Builder Update #3

Welcome to the “Builder Update”, a newsletter covering the BUILD Finance ecosystem. Please refer here for the previous issue.

Happy New Year, BUILD Community!

We are starting the year with a bang — a new product release has been just announced. We are happy to reveal Basis Gold, set for initiation on 14 January 2020 (details below).

During the month of December 2020, we had a number of governance updates as a matter of housekeeping, but we also achieved good progress with Metric Exchange and launched Updown Finance. Let’s go through all of it in detail!

Governance Updates

BUILD community voted and passed 5 new proposals, including:

1. Liquidity Bootstrapping — It was agreed to use part of the treasury funds to provide liquidity to a Balancer pool with the following weights: DAI — 20%, BUILD — 20%, METRIC — 20%, UPDOWN — 20%, bCRED — 20%. The treasury provided ~$100k worth of liquidity with DAI amount set to $20,000 and the remaining tokens determined based on their spot price at the time of liquidity adding (Proposal #18).
2. Liquidity Mining — The community reintroduced $bCRED incentives for the BUILD/ETH Uniswap pool by minting 9,000 $bCRED for month-long liquidity mining. The reward rate is 300 bCRED / day for 30 days (Proposal #16).
3. Debt Repayment — A vote passed to use 50,000 DAI from the treasury to repay 50,000 $bCRED in order to increase confidence in the IOU system and demonstrate the commitment to repay $bCRED (Proposal #19).
4. Community Incentive Program — BUILD voted to extend the $bCRED incentives via the guardianship model. Total new guardian bCRED budget is 14,000 $bCRED. Guardians are responsible for creating incentives and distributing $bCRED to those who help to produce value for the DAO (Proposal #15).
5. Expenses Reimbursement — The community voted to reimburse @0xdev0 for development and gas fees to in the total amount of 5,292 bCRED (Proposal #17).

Additionally, the Community has been working on the following initiatives:

• New Website Look — Design of the new build.finance landing page is complete (snippets are used in this newsletter) and coding has commenced, aiming for a release by mid-Jan.
• Gitcoin Grant Application — BUILD intends to apply for the next round of the gitcoin matching program shortly after we launch the new website. This exercise is envisioned as both a funding raising exercise and a wider community engagement mechanism as we are hoping to attract new dev talent.
• Developer Mining — BUILD has launched an open call for developers, aiming to attract new talent via a symbiotic relationship with the DAO, whereby devs can tap into our existing community, obtain development support from other BUILDers, and get funding for marketing, audits, gas, and other expenses. Refer to the announcement.

Products Updates and Roadmap

METRIC EXCHANGE

Metric Exchange is a DEX aggregator that allows for gasless limit orders trading for any ERC-20 token.

There has been a ton of improvement on the UX and functionality front. The UI is looking cleaner and cleaner every day.

The updates include:

• Added support for price definition change and adapt orderbook to user choice;
• Added bCRED and UPDOWN to default token list;
• Added support for canceling opened orders;
• Removed dust orders (with small amounts < 10$) from the order book as it was preventing efficient order fills;
• UX optimization: Redesign order form for simpler/clearer interactions; mobile version improvement; and enriched display messages for better user feedback.

On top of that, Metric Exchange got listed on 0xTracker. Users now have access to trading volumes analytics (https://0xtracker.com/apps/metric).

Next on Metric roadmap:

• Support for market orders (via 0x swap API) and continue UX improvements.
• Trading Competition. In Q1 2021 Metric plans to launch a 14-day trading competition open to all users of the platform. Prizes will be awarded to leading traders daily and at the conclusion of the promotion period. We are working on details of the competition mechanics and in parallel are building necessary trading dashboards. Please keep an eye for further information.

BASIS GOLD

Basis Gold is an elastic supply algorithmically-stabilized token, synthetically pegged to the price of gold.

On January 9, 2021, BUILD Finance announced the launch of Basis Gold ($BSG). See the announcement article “Introducing Basis Gold”. Basis Gold got quite a warm reception, with a dedicated telegram group quickly gaining ~500 members.

It is a protocol based on the work of Basis Cash, which itself is based on the groundwork laid out by the original Basis team. The price of $BSG is measured by a combination of Uniswap TWAP (Time-weighted Average Price) and XAU/USD oracle by Chainlink. The protocol uses Basis Gold Shares and Basis Gold Bonds to regulate the monetary policy between expansion and contraction phases.

Value for BUILD DAO. $BUILD is assigned as a governance token, controlling protocol upgrades by voting. Basis Gold has zero founder allocation and no shares for the BUILD DAO — instead, BUILD DAO will receive 2.5% of the new seigniorage (BSG). The remaining 97.5% of supply expansions will be directed towards Basis Gold Share holders as per the stabilization mechanics.

UPDOWN FINANCE

Updown.Finance is a binary options protocol for volatility trading.

Updown platform was guard-launched in early December 2020. It is currently set to speculate on price movement for $DSD. $UPDOWN holders are able to stake and receive feed earned via the platform.

To date, we haven’t seen much uptake in the usage of this product, so are in discussions as to how to tweak the protocol economics in order to stimulate the activity.

VORTEX

Vortex is an upcoming money market platform, which aims to serve the long tail of DeFi assets.

The dev work on this front continues, currently focused on:

• The UI is mainly ready;
• Adapting Compound contracts to use Uniswap TWAP oracles;
• Adapting Compound to capture liquidation fees directly by the protocol token holders and using KP3R for them;
• Designing tokenomics.

Build Token

$BUILD is currently held by 487 unique wallets, as seen in the graph below from Nansen. An increase of 12% from last month. The January spike is associated with the Basis Gold announcement.

If you’re interested in building DeFi, working on products of your passion, or pitching a new idea, please reach out to us in Discord. We are looking forward to hearing from you.