The saying ‘this time it’s different’ is a well known trope in traditional investment circles. Usually an utterance met with mockery, because insinuating that things will be different this time, more often than not is a dangerous assumption to make.

The same can be said about the cycles of the crypto market. While the broader economic picture is wildly different today than at the inception of Bitcoin, the cycles have in some ways followed a very similar pattern in terms of timing. Saying ‘this time is different’ is dangerous, but many people do well basing their presupposition off this principle…

But in some instances, this time it IS different. In the case of Solidly, the key difference was the alignment of incentives and the balance of power, which shifted back to the users and away from insiders and VC’s.

Solidly peaked in TVL in early March of 2022 at around $2.3b. The abrupt departure of its founder Andre Cronje caused one of the most damaging TVL crashes of the last crypto market cycle.

However, amidst all the chaos, the blueprint had been clearly laid out. With a few necessary changes to the user experience and a commited team of founders and developers, Velodrome emerged from the ashes of Solidly to light the path ahead.

With close alignment to the Optimism foundation (they are the third biggest holder of veVELO 👀

The Optimistic summer took flight and was always underpinned by Velodrome, the constant engine of liquidity for a new wave of DeFi pioneers.

Velodrome is so successful it has become the top Dex by TVL on Optimism, taking mindshare and wallet share away from many of the incumbents that had long dominated the DeFi landscape.

What makes Velodrome so successful?

• Community owned (60% distribution to the community, 24% to Partners/DAOs)

• Incentives aligned to support protocol ‘investors’ = $veVELO holders

• Revenue shared with the token holders #RealYield

• Partnerships generating up to $1m in bribes each week!

A sea of Solidly/Velodrome forks have since popped up and created a number of unique selling propositions, each of them iterating on the original model in a way that continues to optimise and improve it.

However this explosion of interest in Solidly forks is not without merit. It’s no wonder that this is now the preferred model when you understand how it has fundamentally changed the way users align to the success of a dex/chain and created a new way forward.

It’s our belief that each chain requires a central Dex like Velodrome in order to facilitate large swaps into deep liquidity for a range of tokens. The importance of this model to support the native protocols in the ecosystem cannot be understated. Liquidity is the lifeblood of a blockchain, incentivising that liquidity without negative sum strategies that involve token inflation and holder dilution has always been a difficult problem to solve.

With incentives now aligned more toward the community, the paradigm has forever shifted. The genie is out of the bottle and you can’t put it back in.

As new Solidly forks have become commonplace, every launch teaches us something new and provides a lens through which to view theirsuccesses and failures as a stepping stone to a more sustainable, more decentralized and more successful protocol.

Stratum has had the luxury of being able to watch & learn, and now to incorporate those learnings into an array of changes that will drive the engine of Stratum forward. The first of these changes we are announcing is the inclusion of partially locked emissions for LP’s on Stratum exchange.

The locked rewards model supports two key concepts, decentralization and governance participation. With each LP on Stratum earning locked tokens, they become participants in the decentralization of Stratum, while also holding a veNFT that generates weekly returns in the form of trading fees and bribes deposited into the pool gauge they vote for.

Stratum is not the first to utilize this method, other projects such as Camelot and GMD on Arbitrum have found success by delivering locked tokens to protocol participants. With the veSTRAT tokens being locked for one year, the user retains a level of optionality if they wish to allow that lock to decay and unlock over 12 months, or continually re-lock to preserve their vote and earning power on Stratum. The success of this model will be closely aligned with the success of the Stratum team to generate a flywheel that supports a long term outlook for users and veNFT holders.

This is the first of many articles coming out as we lead up to the launch of Stratum. Each new mechanism has been carefully considered and in concert with each new announcement, the full picture will begin to emerge.

We hope you will join us on the journey.

In order to commemorate the first of these announcements, we have created a NFT that can be minted by Stratum supporters!

Thank you!

