Tapio 2022 Summary

As one of the best protocols within the ecosystem, and now that 2023 is here, we’re able to reflect back on what we’ve achieved in the year with our deployments on Polkadot and Kusama. With excellent advice and assistance from the Acala team, we launched our first product, a synthetic asset called taiKSM on Karura, and shortly followed up with the first stablecoin pool on Kusama, called 3USD.

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The concept of “stable swap” has been critical for DeFi, and the success and entrenchment of Curve Finance have proven this, time and time again. With both Tapio and Taiga powered by the Stable Asset system (comprised of our StableAsset pallet, and StableSwap engine), it’s clear that we have been able to bring this functionality to the Dotsama ecosystem, and it’s been performing exceptionally well. Check out our StableAsset repo on Github, or read more on our Gitbook.

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We are truly thankful for the support we’ve received from users and our community at large, which has been growing rapidly since our reveal and launch, with countless applications to our ambassador program. To thank our early supporters, we not only allocated 5M $TAI as incentives for liquidity providers, but we also distributed more than 1.5M $TAI to our original community members through retroactive usage criteria.

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Since Taiga was going so well on Kusama, we figured it was time to launch tDOT - our first synthetic asset on Polkadot. Shortly after launch, we were able to attend many conferences, including Polkadot Decoded - where one of our co-founders, Terry, was able to give a presentation on Tapio and what it was we were trying to achieve, which can be watched here.

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2022 was by and large, a very volatile year. One of the most significant incidents in Polkadot however, was of course the aUSD mint issue with Acala, which inevitably also affected Tapio and tDOT. While definitely a negative event, there was a silver lining in that it was a rare opportunity to showcase our value and stress test our assumptions, which we wrote an article about here.

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During the events of the issue, tDOT kept working as designed, without a single hiccup, and it proved that the architecture we’ve built can withstand any pressure or event. Despite tDOT’s composition having been severely skewed to 3% DOT and 97% LDOT, the entire pool was still overcollateralized. Furthermore, several StableSwap mechanisms automatically came into effect to balance the pool and they functioned immaculately, returning the pool to a much healthier 20% DOT/80% LDOT within a matter of hours. All of this data was publicly accessible and able to be verified on our dashboard, which we’re always looking to improve.

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As always, the bear market is the best chance to build and develop products, and we’re taking this very seriously. Already we’ve rolled out several updates to our dApp to make it more functional and streamlined, as we noticed it was quite difficult and confusing to have to switch back and forth between the Acala platform and Tapio’s UI. Furthermore, we also received feedback that our website was confusing in terms of showcasing what Tapio and tDOT’s value was, so we decided to completely redesign our website from the ground up.

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To top all of that off - we also finalized a $4M seed round, led by Polychain Capital which is an amazing feat during a bear market and we’re excited to work closely with all of our investors. Continuing from that, we have also completed all the milestones for our second Web3 grant, allowing us to make the StableAsset pallet XCM enabled.

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Well what’s next? We’re always open to speaking to any project wanting to integrate tDOT - and we’ve got a few coming in the pipeline as we speak. Our largest focus right now is increasing liquidity, and specifically institutional liquidity - targeting enterprise-level holders of DOT. Moreover, a fun competition is on the way to reward existing users, and attract new individuals to tDOT - the better way to hold DOT. Stay tuned!

About Tapio

‍Tapio is a synthetic asset protocol enabling efficient liquidity for staking and crowdloan derivatives. It is designed to remove liquidity silos by synthesizing different formats of derivatives into a highly usable synthetic asset on Polkadot.

Our team is composed of engineers, financiers, security experts and serial entrepreneurs, and we’re focusing on improving and unifying the entire Polkadot ecosystem.

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