A Year in Review
It’s been a tough year for the industry, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better either. Every other week has been a nerve-wracking exercise in waiting for the other shoe, on the slimy feet of some tentacled monstrosity, to drop. The misdeeds of a few rogue players have brought the legitimacy of this industry to its knees, changed public perception from excitement to skepticism, and rendered many destitution. While we’ve had zero exposure to the ongoing crisis, nobody has been immune to the fallouts and aftershocks
As the year comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the overall status of our product development and progress so far. So, let’s start with the elephant in the room.
Financial Runway
The development of any product is only as good as its ability to fund itself and attract talent. On the one hand, this means that you need a solid plan for getting your product off the ground and its sustainability — but it’s not just about money. You also have to have a plan for how you’re going to find the right people to work on your project, or else you’ll end up with a team that isn’t working together towards a shared goal.
With Pad.fi, it was imperative that we not only acquired battle-tested developers in the space but also raise and manage the treasury in such a way that there is at least 2 years worth of runway. We are happy to announce that not only have we met this target, but our stimulation has also shown that the runway can be further extended for several more months if need be.
Launchpad
Launchpads have been struggling for some time now, and it is expected that they will continue to struggle given the current level of confidence in the market by investors. The market is not exactly brimming with confidence right now. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to go away entirely. There’s still a lot of value to having such products, especially in bootstrapping ecosystems.
However, the current market environment is hostile to startups, and launching a startup requires a huge amount of confidence from investors. Since investor confidence is unlikely to turn around any time soon, launch readiness has become the most important criterion for evaluating launchpad applications. Without a mainnet project to anchor the user community and give some form of utility to the token, the value of the token will be based solely on speculation undermining its potential.
For those of us who survived the ICO mania of 2017 where millions were being raised in seconds based on tweets and badly worded papers, the wake of its crash, and the numerous attempts to flog it back to life via ICO 2.0, STOs, ITOs, LTOs, the deja vu is strong with 2022. Of course, it could be argued that TGEs and IDOs are ICOs reskinned. Therefore, 2017 never left, it merely evolved. Well, with time being such a linear beast, it’s impossible to measure progress without evaluating what came before. So naturally, the centralised mechanism, opacity, and absence of any viable product that contributed to the market collapse became the core focus of its next iteration. However as the DeFi and NFT manias took hold, the product-first model took a backseat as founders floored the accelerator to be the next celebrated startup on optimistic projections.
With the mania gone, it’s now back to the basics; product first, token second.
DEX
As a decentralized exchange (DEX) platform, we’ve certainly felt the effects of the overall market downturn. Despite these challenges, we’ve continued to make progress and improvements to our DEX and launchpad.
One of the major changes we made this year was to enhance the user experience on our platform. We streamlined the onboarding process and made it easier for users to access and navigate the platform. We also improved the performance of our DEX, making it faster and more efficient.
In addition to these improvements, we’ve also been working on some exciting new products that we’ll be releasing in the coming year. One of these is a DEX aggregator, which will allow users to easily compare and trade on multiple DEXs from both Aurora and NEAR from a single interface. This will provide users with greater liquidity and more options for trading.
While the overall market has been difficult, we’re using this downtime to build out these new products and position ourselves for future growth. Our goal is to become the #1 DeFi hub in the Aurora and NEAR ecosystem, and we believe that with these new products and continued efforts to improve our existing platform, we’ll be well on our way to achieving that goal.
We look forward to continuing to serve our users in the coming year and to the release of these exciting new products. Stay tuned for more updates in 2023!
Pad.fi Links
Website: https://pad.fi/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NearPad
Discord: https://discord.gg/wUzSSUFkc9
Telegram: https://t.me/nearpad
