Hola Algorand! We are honoured with Targeted DeFi Rewards this time. We have a master plan for using it the most efficiently, which we want to discuss with you. Please tune in!

50% — META pools

Cometa token is strongly connected within the whole Algorand DeFi, a variety of tokens, which provides deep liquidity to any new token. So now we’re focusing fully on stable liquidity (but still, do not forget a few amazing community projects).

With our upcoming Launchpad (the proposal has already passed) and a few other minor features, the token’s stability will bring great value to the whole ecosystem.

• 12% — META/ALGO Tinyman
• 8% — META/USDC Tinyman
• 6% — META/gALGO Tinyman
• 6% — META/goBTC Tinyman
• 6% — META/wETH Pact
• 6% — META/GOLD$ Pact
• 2% — META/mALGO Pact
• 2% — META/COOP Pact
• 2% — META staking

20% — Boost Bridged and RWA tokens

Cross-chain and RWA liquidity makes the DeFi ecosystem more stable and robust. Enough of those ALGO chart dances. Let’s make it properly liquid! Our team believes that the following tokens deserve much more attention than they currently have.

We will incentivize all the farming pools with LPs using one of the following tokens:

• GOLD$, SILVER$
• wBTC, wETH, wAVAX, wSOL, wLINK
• goBTC, goETH
• EURS, USDT

The rewards will be distributed among all the qualified pools for the next 90 days after the start.

• A pool gets the amount which is proportional to the total $ cost of the provided rewards.
• If the price is not stable enough, we’ll calculate the cost using the minimum price for the recent period.
• If a pool duration is shorter than 90 days, the share will be cut accordingly.

x2 Boost to small & new projects!

Incentivizing already popular and big tokens makes little sense, frankly. So, instead, we’ll help smaller projects grow faster! This will have much more relative impact for the same amount of rewards, which could be wasted on the big tokens.

To be eligible for x2, a token has to:

• be created before 22 April 2024
• have stable liquidity < $20k (without messing with it beforehand, we’ll analyze the charts)
• have an active Twitter

The same rewards distribution rules apply.

30% — Deeply connect Algorand and Base communities!

Farcaster is a new, amazing social crypto platform that has gained huge attention, mostly from the Base blockchain community. Its dope features and smart built-in DEGEN tokenomics make it very active and grow fast. We see a no-brainer way to connect Algorand and Base via Farcaster, its current state, and its features.

Killer-feature of Farcaster is the ability to integrate any Javascript code into any post! This is the next level stuff. Imagine doing DeFi never leaving the Twitter?

We’ve already created the first simplest app and it was the success!

Check it out https://warpcast.com/cometa/0xd8c1afdd

We want to utilize the feature while it is still early days and literally integrate Algorand DeFi into the Farcaster posts feed.

One of the key Farcaster features is the token DEGEN and its degen tokenomics ($800m FDV). We’re going to leverage the token heavily. With the help of the Messina team, we’ve already bridged the token to Algorand.

The test app allows you to:

• to create a new Algorand wallet
• to claim DEGEN on Algorand wallet
• to claim an NFT to Algorand wallet (was just 28 items)

With that we made 15 Farcaster users to create Algorand wallets and understand how it works (we should’ve created more NFTs, well).

And it is without any funding, promotions and with the app full of bugs. With the proper funding we have 100% potential to make a really HUGE impact:

• we’ll attract people from Algorand to Farcaster, to spread the word about Algorand and assimilate algofam in Farcaster, making the platformAlgorand-native as well
• we’ll get people from Base to participate in Algorand DeFi and engage them on the Algorand Twitter
• thus we’ll achieve a deep symbiosis between Algorand and Base, attracting big money from Base to Algorand

To achieve that, we need the following:

• 8% —Bridged DEGEN liquidity pools: DEGEN, DEGEN/ALGO, DEGEN/goETH, DEGEN/META
• 8% — DEGEN rewards for completing the tasks and using the bridge app (on both sides)
• 8% — constant development of the Farcaster bridge-DeFi/NFT/DEGEN integrated frame app features
• 4% — collaborations and advertisements

Conclusion

Cometa has its own area of responsibility — helping projects to grow and improve liquidity across the Algorand board. We try non-trivial ideas, potentially achieving crazy results. Someone has to do that, right? Algorand has been in the shadows for too long.

What do you think about our plans? Please share any thoughts!

What’s that?

In this game, you take part in 1v1 dance battles. Two opponents have NFT 3D models with different dance moves animations. Each battle consists of several rounds. In each round, you strategically choose one of the dance moves to outperform your opponent. Some moves dominate others, so choose wisely!

You battle until one of the players reaches the specified limit score; for example, they battle until two wins. If you win the battle, you are rewarded with $META tokens from another player or from the PC if you play PvE.

For a while after release, there will be a present to dearest Metapunk holders! Emerge victorious from the dance floor, and you’ll be rewarded with x3 $META tokens.

The Beta: Just work, please

We are releasing the simplest version of the game possible. We could postpone the release for a few weeks and implement our planned features all at once to present you with a quality product. But first, we want to start fun ASAP. Fun cannot wait. Second, we want to get feedback as soon as possible.

Please spend 2 minutes to share any feedback you have. It will help us a lot. We want to build a perfect product, and you can easily help us with that.

🔗 Here is the feedback form. Or you can just put a comment on Twitter.

In the first version, you can only play with default characters. You cannot use any Metapunk in the game because it’s hard to apply animations to all of 2589 Metapunks. There is no easy technical solution for that at the moment.
When we see that people like the game and it is popular, we’ll resolve this task, and you’ll be able to use your own fancy Metapunk on the dance floor and let its personality shine. This feature is the main milestone, actually.

The Next Releases

At Cometa, we believe in incremental development and continuous delivery. That’s why we’ve planned MetaBattle as several milestones, starting with the simplest possible version. This way, fun can start as early as possible. Again — more fun equals more happiness. How will we have fun?

1. PvE Bets: Raise the stakes by placing bets in $META tokens before each battle versus PC. Win, and you’ll double your rewards! Loose and… Start a new game!
2. PvP Mode: PvE mode is just a test. The main feature is, of course, playing against other crazy dancers.
   Invite friends or find random opponents to dance-offs. Bet $META in those battles as well. Take all the money from your friends!
   Shortly after the release we’ll start hosting tournaments for the Algorand community with different prize pools.
3. Player Dashboard: Track your progress and see how you stack up against other dancers on the global leaderboard.
4. Full Metapunks Integration: At this point, players may choose Metapunks from their wallets and use them in battles.
5. ELO Tournaments: Prove your skills in weekly ELO-based tournaments, climb the ranks and take big prize pools!
6. Enhance Game Mechanics: We’ll introduce new abilities and features. Stats will be added to each Metapunk NFT, allowing you to upgrade and gain battle advantages. At this point you will need to actually think when you play, be ready.
7. Custom Swag Store: Stand out by acquiring exclusive dance moves for your NFT bro. Also get custom music to make your battles even more joyful.

