Aqualis January Recap

about 1 year ago

Hi Aqualiens, hope everyone has enjoyed the best January for Bitcoin in 10 years! At Aqualis, it has been a relatively quiet month as we continue working away on our core lending protocol, pre-token sale and marketing strategy.

Smart contract progress
Pre-token sale
Marketing strategy
MALP mathmatics auditing
Separation of Treasury and Operations Budget
Splinterlands update
Closing remarks

Smart contract progress

The lending, MALP and integration between both smart contracts have been completed. However, we are currently experiencing some issues deploying to the Goerli testnet which our team is troubleshooting. We believe it is isolated to the Goerli testnet so worst case scenario we will deploy to another testnet, which means simply setting up a new on chain test environment.

Upon deployment, we will conduct internal testing for the business logic and mathematics of both protocols.

Pre-token Sale

Taking a lesson from our whitelist sale, we have not rushed into listing or announcing anything regarding our pre-token sale. Instead, we are finalizing our marketing strategy and giving some time to our service providers PrimeDAO to make sure everything goes smoothly. We will give further updates in a separate post.

Marketing Strategy

Also reflecting on our whitelist sale, we have decided to do more AMAs and less third party videos by YouTubers and focus on retaining rather than quick growth. Aqualis will launch our own YouTube channel and feature short videos introducing our protocol.

MALP Mathematics Auditing

We have begun an internal audit for the MALP's mathematics to ensure there are no loopholes and it is exploitation proof. Our head of R&D Dr Alan Downes has been exploring using machine learning techniques such as reinforcement learning to simulate our ecosystem and look for potential exploits. Meanwhile, we are also using brute force techniques to simulate different trading strategies to look for any possible exploits.

Separation of Treasury and Operations Budget

Previously, the operations budget and treasury were both stored in the same Gnosis Safe multi-sig wallet. To ease confusion, this has now been split into two distinct wallets.

The Treasury address has 4 signatories including the Founder Simon Zhang, Co-Founder Harold Lucero, Head of Data Alexander Conomos and Advisor and Co-Founder of Splinterlands, Matt Rosen. It requires 3 out of 4 signatories to confirm any transaction. All future transactions out of this wallet will require a community vote, even an informal vote if any funds are required prior to the mainnet launch.

The Operations budget has 3 signatories, Founder Simon Zhang (with two approvals), Co-Founder Harold Lucero and Head of Data Alexander Conomos. The Operations budget requires 3 approvals for any transaction, so any transaction approved by Simon will only need 1 additional approval. This wallet is administered by the team and all transactions are on chain thus subject to the scrutiny of the community.

This has now been reflected on the Aqualis Financial Report.

Splinterlands Update

Over the past month, the Aqualis.io Splinterlands guild has consistently performed well across brawls, including a first place placement in the most recent brawl! We will continue to use Splinterlands as a source of engagement and later as a marketing asset.

Closing Remarks

Over the next couple months, we will be working hard to finish up all smart contracts as our top priority. Other than that, we will be working on preparing for our launch including marketing, forming necessary connections and partnerships and auditing.