Cooking with NearPad: A Look at Our Roadmap
Sometimes, it takes a minute. Other times, it takes several hours — or days, or years. Eventually, the dreaming ends and reality sets in. We wake up from the dreaming and set about the doing. But when you’ve been dreaming your dream with open eyes, the dreaming and the doing becomes one.
Announcing the NearPad Roadmap
NearPad aims to be the flagship gateway for DeFi ecosystem on NEAR blockchain. The scale and scope of this ambition are not lost on us. Our disparate background as traders, marketers, influencers, and shitcoin connoisseur made swol by the heavy bags we sometimes carry is the biggest influence behind everything we’re doing at NearPad. From the finest cashmere rug(pulls) to “Didn’t read, never selling”, getting flashloaned, getting stranded on a bridge in the middle of nowhere — you name it, we’ve likely been there in one form or the other.
With this “wealth of experience” at our disposal, NearPad’s development focuses on addressing user’s pain points, creating an easy-to-use and intuitive platform on one of the most exciting L1 platforms in the industry. This means our approach to product design and development is not based on the usual “build it and they will come” often favoured by code monkeys. Yes, we are code monkeys too, but we are end-users first.
There are two critical components for sustaining any product; knowing the nuances of your targeted users and eating your own dog food. All too often, have we seen teams building solutions to problems they have never engaged with and have no interest in using personally. We intend to eat our own dog food.
Yum.
So, here’s what we are cooking.
Phase One: MVP
Our product launch will kick off with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) on Ethereum mainnet — but wait, before you start sharpening your pitchforks, we’re well aware of what gas fees on Ethereum are these days. However, there are two critical reasons why we’re deploying on Ethereum.
The first is its massive DeFi footprint and network effect. The second and most important is Aurora’s imminent launch. Aurora is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on the NEAR Protocol. Simply put, this is the missing piece for NEAR’s ecosystem to go ham. We’ve all seen how explosive BSC — regardless of the centralised criticism — has gone and how AVAX and FTM are starting to heat up. With Aurora, developers can port successful protocols from Ethereum ecosystem to leverage NEAR’s cheap fees and fast finality, while users will be able to use familiar tools and interfaces to farm for yield.
The MVP is a fixed swap rate pool decentralised crowdfunding. It will support ETH-wNEAR-ERC20 fixed swaps for bootstrapping liquidity for projects and has been designed to be equitable with guaranteed allocations.
Users will need to stake $PAD, NearPad’s native token, in a 21-days staking pool for participation in launchpad projects according to the following tiers*:
- The entry-tier starts at 1,000 $PAD with a multiplier of 1and a staking weight of 1
- The mid-tier group starts at 5,000 $PAD with a multiplier of 1.375 and staking weight of 6.875
- The top-tier group starts at 10,000 $PAD with a multiplier of 1.75 and staking weight of 17.5
*It is important to note here that the DAO will be able to alter this model as deemed fit through voting
The guaranteed allocations model ensures that every eligible user will get to buy out their allocated tokens with time to spare without being pressured to participate in gas and bidding wars in the middle of the night because the event time zone is UTC+12 or Hawaii’s fictional Moon colony UTC+276. There is one caveat though. If some user insists on being that lazy and drop the ball on their allocated tokens, an unlimited allocations after sale will commence for all eligible users to participate in so that the project team’s target raise amount is met and no token is left behind …err, unsold.
Once the MVP is robust enough, we will be adding more features to it including:
Auto-enrollment: Users won’t have to manually enroll in each pool. The guaranteed allocation will be allocated to all eligible users with slightly more cheesier aftersales. Cheese is good, isn’t it?
Variable Tiers: Continuous Variable Tiers (CVT) and Exponential Continuous Variable Tiers (eCVT) will replace the current tiered model with a tier-less one. Stake more $PADs, get exponentially larger guaranteed allocations — no need to stake from multiple addresses if the staking amount exceeds the top tier requirements.
Phase 2: Yield Farming
Portfolio management and auto-compounding tools for yield farming will go live. With these tools, users will be able to find, manage, and optimise yields across different protocols on NEAR ecosystem.
Our goal here is two-fold. It’s one thing to be a flagship product, it’s another thing to understand the nuances of sustaining an ecosystem. We are designing our ecosystem to be cyclic, not just for our tokens and features, but also for the products that will be launching on us. We are looking to launch products that will accelerate and expand the #NEARverse, while also synergizing with existing products launched. We are not looking to incubate and launch projects because it’s the “in-thing”, rather, we are looking to create value and catalyst the growth of the #NEARverse. We believe by Phase 2, we would have kickstarted a thriving ecosystem that plugs into each other, hence the need for tools that will allow users to automate the loop and access functions from a unified interface.
Phase 3: NearPASS
NearPass is a Non-Fungible Ticket (or an NFT, if you will) that gives you exclusive access to events and pools on NearPad. These multi-tier NFTs are designed to reward the community, our loyal supporters, and bridge partners’ ecosystems. This means most of the distribution will be through partners’ ecosystems and projects that we will be onboarding. The community will also be able to mint these NFTs in exchange for $PAD tokens.
But why would you want an NFT?
With NearPass, you will also be able to apply the unique attributes of these NFTs to increase your allocation in the pool.