We have a longer list of planned features and possible ways to make this game a big deal. But that’s another story. At first, we have to dance a lot.

Metapunks OG?

Cometa emerged in 2021 as an NFT collection Metapunks. We created 2589 unique, generative 3D models of the most stylish characters. The sales went pretty good. We’ve implemented the first Random Shuffle NFT Sale service on Algorand and won the Innovative Hackathon in the Art/NFT track!

Fueled by our success, we shifted our focus to developing useful DeFi features and building an innovative protocol with complicated finance algorithms, LaaS. But that’s another story. In the process, we temporarily lost sight of our beloved Metapunks. And now we’re fixing that injustice.

🔗 Buy Metapunks to increase PvE rewards now. Later, with each new release, players with the NFTs will receive new perks.

Isn’t Cometa DeFi? Why game?

1. We wanted to shift our focus from doing severe stuff to resting. We wanted to make something for fun, something that we would enjoy doing, something where we could implement all our crazy ideas without thinking about consequences.
2. We’ve reassembled our team recently. We have a new front-end guy and a new designer. We wanted to test our new team capabilities, to set up all the processes, etc. For that we needed some new feature to release, something nontrivial, but without too much responsibility, that we usually have with our main products.
3. The game gives a huge utility for the Metapunks collection. It also gives a decent utility for the $META token. Both in one shot. Sounds good, huh?
4. We wanted to do something tangible for the Algorand community. Something that people would love to use and it would be useful. It’s not that easy to develop a new DeFi feature, fast and that everybody would use it. So we had to think differently.

We’ll soon be back to developing DeFi. That is our main focus, and we already have a decent roadmap for a few months. It’s a pity we haven’t received the xGov grant this time, which would allow us to do everything much more efficiently. But it doesn’t stop us, we keep buildin.

We are really happy with the result, even though it is still a bit crooked and the main mechanics have yet to be implemented. We just enjoy creating and sharing. We’ll definitely continue development until we release our main milestones.

Thank you! Have fun and be happy 🤍

References

Cometa App: https://app.cometa.farm/
Metapunks Info: https://metapunks.world/

Cometa Twitter: https://twitter.com/CometaHub
Metapunks Twitter: https://twitter.com/metapunksog

Discord: https://discord.gg/KnBEtH8gQQ
TG Channel: https://t.me/cometahub

Email: team@cometa.wtf

It was an extraordinary year for everyone: for the Cometa team, for the crypto industry, and for the whole world.

As a young startup, we learned a lot, generated ideas, and found the best people for our team.

At the beginning of the year, we launched the MetaDAO analytics interface and Fomo3D game on Algorand. These ideas didn’t work as we expected.

But we didn’t give up. We did Space Explorer Game, and Metaverse integrating and spent a lot of hours to think what else we could build for the community and the crypto world.

First, we analyze hundreds of interfaces in crypto and realize that we know how to make it easier for users.
And second, we found that the Algorand community needs space where all projects and users can collaborate.
That’s how Cometa began.
We built the tech, made an audit, and launched on mainnet easy-to-use yield farming & staking on Algorand.
Also, we add Deflex swap, ZAP, and compound feature to Cometa to save users time from routine.
Then we launched gaming pools to unite DeFi and Gaming.
And finally, we launched the NFT lottery for swaps to unite NFT lovers with DeFi.
Thanks, the Alchemon team for the fantastic ideas!

Now Cometa is fully decentralized and open for the community.
Everybody can launch their pool in 1 minute.
And ask us, as a developer team, to add features they need.

We got a lot of great feedback from users and projects about Cometa.
We are really proud to make our community happy.

The next big thing that we worked on was single-sided liquidity lending.
We discussed a lot about the future of crypto and what problems exist now.
And thanks to our advisor, who brings our attention to the liquidity problem.

Altogether we started massive research and found a lot of inefficiency in the existing process of liquidity attraction.
We discuss this problem with around 50 projects, and they confirm it exists.
We changed the pitch deck hundreds of times, we made a smart contract and frontend prototypes.
We participate in Algorand Miami Accelerator with this idea.
And finally, we were one of the winners of the Decipher pitch competition.
The beauty of the single-sided liquidity lending idea is it’s easy to understand the concept. And around the concept, we can build massing infrastructure that makes the crypto market way more liquid and, therefore, more effective.

Many thanks to our best team:
Florian, who made our twitter useful and engaging for everybody,
Geo, who talked with 30+ projects and discussed our ideas,
Dmitry, who built the most complex tech solution to make users happy,
Richard, who built the best activities for the community,
Roman, who gave us a lot of ideas and shared all the crypto news in the world,
Cogitent VC and Big Brain Holding, for all of your support,
Algorand Miami Accelerator and personally Lorenzo, for great advice and help,
Michael and AJ from Optio Capital, for advice and answers to all our questions,
Algorand Foundation and Borderless, for all you did for us,
the Algorand community, for all of your support and feedback.

Happy New Year, Algorand! ❤️

COMETA

Several months ago we posted an article about Cometa’s vision of impermanent loss protection that started from “the last few weeks in crypto were pretty crazy…”.
Retrospectively we see that it was just the beginning of true craziness which touched literally every piece of crypto-space. Today investors as well as retail users are not looking for 100500% APYs or at least “20% on stablecoins” but rather exploring risks that are imminent to every yield venue (excluding maybe U.S. short-term treasury bills). One of the main features of Cometa’s liquidity lending protocol is mitigating one specific risk bearing by liquidity providers aka creditors — the risk of impermanent loss.
So let’s take a deep dive into this topic and learn how Cometa will help investors to get a new stable yield and minimize risks inherent to AMM-model.

But first, let’s take a step back and revise the fundamental prerequisites the protocol is based on:

1. Automated Market Makers (AMMs) popularised by Uniswap are here to stay: at least we can be sure that CEXs are not a good choice and decentralized order-books are still far from their maturity;

2. There is always someone who needs liquid markets for their assets: today it’s DAO, tomorrow it’ll be tokenized RWA issuer, next week — all forms of creators;

3. There is always someone who needs yield venues: nobody wants to lose money due to accelerating inflation, there is no question like “should my money work for me?” — the question is “does this yield venue fit my risk tolerance?”;

4. Risk-free yield venues don’t exist — if protocol with delta-neutral strategies, undercollateralized lending, or option vaults tells your otherwise, they’re liars;

5. Eventually, every financial product is about allocating resources and risks, nothing more.

So basically, Cometa’s goal is to meet two basic needs of the hugest market participants:

• to help digital assets’ issuers with creating healthy liquid markets;

• to create a new yield venue for investors with an adequate risk level.

