The journey of the past year has been a very difficult period for me and my team. This is probably the problem that most crypto teams face right now. I have witnessed many teams close to us that have given up on development due to financial difficulties. Thanks to all of your support, our team has managed to survive in such a market environment. Much appreciated.

I aim to bring you all into the fold about the current landscape of Starlay and where we envision Starlay steering towards.

No revenue and at a loss

First, I want you all to know that we have no means of generating revenue right now. We pay our members salaries from money earned from other businesses. The reason why it is difficult to make money with Starlay is, first of all, that all protocol revenue is allocated entirely to veLAY’s Locker. Before we released veLAY, we had about $300K in revenue, which was also all given back to the users. Besides, all the rewards from dApp Staking are still here, except for the ones used for Buyback.

https://astar.subscan.io/account/b9AB1qFXsw81RuTBQ1sCP6PQ6k27QXWoe7VHrv9m6iwmBRK

Why do we continue to develop Starlay despite these losses? It is for the users who support Starlay. We managed to continue our activities to return profits to investors with the LAY token. However, it is clear that the DeFi market is heavily influenced by the macro economy, and history has proven that a surge in a project's activity doesn't guarantee a boost in token prices. This means that the most plausible strategy now seems to be downsizing the team, reducing expenses, and surviving as long as possible to wait for the next bull market. But even this will be tough for today's crypto.

So, what can we do?

The first is multi-VM/multi-chain deployment: Starlay, deployed on Astar's EVM, has also been moving toward WASM conversion since January of this year, completing a testnet release in April, and has now been accepted into the the ink!ubator program sponsored by the Web3 Foundation, and we will receive our first Grant as Polkadot WASM DeFi. We are also planning to expand to several other chains, which we will announce in the future, and negotiations are progressing well under the radar. In order to broaden our user spectrum, we plan to expand to chains that are expected to be very active in the future.

The second is we will open Starlay Forum to start discussing the future operation. One of the several questions we have received is why Starlay does not list the token and why it is not exclusive to other projects. However, there is a clear reason for not listing it. We understand that there are people who are not very comfortable with us making these decisions on our own, and we wanted to provide a place for open discussion. Personally, I would like to list nASTR on Starlay and would be happy to discuss the precautions to be taken in doing so. We would also like to discuss dApp Staking rewards that are not currently being used. We have been buying back LAY on a regular basis for the past year, but frankly, I feel that it has not contributed to improving the price of LAY at all, and the buyback operation only makes Botters to be richer. This is clearly a poor strategy. Instead, we would like to use the funds to do something with the community. All addresses are public so that no one can misuse them, and we would like to discuss again how to use them for Starlay through Forum.

Finally, we declare that we will continue to research and develop protocols and collaborations. Our strength is development, and we have released three protocols to the mainnet so far. We started out with a copy, but the original Tokenomics, which combines ve equipped Lending and the three protocols, has become a unique ecosystem that cannot be seen in other protocols.

However, in this market environment, it does not make sense to simply develop additional functions. I personally expect that elements for the next mass adoption will need to mature; specifically, privacy, cross-chain communication, and data will become more important. If you have any interesting projects, please DM me and let me know the details. We will possibly be able to help if we can. Even if the project seems to be temporarily independent, we will gladly help develop it if we can expect to achieve a collaboration that will ultimately give back to Starlay.

Gratitude

One day I happened to see a Tweet where I found a comment to the Starlay team saying that I was cheering them on behind their backs for their hard work in spite of some criticism. I remember those messages of support and would like to use my time to confront such people. Thanks for reading.

I hope this message finds you all well.

First of all, the team deeply apologizes for causing confusion in some channels and communities. We confirmed several comments saying that we are scammers. Someone was saying that we are cheating on the community.

Please, let us deny these words.

First, we will NOT run away and won’t cheat on anyone. We will devote ourselves to developing and expanding the Starlay ecosystem.

Before explaining the reasons for the decisions we have made so far, please let me summarize the situation from our team’s perspective.

Determining LAY Price

We determined the price of LAY when launching the protocol. The price was not determined without any estimation but based on calculations that we shared here. At this time, LAY was calculated as $0.3. This is because the veLAY feature is designed so that ALL PROTOCOL REVENUES ARE RETURNED TO THOSE WHO HAVE LAY AND VOTE IT, not to the Starlay Core team. At the time, $500M TVL was the largest AAVE-based lending protocol. (We hope the calculation didn’t sound unrealistic for everyone at the time we shared the article.)

The first IDO took place in late April. At this point we did not know how much the price of LAY would be at the auction, so we decided to sell it for $0.15, a 50% discount from our pre-calculated price. The ASTRs collected here are used for providing liquidity at the time of LAY's listing and are still being provided on ArthSwap as liquidity step by step.

