• Mantle Network has a strong value proposition as an ETH Layer 2, which enables greater use cases around liquid staking, scalability, cost of transactions and growth potential just to name a few.

• The ecosystem being built on Mantle is extensive and we believe it provides a very healthy cross section of projects from Defi, to NFT’s, gaming and much much more! A strong ecosystem is imperative to drive trading volume and value to veSTRAT token holders

• Our values align with Mantle’s - safety is incredibly important to us at Stratum. To that end, Mantle Network issued a Grant to us to help us cover the costs of an audit of the code we have developed, that diverges from the previously audited code originated from Velodrome/Solidly. This gave us a lot more confidence to iterate and push the boundaries of the new features we were already discussing internally.

  Support - the Mantle team has been incredibly supportive of us since we first engaged with them. This relationship will go a long way to enabling both Stratum and Mantle to achieve the long term goal of being a highly successful network for its users for years to come.

There are other changes we need to communicate, this post will detail a big one - the Stratum Exchange LGE.

Initially we were planning on conducting an NFT sale of the Stratum Founders NFT, however it posed a couple of small but niggling problems:

1) The sale needed to be done on a platform like Omnisea - where the fee per mint adds cost to users making it unnecessarily more expensive

2) The whitelisting and phasing process is more complicated and prone to issues

3) The NFT purchase process was somewhat clunky, with users needing to purchase multiple copies of the same NFT to be eligible

To remedy this, we have decided to move ahead with an LGE to simplify the process significantly, while at the same time delivering additional benefits to users such as, lower cost per token, higher cap per wallet, lower fees to participate and a much less complicated process in general.

The premise remains the same: there are no insider or VC tokens. The LGE is open to the public and anyone who wants to participate just needs to whitelist their wallet in our Discord. This helps us reduce the potential for sybils.

Details:

10% of the total supply of 25m STRAT will be offered and fully liquid at launch.

Hard Cap:

$250,000

Fully Diluted Value:

$2.5M

Token Price:

$0.10

Wallet Cap:

Strata role holders (Discord): $1,250

Public: $750

Note: Strata will have a guaranteed allocation through early access prior to the Public as a thank you to our most supportive community members.

At launch, the proceeds from the LGE will be used to seed the $STRAT pools at the target price with a fully diluted value of $3m. This will allow sufficient depth for traders to buy and sell $STRAT and generate a healthy market for the token.

Stratum Founders NFT

Every unique wallet that participates in the Stratum Exchange LGE will be eligible to receive the Stratum Founders NFT. Over time, this NFT will receive unique benefits such as guaranteed allocation to projects that launch via the Stratum Launchpad, possible future airdrops and others rewards that are in the pipeline.

Summary

The LGE will take place soon with details to be announced on our Socials and in Discord so be sure to follow closely for when they are available.

We have significantly simplified the process for users to participate in the launch of Stratum Exchange.

The launch of Mantle Mainnet is extremely exciting and we look forward to cementing ourselves as the leading veDEX on a new and growing network.

To commemorate the announcement of the LGE, users can mint the NFT below. As of writing this article, there are still over 30 Strata roles to be allocated!

Thank you as always for the support ❤️

Quick article to explain how a “potential future” (wink wink) emission based token could balance ecosystem participants.

He also posted an opaque picture of what would later become widely known as the Solidly logo

Solidly was built as a Decentralized AMM, primarily for other protocols to leverage the model to drive ecosystem growth and help them avoid needing to use their own inflationary tokenomics to build deep liquidity on Fantom.

A snapshot was taken of the top projects by TVL on the 21st of January 2022 and the list of eligible project published. These projects would receive a veNFT representing a locked veSOLID position that provided them the opportunity to vote for the 2m $SOLID emissions that would be distributed in the first epoch.

Theoretically, each protocol was capped as to how much vote power they had based on the size of the veNFT they were given, however there were other mechanisms at their disposal to increase the governance power and therefore emissions that were directed to their pool(s) of choice - Bribes

By bribing users to vote for their pools, a larger % of weekly emissions could be directed to their pools thus deepening liquidity and allowing users to benefit from increased incentives to actively provide liquidity on Solidly.