How will Cometa provide an adequate risk level?

If you’re unfamiliar with Cometa’s protocol mechanics, feel free to check this article.
In short, projects create vaults on Cometa to attract liquidity. One side of the vault (ALGO/USDC/etc side) will be filled by investors (those who look for yield on their assets). The other side (token side) — by the project: DAOs or other tokens’ issuers. Then paired liquidity goes to AMM: investors get their yield (from trading fees and incentives), and projects get liquid markets for their assets. There are seven “levels of defense” which helps investors not to worry about possible IL.

Zero level — do not give money to VCs

Not about IL protection, but still worth mentioning — protocol does not give investors’ money to VCs, high-frequency traders, or other actors! The only way money can go from the vault is to AMM’s pool. Giving loans to institutions without any collateral was a dumb idea from the first day, but now we see consequences.

First level — due diligence

In TradFi, due diligence is an investigation, audit, or review performed to confirm facts or details of a matter under consideration.
In DeFi, it’s a pretty similar process that requires taking into account the peculiarities of the crypto space.

Essentially Cometa’s due diligence for Cometa vaults includes the following:

• tokenomics assessment;

• scanning of huge token holders aka whales;

• solvency assessment (including the project’s reserves and financial tracks);

• exploring of team members’ past activities;

• technical analysis (project’s architecture as well as projected vault’s AMM structure);

• preliminary negotiations with team members;

• analysis of broad market conditions;

• and more.

Thus we can be sure that Cometa is not creating exit liquidity, the protocol’s team has a verifiable track of legit activity and can handle adequate communication in case of unforeseen events.

And keep in mind that existing tokens are just the first wave of tokenized digital assets. As crypto matures, we’ll see more players coming into space, including financial institutions and real estate owners with their tokenized RWAs, established brands with their tokenized products, etc. All of them will need liquidity, and onboarding them will require more sophisticated due diligence frameworks.

But no matter how legit projects are crypto is still volatile and even the best projects could fail (in terms of token price). The risks are still here, so we’re moving to the next level.

Second level — negotiations

We always proceed from the fact that our counter-parties are decent and accept the basic rule of people interactions “pacta sunt servanda”. Most projects have treasuries full of reserves with their native tokens and stablecoins. So yes, we expect that in most cases negotiation process (with an established framework and deadlines for required actions) would be enough to cover IL.

But at the same time, we do fully believe in code, not the people. It would be too naive to only hope for the decency of the project, so we’re moving to the third level.

Third level — tokens’ issuer’s insurance pool

A project could be asked to create the insurance pool with their treasury assets (native tokens and/or other assets). The size of the pool depends on the results of due diligence. If the project is insolvent or unwilling to pay this insurance will be sold into the market or redirected to the vault’s investors.

But if it’s still not enough…

Fourth level — public insurance pool

All we can do is to allocate resources and risks, remember? So the next level of defense is reallocating the risk of IL to third parties, which could be:

• Cometa users who put their money in a vault-specific insurance pool in exchange for part of vault revenue and/or incentives; or

• protocols specializing in insurance coverage (though at this moment we don’t see any protocols of this kind mature enough to satisfy Cometa’s needs).

But we need more…

The fifth level — dumping to the market

Even if the vault suffers from IL and previous levels do not work as intended, we still have some tokens in the vault, which can be sold into the market. It will be possible if any external liquidity exists.

And if it’s not enough, we still have…

Sixth level — reserve fund

Part of the protocol’s revenue will be redirected to the reserve fund which will be used to cover IL.

Seventh level — up to you

Cometa is DAO which means that every participant can propose his ideas about the mitigation of IL risks. It could be:

• META reserve fund or META issuance: even though we see from Bancor’s experience that native token issuance is not a great idea, some META could be reserved to act as the last line of defense for investors;

• OTC-deals: the other possible way to cover IL is selling tokens from failed vault or insurance/reserve funds through OTC-deals (instead of dumping them into the market);

• legal actions.

Finally, do we have a risk-free investment opportunity?

No, we do not! The only “risk-free” investment is U.S. short-term treasury bills. So Cometa, like any other yield venue, will bring not only investment opportunities but also some risks inherited from AMM’s architecture.

At the same time, we do believe that Cometa will drastically minimize these risks and create new yield opportunities with higher APYs (compared to the safest DeFi venues: ALGO governance rewards, ETH staking rewards, AAVE rates, and so on) and adequate risk level thus establishing new DeFi-primitive demanded in any market conditions.

Is liquidity lending our final point?

No! At this moment, we see significant demand for creating healthy liquid markets in DeFi, so Cometa is ready to meet this demand. At the same time, nothing stops us from leveraging gained experience and a dedicated community to create new financial products and evolve together with the developing market.

Stay tuned, big news is coming soon!

written by Roman, Cometa's advisor.

cometa.sh

Winter is already here! The bear market is not a horror story from OG crypto-chads anymore but a fierce reality. TVL shrank by more than 65% just in a few weeks, and one of the top blockchains is dead now (almost dead). Trust in alternative L1s is questionable…

Seems like it’s time to sell your shitcoins and withdraw funds in fiat (if you still have something to withdraw). For newcomers who started their crypto-journey from dog-tokens or StepN snickers, this thesis is undoubted, but for those who survived crypto winter of 2018–2019 the situation looks very, very different…

It’s not a secret that the bear market is, on the one hand, the most difficult period for devs and teams who are seeking investors. But on the other hand, it’s a beautiful time for investors who can finally take a little break after an exhausting bullrun. They have time to soberly evaluate projects that still exist or those that try to pull off in these hard times and to define new favourites and narratives for the next bullrun.

So… For all who understand crypto-cycles and how they actually work, the main question to think about is which projects and/or blockchains will explode in the crypto space in the next few years. Can we already identify future crypto-narratives? Or maybe we are the people who should establish them?

From our point of view, last year’s DeFi-boom and L1-wars haven’t revealed clear winners but only established the space and defined vectors for future development. Today, in 2022, we clearly understand that:

• It’s not only possible but also necessary to compete with Ethereum as L1: it doesn’t matter if we’ll have a cross-chain future or not. Ethereum is not going to be the only viable solution;
• Blockchains have all the necessary components to create a better alternative to existing financial systems: it’s the first time in history when this statement is not just a marketing slogan but a proven fact;
• Not only DeFi degens, but huge institutional players are interested in (and, moreover, are already using) blockchain technologies and L1 infrastructure: FIFA, Ubisoft, Pepsi… actually it’s not so easy to find a company which is still not tied to blockchain in one or another way.

So… We’re still early :) But the difference from 2018 is that now we understand the path we’re following and have a vague idea of the expected outcomes.

Spotting the Future Winner

Although trying to guess the next big thing in crypto has little to no sense, examining different blockchains (aka infrastructure or base layers for all crypto projects) could be a great idea to start this bear season with.

