Import 2022-11-30 11:09

New blog: Highlights from 6 months of building

Basis Markets

• 6 min read
New blog: Highlights from 6 months of building
Photo by Jay Zhang / Unsplash

It has been a while since our last blog post on medium.com. Since then, we’ve been communicating project updates via other channels - these have included monthly townhalls, AMAs, and weekly updates posted on Discord and Twitter.

With the launch of our DBLP nearing, we thought it was time to start blogging again, sharing updates on the most important aspects of the project, and will now be doing this on https://blog.basis.markets.

This blog post will focus on updates from December 2021 to May 2022.

Staking

Our single-sided staking pool went live on February 1st, 2022. Any $BASIS token holder can stake at staking.basis.markets without impermanent loss.

The total supply of $BASIS is 1 billion tokens, to date 955m tokens have been minted and at the time of writing, 700M+ tokens are currently staked. This means that 77%% of total token supply is staked.

771 million $BASIS staked (~70% of supply)

We have one of the most successful staking schemes in terms of percentage of staked tokens.

Airdrops

We recently finished a monthly airdrop programme to our NFT Holders. Each NFT was airdropped 100k BASIS over a six month period (December 2021 to May 2022). This means that we have airdropped 50% of the total supply of BASIS (500 million out of 1 billion tokens).

This went smoothly and all airdrops were successfully delivered, on the following dates:

  • 11 Dec 2021
  • 09 Jan 2022
  • 10 Feb 2022
  • 14 Mar 2022
  • 14 Apr 2022
  • 13 May 2022

BASIS Token

Following the launch of our BASIS token in December, Basis Markets partnered with Orca for the double dip BASIS-USDC pool on January 13, 2022. A week later, the BASIS aquafarm was already the second highest by TVL on Orca.

Orca's double dip BASIS-USDC pool

We are one of the few projects with almost all its tokens available on the market. As of May 2022, about 95% of the tokens (955 million) are on the market.

There are no more token emissions or airdrops. The only way to get BASIS tokens is through staking, farming or buying them.

Team growth

The Basis Markets Team has doubled since the project's inception in November 2021, and our headcount will continue to increase as required.

We have hired for the following positions: community managers, developers, quantitative engineers and designers.

  • Grayfox joined the team as lead developer in January
  • Pixelgroove joined the team as senior UX/UI designer in March
  • Kidgoudi recently joined the team as quantitative analyst in May

Rebranding

Pixelgroove joined us as senior UI/UX designer after a long career of delivering high quality branding and marketing materials at agencies/in-house. He worked on the rebrand, which went live in May, is refreshing the website (keep an eye out), and is currently working on the design for the DBLP.

Basis Markets re-brand


We will have an individual post about our branding updates soon.

Townhalls / AMAs / weekly updates

We have come to realise our most effective means of communication are through monthly townhalls, AMA's and weekly updates.  

We suggest readers and members of the community to follow us on Twitter, Youtube and Discord to stay up to date with new developments.

The Basis DAO

The Basis DAO governance document was created in March and approved on April 1st, 2022. It outlines the code of conduct expected of members and the proposal process an NFT holder must follow.

Any NFT holder can create a proposal and improvements for the project. As of May 2022, there have been 3 official proposals approved: proposals 000, 001 and 002.

The Basis DAO governance document

Proposal 000

The genesis proposal passed on April 1st, 2022. Its purpose was to approve the DAO governance document.

Proposal 001

The 1st proposal passed on April 4, 2022, with the question:

Are you in favour of the proposed basis liquidity incentive schedule changes?

This proposal introduced changes that:

  • Moved 30m $BASIS tokens from single side staking (3S) to Orca, so liquidity in Orca is maintained until the end of June, the DBLP launch.
  • Increased NFT royalties, to be used to buy-back BASIS and send it to staking emissions, continuously, with variable yield.
  • Increased DBLP fees to 24%, adding additional utility to the NFT (6%), and generating more liquidity in royalties to buy BASIS for 3S emissions. BASIS token holders keep the same portion of fees  (16%), and the extra (2%) is used to buy BASIS and send it to Orca.

Proposal 002

The 2nd proposal passed on April 26st, 2022, to decide how to address the DAO Solana reserves:

Are you in favour of Proposal 002 to deploy DAO assets into basis.markets products & services?

This proposal involved selling SOL assets to $BASIS, then staking the total amount. You can check the DAO wallet here.

Votes on these proposals were performed off-chain as we were still researching the best DAO platform for our needs.

Our choices for a DAO platform that would work in the Solana ecosystem were Reals, Squads and Tribeca. Each of them had their pros and cons and were recognised in the community but we didn’t feel they would suit our needs.

Through our research, we found Metaforo.io early in 2022, a promising DAO platform. Metaforo did not initially work with Solana, but their team has been working and iterating according to our feedback.

We expect to launch the DAO platform by Summer 2022.

CeX listing

HotBit, a centralised exchange, listed $BASIS on their exchange in April 2022, of their own initiative.

Although there is now a way to buy $BASIS on an exchange, many of our community like to trade $BASIS through Jupiter.

Educational Content

In March 2022, we launched a six-part educational video series on using the Basis Trade Engine (BTE) on YouTube.

The series went over concepts such as funding strategies, basis trades, reversed basis, and long & short trades.

Our goal is to educate community members about these strategies to help people get the best value out of the Basis Trade Engine.

BTE Update

There were several improvements made to the Basis Trade Engine (BTE) throughout 2022.

  • Updated the algorithm to receive more funding opportunities
  • Added new exchanges: Mango Markets and Kucoin
  • Created a new menu with information about lending and borrows
  • Fixed trade type: reversed basis
  • Added the option to save individual strategies
  • Small improvements
The Basis Trade Engine (BTE)

Discord / Twitter growth

User count and engagement has been steadily rising in our Twitter and Discord channels.

  • Our Twitter followers increased to 14.6k in 5 months
  • Our Discord users increased to 10k in 5 months

Miscellaneous

  • NFT owners have access the private area on our Discord, which is now also used to vote on DAO proposals. NFT owners can login on https://basis.markets and would automatically receive the NFT owner role on Discord.
  • We held a meme competition for Basis Markets. The 6 winners were announced on December 11, 2022, with a total prize of $5k USDC distributed among them.
  • There are 3 un-official education videos on the BTE and funding rates, by Andres12, a community member. This 3 part video series was finished on December 10, 2021 and they can be accessed here.
  • Basis Socks was launched in March 2022 with our partners at Stand4Socks. For every pair of socks sold, they have donated a pair to someone in need (homeless people). You can buy Basis socks at stand4socks.com. Password is “wensocks”.  
  • On April 12, 2022, the Basis Markets Twitter account became officially verified.
  • On May 27, 2022, we held an AMA with Orca on Twitter Spaces.

Next steps

Here’s what you can expect from our next blog posts:

  • DBLP updates
  • Explanation of technology developed so far
  • New brand, landing page, DBLP UI/UX
  • High level information about the DBLP strategies
  • rBASIS and collateralisation