Bribing is one of the key elements of the Solidly flywheel, as a supplement to fees - bribes drive significant value to veNFT lockers. There is one major problem, consistency.

Bribes cannot always be counted on…

So, at Stratum we have incorporated a mechanism to reward participants that model the behaviors that drive value toward the veNFT holders through bribes. Introducing Meta Bribes

Meta Bribes

Firstly, who bribes?

Typically, it is a protocol with a large treasury, native token, or some other mechanism through which it makes sense for them to bribe the pool in order to receive more votes to deepen liquidity for their token on the network. Why do this? Well, let’s do some quick maths and use theoretical numbers:

Let’s say I’m a project, and I want to calculate the value of bribing vs. incentivising a pool natively using my own token (inflationary and dilutive to current holders)

So, I deposit $5k worth of $USDC from our Treasury onto Stratum in bribes for users to vote for my pool of choice (in this case it is my projects native token & $USDC in an LP).

This helps me to gain an additional 2% of the total votes for the next epoch from users who believe that my bribe is incentive enough for them to vote for our token pool.

If the total value of emissions that week was $150k and with my own protocol owned veNFT (lets say ~3%) + the bribes I deposited I was able to receive 5% of the total emissions that epoch. That would mean:

My cost is $5,000 USDC in bribes

Emissions value ($)150,000 * total % of votes 0.05 (5%) = $7,500 revenue

Value gained $2,500

So for the cost of $5k I am able to generate $7.5k of revenue, AND I don’t need to issue rewards in my own protocol token. If I am voting for my pool I am also able to also get a return in bribes to further validate my strategy.

This is the power of bribing as a protocol on Stratum.

So how do we support and enhance the value of bribes for projects that see the value in issuing them, especially consistently and at high levels? Through Meta Bribes

How does it work? We bribe the bribers!

Two factors are important here:

✅ The relative size of the bribe in relation to the total bribe amount across all pools.

✅ The partner's relative voting power needs to be factored in.

We will use the following formula to determine the weekly rebase for partners:

Weight(Pool) = 2x $Bribe(Pool)/total$Bribe +1x Votes(Pool)/PartnerVotes.

This formula was invented by our friends over at Solisnek Finance. The first part of the equation incentivizes larger bribes in general. Think of it like a cashback for spending money on bribes.

The second part focuses on the protection of the protocol. Larger bribes will attract more votes and therefore a higher revenue in return for your bribes. So, each epoch 7% of weekly $STRAT emissions are directed towards meta bribes and are claimable at epoch flip.

Partners will need to whitelist their addresses to receive meta bribes. Any protocol can participate, including partners that start to accumulate STRAT (and lock it) at a later stage.

According to internal calculations, based on the assumption that the average size of veNFT for the top bribers is around ~2.5%, and the majority of meta bribes goes to the top 5 protocols in this scenario, the rebase would result in an approximate 50% annual cashback. This successfully provides an avenue for dilution protection tied to conditions that help veSTRAT holders to generate cashflow, while also improving the overall health of the protocol.

Conclusion

TLDR; Stratum is building on the Solidly incentives model to support the right behaviors that are in the interests of veNFT lockers. It’s a delicate balance, but with each iteration, it becomes more and more clear where the inefficiencies lie. The lack of consistency in bribing or lack of incentives for protocols to bribe and bribe well, is something that can and should be addressed.

Stratum Exchange continues to revise and refine the model as more information becomes available. It’s important to our team that we are not just another ‘solidly/velodrome fork’ - but another project that is driving the ecosystem forward for the greater good of the network, the projects, and the users alike.

In order to commemorate the second Mirror article in the series of these announcements, we have created a NFT that can be minted by Stratum supporters!

Thank you as always for your support!

The Stratum Exchange Team

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.

levy (△/acc)

@levysaur

Want to know why ve(3,3) forks are taking over every chain?

This is the list of DEXs sorted by revenue to holders.

ve(3,3) makes up 6 of the top 11, AND THIS DOESN'T EVEN COUNT BRIBES.

If you haven't yet informed yourself of how this primative works, the time is now.

136

9:43 PM • Apr 6, 2023

This Time IS Different

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.

Stratum Exchange: A New Way Forward

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