Around a year ago (before we started to work on our NFT project), we asked ourselves this question and found that from a technical perspective, all blockchains have their trade-offs (you know, Vitalik’s trilemma…). We analysed multiple blockchains and found that Algorand is one of the most technically advanced and suitable for future development (far beyond NFTs).

After this year, we understood a couple of things:

• Technical advantages do not always correlate with native token price and development pace;
• Moreover, a lack of real fundamental advantages and abnormal token growth would lead to an even greater token dump (and may actually lead to the blockchain death… we’ll see soon);

So… You think we’ve changed our mind about Algorand? Hell, no! Today we more than ever believe that Algorand will be the next big (infrastructure) thing in crypto, and you’ll see why!

Why Algorand?

1. Market cap and TVL

What do you think about when you look at Algorand’s 18th place in the TVL ranking? Not outstanding results, huh?

And what do you think when you look at Algorand Mcap/TVL ratio at 10? Wtf is this ratio supposed to tell me, you think…

Although this picture may not look very remarkable in static, its dynamics matter the most. Six months ago, Algorand barely was in the top 40.
What makes it more impressive is that, unlike most other blockchains on the list, Algorand is not EVM-based, which means the bootstrapping ecosystem requires much more work.

But as we know, past performance is not an indicator of future results. Is there a lot of space to grow left?

Actually, there are more than 3.5 billion illiquid ALGOs ($1.05 billion) in the Governance program. And liquid governance solutions have just started, so be sure to see all that money in the DeFi soon.

Yes, a high Mcap/TVL ratio is not a bullish argument itself, but please, keep these numbers in mind while we’re diving into amazing Algorand’s world.

2. Infrastructure for states

No doubt you know that today you can officially buy a hamburger with your BTC in El Salvador. But do you know whose infrastructure you will use by doing that? Algorand’s! Amazing, right? It’s hard to name a more obvious vote of confidence for an L1 blockchain than official implementation in the governance financial system…

Oh, an important note: it’s not the first country collaborating with Algorand that way! The Marshall Islands will also design their national digital currency with Algorand technologies. Nigeria is also using Algorand’s infrastructure and is aiming to onboard 1M people in 1 year.

We all know how complicated it might be to convince governments of the necessity to use new technologies (in the case of crypto — it’s not easy even to explain what crypto actually is). But when there is a battle-tested technology successfully used by other governments, the process will definitely be more smooth… And since Algorand is one of the first blockchains that have a ready-to-go product for states, we can expect that Algorand will use this advantage and likely will have on board the majority of governments with their digital-state currencies. So who will be the next government client of Algorand? We’ll know soon :)

What could be a better confirmation of blockchain greatness if not the interest from several governments at once?

Sounds really huge already, huh? But we’ve just started.

3. Biggest partnerships in the crypto space

First and foremost, Algorand is the official blockchain platform of FIFA. Yes, you heard it right: it’s not a typical crypto-partnership “I bought a burger in Mcdonald’s, so we have a partnership”, but a real collaboration where Algorand will become the official blockchain platform of FIFA and provide the official blockchain-supported wallet solution. You can hardly find such a huge and promising partnership in the whole crypto space.

Tons of other partnerships with crypto: Alchemy Pay, Circle, Tether, Watr Foundation, Limewire. As well as non-crypto: WadzPay, Italia Olivicola, Bnext, Drone Racing League, Gotham FC, Australia Zoo. Such companies are a guarantee for the future demand for the Algorand blockchain. And yes, you heard it right again: Algorand’s projects had already started their journey to the non-crypto world a few years ago:

• 70M South Americans (potentially 200M soon) using Algorand to issue + store COVID-19 passports.
• Algorand is the IT infrastructure partner of ISDA.
• BNext adopting ALGO for its $100b/year Spain<->Latin American remittance service.
• MAPay adopting ALGO to power $800m/year in healthcare payments for Bermuda.
• SIAE, one of the world's largest and oldest digital rights management companies, launched 4.5m NFTs onto ALGO — representing the work of 10,000 artists and which will involve $100m/year in royalties.
• Algorand was recently featured in a World Economic Forum (WEF) report on cryptocurrency — listed as a recommended “VIP” blockchain that solves issues with BTC/ETH and proof-of-stake. This document will be seen by institutions, banks and economists worldwide.
• Algorand is the main sponsor of the world chess championship.
• Also, a fun fact: a few years ago, Facebook tried to acquire Algorand! Let’s see who will acquire whom in the next few decades…

So finally, we got some not a crypto-with-crypto but crypto-with-reality collaborations.

4. Institutional partnerships

Partnerships with governments, partnerships with customers… But also a very important role in the partnership list is partnerships with institutional investors. And we are not talking about curly VCs buying and then dumping the native chain’s token. It’s about using Algorand infrastructure by institutional investors for a smooth transition of their money (like really big money) to the crypto space. Have you ever heard about Hivemind Capital Partners? If not, you definitely should google it! It is one of the biggest investment funds in the whole crypto space ($1,5B). And Algorand is a strategic partner to provide technical capability and network ecosystem infrastructure.

Why did they choose Algorand? Thanks for the answer to Matt Zhang (ex-Citi head of structured products trading): “Algorand is the preeminent blockchain protocol that allows institutional and corporate users to connect with the decentralized economy”.

5. Exceptional team and unceasing hiring

Silvio Micali, the founder of Algorand, is the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Verifiable Random Functions and many of the protocols that are the foundations of modern cryptography. Also, he is the recipient of the Turing Award (in computer science), the Gödel Prize (in theoretical computer science) and the RSA prize (in cryptography).

Though Silvio and other team members have mostly been with Algorand from the beginning (2017), it’s important to note that the core Algorand team is becoming stronger yearly.

• Staci Warden, CEO from 2021: former executive director at JPMorgan, also worked at Nasdaq.
• Devan Moorthy, a former Ripple executive, has just recently joined the team as head of ecosystem access.
• John Alan Wood, former Director of Cardano Architecture, joined the team as a new CTO just a month ago.

So Algorand basically stole really good people from really good companies and projects. Just imagine what they could achieve together!

6. DeFi Ecosystem is Ready to Explode

Just a brief look at Algorand’s DeFi ecosystem (we will deep dive into the topic in the next post):

• Yield farming: Cometa, AlgoStake, Yieldly, + more dapps in development;
• Lending/borrowing: Algofi, Folks Finance + more dapps in development;
• DEXes: Humble, Tinyman, Pact, Algofi, Algodex+ more dapps in development;
• Stablecoins: native USDC and USDT, xUSD from xBacked, goUSD from Algomint, STBL from Algofi, GARD from AlgoGARD+ more stablecoins in development;
• NFTs: RandGallery, AlgoXNFT, Algogems, AB2 Gallery, Dartroom and several other small marketplaces. 10k+ ALGO floor price for top collections;
• Liquid governance: Algofi, Folks Finance;
• Bridges: Algomint to connect with BTC/ETH, pNetwork to connect with BTC/ETH/BSC/EOS/MATIC/Arbitrum, Glitter Finance to connect with Solana. Also, Wormhole is going to support Algorand really soon.

