Dot Pulse #16 — OHM Forks Are Here & Calamari Deep Dive
Learn about the Calamari parachain, Polkadot parachain auctions, DeFi action on Moonriver and governance watcher! 📣
Welcome to Dot Pulse, your window into the Polkadot DeFi ecosystem.
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After last week’s highlight on Kilt, we move ahead with the 7th Kusama slot auction winner: Calamari, Manta’s canary on Kusama.
Calamari is a privacy-focused protocol for payments and DeFi based on zero knowledge proofs, an exciting field of research in crypto that could revolutionize the way we do privacy and scalability for computations. It’s different from the likes of Khala because it uses math and software to guarantee privacy, instead of specialized hardware. Using ZK tech is much harder, but the payoff is very much worth it.
Calamari, The Private Protocol for cross and parachains
Calamari (and Manta) is an open-source and user-friendly protocol built on Substrate that aims to fill in the gap of privacy protection most blockchains still suffer from.
It’s probably obvious to anyone using DeFi why we need privacy protection. The blockchain is completely transparent and traceable, even if we can’t always assign wallets to identities. That creates a lot of problems ranging from doxing, Miner Extractable Value (MEV) and so on.
Of course transparency is not all bad, in fact we want to be able to monitor a protocol’s health with on-chain stats! And ultimately, the market clearly doesn’t care about privacy that much. The public chains we’re used to, e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum and so on, are easy to use and offer high liquidity, even if they’re hardly private. But eventually, the weak protection of pseudonymity just won’t be enough.
If you just stop to consider a world where everyone does business on a blockchain, would you really want a store clerk to know you’re an elite degen earning more yield in a day than they make in a year?
And if you’re the CEO of a company, how would you feel if your competitor hunted down all your suppliers and bribed them to reject you? Point is, lack of privacy is a serious issue to tackle in blockchain.
Of course we have various private cryptos like Monero and ZCash, but these seem a bit out of place in today’s crypto world. They have almost no cross-chain support, very little liquidity in DeFi and in general just don’t mesh well with smart contracts.
So, how can we improve privacy coins? Calamari and Manta are one way.
What’s different about Calamari
Manta is quite unique in the privacy coin world as it’s a generalized private token platform. You can think of it as Zcash, but for tokens. With MariPay you can mint private versions of various tokens on Kusama, including stablecoins and WBTC, and transact with them fully privately.
The technology is based on zk-SNARKs, quite similar to that of Zcash. The idea behind zero knowledge cryptography is that for each transaction you make, you can prove that it respects the rules of a proper transaction — that the sender has the right to send tokens, that they’re not double spent, and that no new coins are being created — without revealing the amounts or sender and destination.
Calamari also aims to build MariSwap, a fully private AMM exchange. Bye bye MEV!
The best thing about Calamari is probably the fact that it’s a parachain. That’s a game changer for actually using it, as people who want additional privacy have an easy way to get it. Privacy computations are obviously an additional cost that not everyone wants to pay, so by integrating as parachains, Calamari and Manta can provide privacy to the entire DotSama DeFi ecosystem.
Crowdloan stats and KMA
If all these privacy features sound exciting to you, you’re not alone! Calamari was one of the more successful crowdloans on Kusama, raising more than its cap of 200,000 KSM. They eventually ended up getting 218k KSM because the cap simply meant the team wouldn’t reward any more contributions, but they decided to reward these late comers as well.
Calamari offered up to 30% of supply to contributors, ultimately generating about 21.8%, or 2,182,470,000 KMA tokens. The tokens were recently listed on Kucoin and are currently trading at around $0.03, giving a theoretical return of 83%! Not all of the tokens are immediately unlocked though, which is common in crowdloans.
KMA is used to pay transaction fees, part of which gets burned by the system. KMA also has governance utility for the parachain.
This is just the beginning for Calamari and Manta. The team is planning to launch a private lending platform in the future as well, and that feature is likely to land on Calamari first!
Astar Network took the third slot in a pretty heated battle with Parallel. We’re now rounding out the top three on Polkadot with exactly the same results as on Kusama, curiously enough. Parallel is likely to take the fourth slot though!
On Kusama, auctions have restarted with Subsocial quickly capping out its entire allocation of 100k KSM. Most likely they’ll take this round!
Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)
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.
TL;DR: Closest competitor to Parallel, offering 20% of the supply. The parachain is a DeFi-focused smart contract platform largely backed by Bithumb Global. Sitting at 3.8M DOT.
TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply to launch the main Polkadot version of Calamari (see above for an explainer). Collected 3.5M DOT.
TL;DR: An NFT parachain created by Enjin, offers 10% of the supply. Currently slightly lagging the others with just over 3M DOT contributed.
Active Farms
Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX
Yields are around 20% APR (or 45% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM.
KSM/LKSM farm has 15% APR (45% with loyalty)
KAR/kUSD offers an APR of 65%, 95% with loyalty.
Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC
APR is 120% with loyalty, 35% without.
Sushi farms on Moonriver are decreasing in profitability, with most farms below triple digits APR.
Solarbeam farms offer a lot of >100% APR choices for riskier pool, while the usual staples are below 100%.
It’s official, Moonriver has its first OHM fork! It’s called RomeDAO Finance and it looks pretty sleek.
The cool thing about it is that it’s also going to be an RPG game centered around the Roman Empire (obviously). The game is called Warmap and it will feature a campaign map with various minigames and NFT drops (not much else is known at this point).
Of course, the basic mechanism of Rome is the same as Olympus: get a bunch of protocol-owned liquidity through bonds and use it to support the Moonriver ecosystem.
In the meantime, honest farmers can stake ROME to earn 10% every 5 days, which is a gajillion percent in APY terms (186,500%). To buy bonds you need to supply FRAX-ROME LP tokens, or just MIM or FRAX separately.
Overall this looks like a strong DeFi 2.0 play for the Moonriver ecosystem, so we’re getting there! OHM forks are definitely some of the most popular farms in recent months, and RomeDAO looks like it’s adding something to that base design.
But it probably won’t be the last of its kind!
Moonbeam has implemented Chainlink Price Feeds on Moonriver. It will allow developers to leverage Chainlink’s oracles to build flash loan-resistant DeFi smart contracts
Moonbeam has won the second parachain auction on Polkadot with more than 1,000,000 DOT (approximately $1.4 billion USD) contributed worldwide. As a thanks for the community’s support, the Moonbeam Foundation has added 50 million GLMR tokens to the reward pool.
SubQuery Network to Launch on Acala’s EVM+, Decentralizing Polkadot’s Leading Data Indexing Service.
SubQuery, a data indexing solution for Polkadot, has chosen Acala’s parachain for the launch of the SubQuery Network on Acala’s upcoming EVM+ launch.
HydraDX announces the successful Council election, passing of the first community referendum, as well as the upcoming vote to multiply by 3 the balances of all HDX wallets, excluding those of the HDX Treasury and Founders & Investors.
Referendum 156, proposing to upgrade the Statemine runtime to v600, is currently failing unanimously due to an error in the XCM config that would prevent teleports from Statemine to Kusama.
The DotSama wallet ecosystem is expanding with a more user-friendly option in Talisman, which launched an Alpha release this week.
(Kusama) Referendum 158 to register the Encointer chain as a common-good slot on Kusama Network.
(Kusama) Motion 407 a motion to reject Treasury proposal 112 to fund CHAOS 2021 - Kusama Conference (Virtual).
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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