join the Polkadot ecosystem!
The result was a bit obvious after Acala took the first slot, so the team eventually decided to close the crowdloan from any more contributions. According to the team, 190,000 people joined the launch (potentially this includes exchange users and the Take Flight distribution).
With 35.75M DOT raised, the Moonbeam crowdloan totals a cool $1.2 billion right now! This also means that contributors will receive about 4 GLMR for each DOT, since the project is distributing 15% of the supply.
We can even derive a potential valuation for these GLMR tokens! How, you may ask? Well, the crowdloan contributors are getting the tokens for free, but they do need to pay the opportunity cost of not being able to regularly stake their DOTs. Doing a quick and dirty estimation, with around 18% APY and around 2 years of staking, this results in a price of $500 million for that 15% of GLMR supply.
Expanding to the entire supply gives us a fully diluted value of $3.2 billion — which actually feels a bit low! Moonriver has the same FDV, so either the market is saying that they’ll be worth the same, or maybe it’s just that crowdloan apes are not that efficient!
We also got two major integrations going live for Moonriver this week, including a native implementation on the Ledger app, allowing its users to just sign Moonriver transactions without any extra configurations. Plus, the collaboration with Lido is progressing with a testnet version deployed this week. Once live, you’ll be able to create liquid KSM derivatives with Lido.
We can already hear the eternal question, “wen defi?”
That mostly hinges on the team launching the parachain and onboarding as many partners and infrastructure providers as possible. The parachain launch should be quite quick, as officially it begins on December 23. That’s definitely not the period where you’d expect 24/7 shifts to get it done fast, but a January full launch with transfers and the EVM enabled seems quite realistic.
Bifrost has launched the vETH function module on the dApp, which will allow users to participate in ETH 2.0 Beacon chain staking and receive liquidity derivative vETH (Voucher ETH)
OriginTrail intends to integrate its multi-chain Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG) on Acala. The DKG creates connections and associations between all of its accessible physical and digital assets and will have multiple implementations in the ecosystem, improving Acala’s economy.
Parallel Finance has partnered up with Gauntlet in order to improve liquidation dynamics, cross-parachain liquidity and cross-network liquidity with Gauntlet’s well-tested techniques.
(Kusama) Referendum 156 to upgrade Statemine runtime to v600.
(Kusama) Referendum 155 to decrease the maximum number of validators in the active set by 150, unlikely to pass.
(Kusama) Motion 397 a proposal to fund an interactive virtual museum dedicated to the guided education and awareness of the entire Kusama & Polkadot ecosystem.
All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!
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