So lots of stuff is already there, and much more is in development. Just wait for the next bullrun…

7. Developers

It is clear that supporting developers is one of the key priorities of the Algorand foundation. For example, there is $10 million allocated for Developer Tooling SupaGrants.

One of the grant recipients, Reach, created a uniquely accessible smart-contract language which has already been learned by thousands of builders.

Moreover, developers are incentivised to build on Algorand with ecosystem grants. And these grants are one of the biggest in the entire crypto space:

• In June 2021 Arrington Capital, run by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, launched a $100 million fund to build on the Algorand blockchain;
• In September 2021 Algorand Foundation also launched its $300 million development fund.

Have we already seen the results of those programs (just a small reminder: 2-day lasting token’s pump is not a result)? We, from the developer's perspective, already have. You, from users’ experience, will see it soon… But for now, just keep in mind that Algorand Foundation has launched a $250 million Algo Grants Program, which means that just in a few years, we’ll see hundreds of DeFi/NFT projects on Algorand!

8. World’s greenest blockchain

Last but not least: Algorand is the only blockchain which aims to be carbon negative. To create such a network, Algorand and ClimateTrade decided to implement a sustainability oracle, which will notarise the carbon footprint generated by Algorand’s on-chain transactions for a set amount of blocks. Algorand will lock the equivalent amount of carbon credit in a smart contract and put the same amount into a green treasury to offset its carbon footprint.

Moreover, Algorand Foundation is committing $15M over five years by matching funds (up to $2.5M annually) raised by Climate Ride (the non-profit mobilizing people to protect our planet through life-changing adventures) participants and contributing $500K annually to program expansion.

Yep, it may sound strange (especially for DeFi-degens), but we really want to see our planet clean and healthy. As well as the governments (future users of Algorand’s infrastructure, remember?).

So… Algorand?

• Mcap/TVL ratio is really high and much money is still in the illiquid governance, which means lots of money is gonna be in DeFi soon;
• Several governments are going or already using Algorand infrastructure for their needs and possible CBDC;
• One of the strongest teams in the space, gathering the best minds from different blockchains;
• Lots of big partnerships with real-world companies as well as a really big interest from institutional players;
• Huge investments as well as development funds;
• Lots of interesting projects in development and we have plenty of time on the bear market to see them explode in the next bullrun;
• Really convenient tools for development, which are improving on a really rapid scale;
• The negative impact on the environment.

Before, we were talking only about the amazing tech behind the scenes. Now we see that all the parts of the puzzle have come together. And the puzzle is beautiful.

As a team, we aim to build the best blockchain products in the space. And to do so, we need to choose the best tech/marketing team to rely on.

We have already made our choice. What will be yours?

By the way, check out our website. As well as our Yield Farming.

written by Roman, Cometa advisor, and Nikita, Cometa co-founder.

The last few weeks in crypto were pretty crazy. So many things were going on that it was hard to keep track of everything. But one particular event captured our attention: Bancor’s decision to pause impermanent loss protection.

Bancor on Twitter: "Due to hostile market conditions, Bancor's Impermanent Loss Protection is temporarily paused. IL protection will be reactivated on the protocol as the market stabilizes.More info: https://t.co/pHrdO4sTFdWe're hosting a community AMA in 15 minutes: https://t.co/xgh8UmfNoL / Twitter"

Due to hostile market conditions, Bancor's Impermanent Loss Protection is temporarily paused. IL protection will be reactivated on the protocol as the market stabilizes.More info: https://t.co/pHrdO4sTFdWe're hosting a community AMA in 15 minutes: https://t.co/xgh8UmfNoL

This decision was not warmly welcomed in the DeFi community.

And it’s no wonder: IL protection was the core value proposition of Bancor. Promising “instant 100% impermanent loss protection” and disabling it when IL is massive? Not very nice.

Changing game rules on the fly is unfair and should be strongly discouraged, especially in DeFi.

Liquidity-as-a-Service vaults in Cometa are also featuring IL protection.
But it’s not like the other protocols. It’s built different.

And it is so simple. The core idea can be outlined in a few short paragraphs. It’s a stark contrast with Bancor’s design which takes dozens of pages and results in overwhelming complexity.

But despite its simplicity, it was not the first thing that came to our minds. Cometa design has evolved quite a lot since the initial idea.

Let us walk through the stages.

Just Swap It?

Single Cometa vault provides single-sided exposure in pair X-ALGO (where X can be any other token).

• X represents the liquidity seeker side: the vault creator provided tokens X intending to attract liquidity in the pair.
• Liquidity providers supply ALGO. They are not seeking liquidity for ALGO but are motivated by generating returns.
• Liquidity providers are protected from impermanent loss: if X depreciates in terms of ALGO, somebody has to cover for it.

How to do it? The most intuitive idea is: let’s sell X tokens using AMM DEX.

We were not the first to think about it; Rift Finance does precisely this.

Looks good at first glance. However, there are a lot of pitfalls and dangers.

First of all, you need liquidity to sell tokens. And you cannot use your own liquidity. If you will “sell” to yourself, it will have zero effect.

Therefore, outside liquidity is needed. And it is pretty weird to require outside liquidity in a protocol designed to attract liquidity, isn’t it?

And it’s not enough to have some outside liquidity. You may need quite a lot!

• Suppose there is 2000$ of liquidity in the LaaS vault and 1000$ of external liquidity.
• Now, imagine that the X token is worth three times less ALGO than before.
  At the end of the vault, the impermanent loss of liquidity providers will be around 42%.
• And because DAO tokens are cheaper now, we have to sell around 72% of DAO tokens to cover the IL, which is worth around 500$. If we still have 1000$ of outside liquidity, the price impact will be around 100%. So, we will sell tokens two times cheaper than market value. Obviously, arbitragers will extract a lot of profits from it.

But even worse, suppose you are an external liquidity provider. You know that LaaS vault is going to finish soon and that it will cause a huuuge swap. Will you stay in the pool and suffer impermanent loss yourself or withdraw liquidity right before the swap?

Needless to say, we judged against this model.

$META go Brrrr

The second idea was similar to what Bancor and numerous other protocols do.

Swaps may cause problems. But if the protocol has a token with a controlled supply, why not use it to cover IL? Of course, if the token has no backing, excessive minting will render it worthless. But what if we will use protocol-generated revenue to back it?

It effectively means that the protocol socializes impermanent loss and redistributes it to its token holders.