The Stratum Exchange team

The saying ‘this time it’s different’ is a well known trope in traditional investment circles. Usually an utterance met with mockery, because insinuating that things will be different this time, more often than not is a dangerous assumption to make.

The same can be said about the cycles of the crypto market. While the broader economic picture is wildly different today than at the inception of Bitcoin, the cycles have in some ways followed a very similar pattern in terms of timing. Saying ‘this time is different’ is dangerous, but many people do well basing their presupposition off this principle…

But in some instances, this time it IS different. In the case of Solidly, the key difference was the alignment of incentives and the balance of power, which shifted back to the users and away from insiders and VC’s.

Solidly peaked in TVL in early March of 2022 at around $2.3b. The abrupt departure of its founder Andre Cronje caused one of the most damaging TVL crashes of the last crypto market cycle.

However, amidst all the chaos, the blueprint had been clearly laid out. With a few necessary changes to the user experience and a commited team of founders and developers, Velodrome emerged from the ashes of Solidly to light the path ahead.

With close alignment to the Optimism foundation (they are the third biggest holder of veVELO 👀

The Optimistic summer took flight and was always underpinned by Velodrome, the constant engine of liquidity for a new wave of DeFi pioneers.

Velodrome is so successful it has become the top Dex by TVL on Optimism, taking mindshare and wallet share away from many of the incumbents that had long dominated the DeFi landscape.

What makes Velodrome so successful?

• Community owned (60% distribution to the community, 24% to Partners/DAOs)

• Incentives aligned to support protocol ‘investors’ = $veVELO holders

• Revenue shared with the token holders #RealYield

• Partnerships generating up to $1m in bribes each week!

A sea of Solidly/Velodrome forks have since popped up and created a number of unique selling propositions, each of them iterating on the original model in a way that continues to optimise and improve it.

However this explosion of interest in Solidly forks is not without merit. It’s no wonder that this is now the preferred model when you understand how it has fundamentally changed the way users align to the success of a dex/chain and created a new way forward.

It’s our belief that each chain requires a central Dex like Velodrome in order to facilitate large swaps into deep liquidity for a range of tokens. The importance of this model to support the native protocols in the ecosystem cannot be understated. Liquidity is the lifeblood of a blockchain, incentivising that liquidity without negative sum strategies that involve token inflation and holder dilution has always been a difficult problem to solve.

With incentives now aligned more toward the community, the paradigm has forever shifted. The genie is out of the bottle and you can’t put it back in.

As new Solidly forks have become commonplace, every launch teaches us something new and provides a lens through which to view theirsuccesses and failures as a stepping stone to a more sustainable, more decentralized and more successful protocol.

Stratum has had the luxury of being able to watch & learn, and now to incorporate those learnings into an array of changes that will drive the engine of Stratum forward. The first of these changes we are announcing is the inclusion of partially locked emissions for LP’s on Stratum exchange.

The locked rewards model supports two key concepts, decentralization and governance participation. With each LP on Stratum earning locked tokens, they become participants in the decentralization of Stratum, while also holding a veNFT that generates weekly returns in the form of trading fees and bribes deposited into the pool gauge they vote for.

Stratum is not the first to utilize this method, other projects such as Camelot and GMD on Arbitrum have found success by delivering locked tokens to protocol participants. With the veSTRAT tokens being locked for one year, the user retains a level of optionality if they wish to allow that lock to decay and unlock over 12 months, or continually re-lock to preserve their vote and earning power on Stratum. The success of this model will be closely aligned with the success of the Stratum team to generate a flywheel that supports a long term outlook for users and veNFT holders.

This is the first of many articles coming out as we lead up to the launch of Stratum. Each new mechanism has been carefully considered and in concert with each new announcement, the full picture will begin to emerge.

We hope you will join us on the journey.

In order to commemorate the first of these announcements, we have created a NFT that can be minted by Stratum supporters!

Thank you!

The Stratum Exchange team