Apology for the First Confusion in the Second Token Sale

We’re thinking this is the first big confusion we have caused to our community.

There was an investor we decided not to count as a participant at the end. We received many comments from the community. We sincerely apologize for making confusion in the community by this.

Also because of the LUNA incident that occurred two/ three days before the token sale, the price of LAY didn’t rise as we expected. I hope all members of the community had the same feeling.

Due to the gap between the price of LAY's first and second token sales, we decided to list LAY as soon as possible to determine the token price in markets, with everyone.

Apology for the Second Confusion due to Small Liquidity when Listed

We saw posts that some members in the community couldn’t swap properly due to the small liquidity at the beginning. Please accept our apologies for the confusion caused by this. We hope now most users are swapping without a large issue.

We will Continue to Develop for Starlay

We are now implementing veLAY. The code is being reviewed with RuntimeVerification, a Tier 1 auditing firm, to be secure as best as possible. That will be released by the end of June.

If you are dissatisfied with the decisions we made so far, once again, please let us apologize. We’re trying our best to develop a great product with the community. Perhaps, sometimes we didn’t have the capability to hear all opinions from the community.

However, we will not stop developing products. We will do our best for all those who support us. We have worked extremely hard; every core member cut back on sleep and personal time to develop a great UX and useful features. At this moment, there are no defects with the product. We will continue to make Starlay Finance more robust. It will be appreciated if we can get continuous support from the community.

Sincerely,

Neo

Hi everyone. This is Neo, the founder of Starlay Finance.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Starlay Finance has formed a new alliance “DeCartel” with some promising DeFi protocols.

DeFi Should be an Infrastructure for Everyone

DeFi is still in the beginning stage of its evolution. According to this data from Dune Analytics, the number of uniques users in DeFi has been increasing over time and is currently at the record of 4.6M unique wallets.

I expect this number to continue to grow exponentially; in two years, even people who are not interested in technology will be using DeFi in their daily lives, whether they’re aware of it or not.

However, the threshold for that to happen is pretty high today. Major DeFi protocols, which have been deployed on Ethereum or such, are so complex for non-developers, which seems to be an entry barrier. That is a serious issue for the majority. On top of that, as users begin to use and become accustomed to DeFi, they will be concerned about sustainable revenue from the protocol. Even if the security is a high standard, no one will use it if the APR is 0%. That must be the second point to scale for the masses.

Starlay Devs are working to solve these two challenges, and the first step in this direction was the release of Starlay Finance, Kagla Finance, and Muuu Finance. These three are still being upgraded and evolving into better protocols, but with the release of Muuu Finance on the 28th of April 2022, we are ready to take the next step toward our mission.

DeCartel, which we are announcing today, would be a significant step toward building a new DeFi network to improve these challenges substantially.

What is DeCartel?

DeCartel is a new type of alliance, which is formed by Starlay Finance and some promising protocols to stabilize DeFi space, where protocols work together to enhance the value of each protocol, providing users with a refined UX and stable rewards.

In April 2022, Terra announced that they formed a cartel with Frax Finance and other active protocols to cooperate for more incentives in the Curve War on Ethereum. The point is that they've decided to collaborate rather than engage in competition wastefully because it would be beneficial for both parties. This case indicates the importance of independent protocols working together for middle-term mutual benefits.

Starlay Finance currently has the largest TVL in Polkadot. We faithfully want to provide a better user experience and higher rewards for users. By forming DeCartel for the benefit of users around Starlay Finance, we will push forward powerful features that would be impossible by only a stand-alone DeFi.

One specific measure that can be revealed now is Mutual Airdrop. For example, if a user has a certain amount of $LAY, a snapshot is taken at irregular intervals and an airdrop event is conducted from the protocols participating in DeCartel. The amount of $KGL or $MUUU distributed to the user depends on how many amounts of $LAY the user has. This will encourage heavy DeCartel users to participate in the governance of every protocol. This will not be a one-time event but will take place over and over again at irregular intervals.

More information about DeCartel will be updated on this page.

DeCartel Experts/ Protocols

Currently, DeCartel is comprised of four protocols: Starlay Finance, ArthSwap, Muuu Finance, and Kagla Finance. Also, these are clear roles for each other: Lending Market, Universal DEX, Stable AMM, and Voting Controller. Cooperation between protocols allows users to provide further benefits.

Furthermore, two new protocols will join DeCartel in Q2. One of which is the liquid staking protocol under development by Starlay Devs. The other is the fixed yield market to leverage the variable yield developed by other dev members cooperating with us. These will provide Starlay Finance with new additional liquidity and enable it to return more significant revenue to its users.