It is not very capital efficient because it treats all tokens equally, no matter how risky. It’s binary: the particular token is either good enough to be whitelisted or not. There is no finer-grained risk scoring.

Another problem is the possibility of economic exploits. If an issuer of a whitelisted token decides to do rug pull, she can double her gains by taking another side of the pool with the soon-to-be-rugged token and then receive compensation for the impermanent loss.

Perhaps even more importantly, it creates a systemic risk: if one pool goes under, causing huge IL, more protocol tokens will be printed and sold. It will cause volatility and more impermanent loss in other pools, causing a Terra-like chain reaction, a good old bank run.

And it’s not just abstract theory. We have seen it in practice, and memories are still fresh.

Keep it Simple, Stupid.

We were unhappy with the existing solutions and returned to the whiteboard, starting from the first principles.

Two core ideas of LaaS are single-sided exposure and impermanent loss protection.

There is token A and token B. Then, an A-B LP token is created by providing liquidity to an AMM DEX. Liquidity stays on the DEX for some time, let’s say 30 days. Then, it gets withdrawn, and tokens get back to the original depositors. Single-sided exposure seems easy.

But what about IL protection? It’s a bit trickier: one of the sides is protected from impermanent loss (protecting both sides is never feasible) but may have fewer tokens after withdrawal. So, somebody has to repay them.

And here is where two crucial questions arise: who pays and how?

As we have seen previously, the protocol shall not take this risk. Sure, it may be okay to provide a protocol-wide insurance fund, but it has to be limited. If things go awry, the protocol will pay as much as it can without sacrificing itself and hurting the community.

Thus, another side of the pool, the liquidity seeker, shall cover IL. The only question that remains is how to do it.

The simplest thing would be to pay in whatever tokens we have on the other side of the pool. Unfortunately, it is not convenient for LPs and will cause a race between them to sell before others do it.

The second idea is to swap on the market. But we have already established it requires unpredictable external liquidity and has slippage-related issues.

Mint more $META? Forget it.

Maybe we can kindly ask the liquidity seeker to cover IL in native tokens? Surprisingly, this is what Cometa does.

But with a caveat: if the vault finishes and there is a shortage of ALGO in the pool, there will be a few days unlock period. During the period, the LS should pay for IL to unlock their tokens.

It is the primary IL protection mechanism of Cometa LaaS vaults, and we believe it will be sufficient in roughly 95% of cases (we did our math but did not draw convenient charts for you yet!).

But what about the remaining 5%?

Auctions and OTC deals

Fortunately, a solution for such cases was invented long ago and tested by numerous crypto protocols. It is called collateral auction, the same as Maker DAO and many others used for liquidations.

Cometa’s uses a dutch auction: the price will start with a slight premium and slowly decrease. The auction will be finished when all tokens are sold or enough money is raised to cover 100% of the impermanent loss. All remaining tokens (if any) will be sent back to the LS.

Auctions are optimal according to the game theory. They allow maximal efficiency, exactly how we like. However, there is one possible case where it can be an imperfect solution: the corner case when the LS does not want to give ownership of tokens and is happy to cover IL but doesn’t have the technical ability to do it.

For example, LS may have a lot of ALGO, much more than needed to cover IL locked in some protocol with unlocking time in one day.

In TradFi, it would be sensible to do an OTC deal in such a case, something like the following: third-party A agrees to pay for IL on behalf of the LS and then exchange tokens to LS’s ALGO when LS can do it.

Great, but we are doing DeFi here. Is it possible to do it while keeping the protocol trustless? Fortunately, it is!

Before the start of the auction, LS has an option to provide some specific wallet address with a priority right to buy tokens with a particular price P.

Then, the wallet will be able to buy tokens at any point starting immediately (before the auction starts) and ending when the auction ends, with the only condition that it should cover all remaining impermanent loss exactly, i.e

amount * price = IL — raised_on_auction

All remaining tokens will be returned to the LS, and then parties would be able to proceed however they agreed in private.

Insurance

Unlike some other protocols, Cometa does not claim to be risk-free for liquidity providers. Indeed, it would be silly to do, the risk always exists, and somebody has to pay if it materializes.

In the case of Cometa, liquidity seekers pay, but we cannot always rely on it. They can be insolvent or simply unwilling to pay.

Of course, collateral will be sold at the auction, but we cannot rely on it either: in case of tragic events, it can go to zero in one tick.

To mitigate even long-tailed risks (mostly related to hacks or rug-pulls), Cometa provides five levels of safe nets:

1. There will be a verification process with extensive due diligence. The core Cometa team will initially verify each potential liquidity seeker before the listing.
2. Vault-specific insurance. Anybody can act as an insurer by staking ALGO in a particular vault. Those ALGO will not go to the liquidity pool but will be used to cover IL in extreme cases. Of course, local insurance providers will be compensated.
3. Protocol-wide insurance fund. X% of protocol revenue will be directed to the insurance fund. It can cover up to Y% of losses in each vault. The DAO governance will decide X and Y.

Did you notice that five levels were mentioned, but only three items were given? The reason is that vault-specific insurance is three safe nets that use the same mechanism but, in some sense, are very different:

1. Insurance from the liquidity seeker, on top of their collateral.
2. Insurance from Cometa, provided if due diligence shows impeccable results.
3. Insurance from independent participants, who can perform their own risk analysis.

Detailed coverage of insurance mechanisms is out of the scope of this article but will be published later.

Conclusion

To summarize, Cometa’s Impermanent Loss Protection:

• Features swapless execution;
• Does not resort to token printing;
• Does not automatically put risk on the protocol;
• Provides the ability to pay for IL OTC without sacrificing trustlessness;
• Features fine-grained risk management via insurance;
• Maximizes capital efficiency.

According to this, we believe that Cometa is not only the first LaaS on Algorand but a unique LaaS solution that is very competitive in the broader DeFi landscape. To say the least! 😉

Don’t miss the news!

Website: https://cometa.farm/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CometaHub
Discord: https://discord.gg/eGnqpjkxnC

COMETA

Cometa is a sustainable liquidity aggregator on Algorand, that combines Liquidity-as-a-Service with DAO governance and user-focused features such as auto-compounding and ZAP.

Cometa helps projects to effectively deepen the liquidity of their tokens as well as introduce stable investment tools for DeFi users. It differentiates with a focus on composability, tokenomics, algorithmic risk optimization, and convenient UX. Building on Algorand enables Cometa to have ultra-low transaction fees, greater capital efficiency, and fast transactions.

This article aims to bring a closer look at Cometa's features and how they help the Algorand ecosystem to grow.

Beyond Liquidity Mining

Having sufficient liquidity is paramount to any financial asset. Especially in crypto, where everything is tokenized and highly tradable.

It is easy to provide liquidity but not necessarily profitable. In fact, a recent Bancor study has shown that roughly half of the liquidity providers at Uniswap underperformed a basic buy-and-hold strategy.

Historically, Liquidity Mining was the go-to solution to incentive LPs. However, it is not really sustainable. Another study shows that at least 42% of LPs withdraw liquidity in less than 24 hours.

The DeFi ecosystem deserves something better.

Algorand has 150+ projects, including 50 DeFi & 5 native stablecoins, they all need liquidity. To help the Algorand ecosystem grow we have to find a new way to attract liquidity and users.

Introducing Liquidity-as-a-Service

Liquidity-as-a-service is a decentralized protocol that restructures incentives and risks to improve liquidity across DeFi, which is strictly better than traditional yield farming.

It allows projects to acquire desired liquidity much cheaper and, at the same time, affords a more attractive risk/reward profile to liquidity providers by doubling trading fees and protecting them from impermanent loss.

Traditional liquidity provision exposes LP to two assets. At the same time, Liquidity providers profit from trading fees and suffer from impermanent loss.

The mix of those four factors makes liquidity provision quite unpredictable. Therefore, projects have to incentivize pools with a lot of tokens in liquidity mining to compensate for this risk.

LaaS makes it much simpler: projects seeking liquidity provide their tokens from one side, and users provide the other. All trading fees are distributed to users while the project eats the impermanent loss.

LaaS not only provides much less risk for liquidity providers but also restructures their incentives: participants focus their attention on pools that they predict will generate the largest amount of trading fees. Luckily, such pools are precisely the ones that need liquidity the most.

Therefore, LaaS decouples all components of liquidity provision and repackages it in a way that reduces risks for liquidity providers and restructures their incentives which leads to increased capital efficiency and ultimately makes liquidity acquisition cheaper.

We will provide additional $META incentives to LaaS pools. Wait, but what is $META token?

Fully Decentralized

Cometa will be fully decentralized and controlled by the DAO. $META will serve as a governance token following the ve-tokenomics model. DAO will decide:

• Which projects to take on board;
• Where will additional $META incentives go;
• Protocol parameters such as fees % and distribution.

To be eligible for the voting process user needs to stake and lock their $META token to obtain $coMETA. $coMETA holders can vote and also they receive a part of all the fees collected by the protocol in $META tokens.

Cometa Token in a Nutshell

$META has three main uses: voting, staking, and boosting. They will require you to vote lock your $META to acquire $coMETA.

Staking (protocol fees)

$META can be staked (locked) to receive fees from the Cometa protocol. Community-led proposals will manage the exact percent of the fees that will be distributed to the community. Collected will be distributed to $coMETA holders in $META tokens.

Boosting

One of the main benefits of $META is the ability to boost your rewards on provided liquidity. Vote locking $META allows you to earn a boost of up to 2.5x on the liquidity you are providing on Cometa.

Voting

Once $META holders vote-lock their $coMETA, they can start voting on various DAO proposals and pool parameters.

The total supply of 10M $META tokens is distributed as such:

• 40% to liquidity providers
• 25% to DAO treasury (6-month lock + 6-month vesting)
• 18% to the team for development purposes (1-year lock + 1-year vesting)
• 10% to the investors (1-year lock + 1-year vesting)
• 3% to Metapunks holders (6-months vesting)
• 2% to advisors (1-year lock + 1-year vesting)
• 2% to initial token sale

For starters… Yield Farming

LaaS is a complicated system and smart contracts are still under development. We need some time to make sure that everything will work like a clock.

Therefore, we decided to start with the basics. We’re launching yield farming as a stage 0 of Cometa protocol, which will be followed by LaaS in Q3.

Even if yield farming isn’t the best model, Cometa will still be able to benefit its users by focusing on the most convenient UI with important quality-of-life features.

Auto-compounding

All the rewards in pools will be automatically reinvested into the pools to achieve the best APY.

Algorand has almost zero fees, and because of that your 100% APR will become 172% APY with our auto-compounding feature.

ZAP

Users will be able to add liquidity to any liquidity pool with just one click.
Provide any token you want, and it will be converted to the desired LP tokens.

Our algorithms will find the best swap rates through Algorand DEXes, so you don’t have to compare prices and slippage yourself.

Locked Pools

Cometa aims to make liquidity more sustainable. Thus, we want users to provide liquidity as long as possible. That’s why we will provide additional incentives to users that are ready to lock their tokens for some period of time (week, month).

Projects with the most volatile tokens will benefit a lot from this feature gaining much more sustainable liquidity.

Liquidity can be withdrawn earlier than the lock period, but all the rewards will be gone.

Our nearest plans

Yield Farming

• We have a beta version of YF running on the testnet. Everybody is welcome to test, feedback is really much appreciated!
• Public sale of Cometa token, exact date TBA.
• The mainnet version of YF is to be released at the beginning of July.

LaaS

• We are going to launch testnet version by the end of July.
• Mainnet will be released approximately in September. Contact us to be one of the first projects to have sustainable and more profitable liquidity on the Algorand.

$META airdrops

Metapunks are one of the biggest NFT communities on Algorand. We appreciate the support of our holders very much, they energized us to build something really cool!

That’s why we will airdrop 3% of the whole $META supply to our holders.

There will be 12 airdrops during the next 6 months, every two weeks, on Sunday at 2pm UTC, starting from 1st of May.

• The first 3 airdrops went well and 75k of $META were distributed.
• The next one will take place on 12th of June, be ready!
• Only Metapunks that are in the wallet at the moment of the snapshot are eligible for the drop!

That’s Cometa.

Welcome on board!

Join us on Twitter and Discord. If you’re interested in becoming our liquidity seeker partner, please drop us an email.

It has been a long time since the last update, so now it is time to cover what happened in the last ~5 weeks.

Highlights

• After market analysis and careful consideration, we reduced the total supply from 10000 to 3000. Our community positively received the decision.
• We finally sold everything we planned to sell on our main initial sale, around 2500 metapunks!
• We participated in the Algorand INNOVATE hackathon. There were 2500 teams and only five prizes. Nevertheless, we managed to get one. I am happy to announce that our NFT sales system won the Digital Art track!
• The first metapunks holders meet-up was conducted in the metaverse! It had minor technical issues (which will be fixed) but was very fun! The recording is here (no sound, unfortunately)
• Discord server got more helpful functionality:
  - Verification bot, which lets metapunk owners have a special role. The role grants access to the special holders’ chat.
  - NftExplorer listings/sales/auctions bot provide convenient access to the market right in the Discord.
  - Additionally, the Algorand Tracker bot does what its name implies.
• We minted 10 special metapunks. They are out-of-collection and never sold by us. They can only be won or gifted on special occasions.