The diagram above illustrates how the relationship would be between protocols. For instance, Kagla Finance offers a lending pool with Starlay Finance, which allows for Collateral Swap of lTokens, the ibTokens issued by Starlay Finance. Muuu Finance, on the other hand, is possible to make Starlay’s veLAY and Kagla’s veKGL easier and more convenient, maximizing user profits. Fees generated by these protocols are returned to users based on the voting results.

The new coming protocols added to DeCartel in Q2 will generate multiplied profits for users. I’ll reveal additional information shortly.

About Starlay Dev Team

Starlay Devs are not only developing a lending market but also multiple DeFi protocols concurrently. In just two months, we have released three protocols; Starlay Finance, Kagla Finance, and Muuu Finance. The team is comprised of outstanding engineers and designers with deep knowledge of crypto.

Our mission is to complete building a DeFi network that is easy for everyone to use with a refined UX and generates consistent revenue for users. We do not want short-term TVL or market value. Instead, we hope to work with community members to make a great network of protocols to create the ideal DeFi for users.

About Starlay Finance

Starlay Finance is a lending protocol that has grown at a phenomenal rate since its release in March of this year and is currently the most significant TVL DeFi protocol on Polkadot.

Starlay Finance has a unique leverage function, Makai, maximizing profits by automatically looping lending and borrowing. In addition, it will soon have a voting-escrow process to return protocol revenues to users. In other words, voters of veLAY who have locked LAY will be able to receive their fees in WETH or USDC.

In addition, Starlay Finance has requested the smart contract audit with Runtime Verification, one of the top-tier and most respected auditing firms, for maximum security. It will be Starlay Finance V2 with more leverage features on top of the standard lending features and the high-security.

Lastly, Starlay Finance's governance token LAY, which will be the centerpiece of DeFi going forward, will be priced in an auction format on the 13th of May, 2022 —looking forward to your participation.

https://starlay.finance/app/launchpad/lay

The hottest topic in the crypto industry seems to be DeFi. It goes without saying that the essential key takeaway in Web3 is ownership and proof of existence. Although it looks the new waves are coming one after another, such as NFTs, Metaverse, GameFi, these all are basically on top of DeFi because human being measures the value of the ownership and the proof by quantitative indication. In other words, DeFi is now the infrastructure of the crypto industry.

The DeFi, born on Ethereum, has evolved tremendously in its not-so-long history. MakerDAO creates stablecoin, Uniswap offers AMM-type DEX, and Compound opens a money market. Many other protocols have been created in the last two years, which have created a fat protocol by leveraging each other. The reason why the networks are made is that one of the vital traits of the smart contract is an open API, which allows any other protocol to call it easily. However, what if the blueprint for protocol interfaces could be architected with the grand design from the beginning to be useful, rather than as an afterthought? That is the challenge we are doing right now.

Indispensable blocks

Defillama, a web page that aggregates DeFi data, shows what DeFi is essential on each chain. It is important to note that the categories of protocols with the largest TVLs on any chain are roughly similar. The list below is the top five categories of DeFi protocols across all chains.

Mar 30, 2022:

• DEX: $70.18B

• Lending: $54.49B

• Bridge: $33.23B

• Yeild: $22.85B

• CDP: $22.73B

https://defillama.com/categories

As you can see, these top five are in high demand by any chain, and cannot be ignored when building other applications. Other categories such as derivatives and aggregators are basically on top of the base layer, utilizing them to establish themselves as a protocol.

Looking further into Defillama, it is obvious that there are not many protocols with TVLs exceeding $1B. Furthermore, since web3 has a culture that allows forking from originals, there are many copies, which cannot be completely ignored because of adding unique features, but the patterns we should grasp would be so limited. I have great respect for all the protocols that have been developed so far, and the history and data show us an idea of what is efficient to build in what order.

One team for great UX

We are a team continuously developing DeFi protocols: Starlay, Kagla, and Muuu.　 Starlay is a money market where users can deposit/borrow their own assets with a variable interest rate based on the demand. Kagla is an AMM for stable-pair swapping. Muuu is a yield booster for the vote escrowed functions, initially supporting Kagla and Starlay.

Each protocol has its own tokenomics and a completely different UI, but the protocols influence and add values to each other. This mechanism will not only provide benefits to users but also will be a central position to activate the entire ecosystem. More details are linked at the bottom of the page.

Starlay Finance

https://medium.com/@starlay_fi

Kagla Finance

https://medium.com/@kagla_fi

Muuu Finance

https://medium.com/@muuu_fi

DeFi yet to be seen is coming

Starlay has exceeded $300M within a month since its release, which is currently the largest TVL in the Polkadot ecosystem. Our team continues to develop new features and community growth every week and will announce the IDO schedule soon. Kagla and Muuu will be public shortly as well.

Our challenge is just the beginning, and we will gradually expand what we wanna try to realize. We are gonna release challenging features on top of a promising chain. Please look forward to the following announcements and grow them together.