Partnership/Collaboration

• We partnered with Alognauts and now have a dedicated channel on their Discord and soon will conduct an AMA session.
• Metapunks participated in the AlgoGems launch event and are now verified as a VIP collection.
• We reached an agreement with Yieldly about adding Metapunks to NFT prize games.
• Metapunks reached an agreement with NFTExplorer about properly supporting Metapunks 1st party volume.

Thanks a lot to our partners!

• Additionally, we are discussing RandGallery listing. We know this is the most popular marketplace in our community, so this is a high priority for us.

Technical

• Issues with previews on AB2 were fixed.
• Our Indexer instance is finally fixed! Email us if you are interested in using it.
• We are working on open-sourcing our sales system to make it possible for other projects to use.

Hiring

• We found a great marketing leader which should have started in the middle of February. Unfortunately, it was postponed to March due to personal circumstances.
• There is one very strong candidate for the smart contract developer position. We are still in discussion but humbly hope that he will be able to start in early March.
• We are still interviewing front-end developers.

Our short term plans

In the next couple of months, we are going to focus on releasing the META token and providing utility for it. We brainstormed a lot and discussed numerous options, ranging from landing platform to buying ownership rights of one existing card game and reimplementing it on-chain. However, we decided to

1. Not trying something overly ambitious for now, but concentrating on something we definitely can deliver and can deliver fast.
2. Not moving too far away from the roadmap, we do not want to be the team that constantly changes its plans out of the blue.

Therefore, we have the following medium-term priorities:

• Finalize META tokenomics and publish it.
• Implement NFT staking or similar mechanics.
• Implement Yield Farming to boost the initial liquidity of META and provide a valuable service for other Algorand projects.

Additionally, we have one more short-term priority. This is based on a simple game/DeFi product that was popular on Ethereum a long time ago but has been mostly forgotten now. We want it to be a surprise, so I will not share more details. All I can say is it is going to be released in February!

The Problem

There were two options for selling the NFT collection on Algorand.

1. Publish the collection on the marketplace. The disadvantage of this option is that the buyer can see random NFT’s ASA ID before paying. Therefore, it is possible to cheat and decline less rare NFTs, getting an unfair advantage.
2. Collect applications from participants and, after a while, arrange a lottery. The disadvantages of this approach are that participants need to wait for a purchase, usually at least a day.

Also, both options allow you to buy only one NFT. This is not convenient for large generative collections such as Metapunks because it takes hours to buy a significant amount (e.g., 50).

Our infrastructure allows buyers to buy from 1 to 8* NFTs in 2 minutes or less.

*The maximum number of NFTs for purchase is limited due to Algorand’s restriction of handling at most eight different ASAs in one smart contract.

The Solution

We developed a custom solution that doesn’t have those problems. As far as we know, this is the first such solution on Algorand. Additionally, our solution provides support for the whitelist sale.

Our solution has already worked in production, and around 1000 people have already used it. You can check it in acton here.

The rest of the article contains a technical description of our solution and proposes simplifications to make it easily reusable.

We have developed a code generator that generates 8 different smart contracts in Reach (one contract to buy 1 NFT, one contract to buy 2 NFTs, etc.) for the NFTs’ purchase, a backend application that sends NFTs into a smart contract, and a frontend application in React for the user purchase interface.

The full infrastructure includes:

• the code generator leveraging mustache.js, which generates a set of 8 smart contracts in Reach language
• The fastAPI backend written in Python allows checking if a user is whitelisted and getting user NFTs limit, and sending NFTs into a smart contract.
• 8 RPC servers (1 per smart contract) connect Python backend and smart contracts. RPC servers are dockerized and managed by Supervisor.
• Algorand node (Algod).
• a React frontend application provides the user purchase interface and Metapunks 3D and AR viewers using <model-viewer>.

Technical details about the purchase flow are described below.

Preparation

The first step is to shuffle the asset IDs sequence. We digitally signed random orders (more than one because each minting wallet has a custom order) and published the signatures to prove that our backend does not mess with the order.

User interaction

1. For the whitelist sale, we check the user NFTs limit on the backend using Redis. If the user has no limit, the whitelist sale is disabled.
2. The user sets the desired amount of NFTs.
3. The frontend sends the deploy smart contract transaction to the user wallet and asks the user to make a payment.
4. After the payment is confirmed, the frontend asks the backend to send NFTs to the deployed smart contract.
5. When the smart contract receives NFTs, it asks the user to opt-in.
6. After opt-in is done, the smart contract sends NFTs to the user wallet.
7. Finally, the smart contract asks the backend to confirm the delete application transaction. Along with app delete, the backend receives the payment.

Corner cases

• If the user doesn’t send the payment, nothing happens.
• If the user sends payment, but the backend doesn’t send NFTs (e.g., request did not arrive at the backend for some reason), then smart-contract will timeout, and the user will claim ALGO back using the contract’s application id.
• If the user opt-in but doesn’t receive NFTs (did not confirm the last transaction), then similar to the previous case, there is no timeout, and the user can claim NFTs instead of ALGO.

Background/History

We wanted to make one smart contract with built-in random and all logic. We had a pretty complicated smart contract for this. Unfortunately, we ran into some Reach limits about handling ASAs and into Algorand limitation of at most 700 operations per transaction.

We probably could somehow make it less than 700 operations but couldn’t do anything about the first limitation.

Even if we could solve this, we would probably run into Algorand’s limitation of having at most 8 ASAs per smart contract.

Therefore we had to rewrite it from scratch and make “lootboxes” with at most 8 ASAs per contract and have it deployed by a buyer (because of the limitation of at most 10 contracts for the wallet).

Downsides

Our system has some downsides. For example:

• Having a backend is rather redundant and much more complicated. About being complicated: we are running 8 RPC servers, 1 per lootbox, because we have backend written in Python, and the Reach’s way to handle it has RPC servers, and each RPC server only handles one contract. Also, there are 8 similar smart contracts, so we used code generation for it.
• The final order is not perfect; there are some gaps, mostly due to the backend missing something. Sometimes it was caused by an Indexer issue, sometimes because it did not receive a request for whatever reason, sometimes it struggled with the load.
• Backend can theoretically send fake NFTs if it wants. However, this is a tricky problem: how can a user ensure that he buys something authentic while not knowing what exactly he buys? The system is engineered so it cannot happen, and of course, it never happened.

Simplification for Improved Reusability

We learned a lot from this experience. A more straightforward (and easily reusable) system can be:

1. Having a lot of ALGO addresses to deploy a lot of smart contracts will be a bit simpler for buyers. [note: hopefully 10 contracts per wallet limit will be lifted soon]
2. Still have 8 smart contracts, each for a particular amount of NFTs.
3. Each smart contract will be deployed by the NFT collection creator from one of the wallets from (1) and will have secret information about particular n ASAs it can accept (easy to do in Reach).
4. Then, the buyer pays and waits until the NFT creator fills the lootbox. It should have a much longer than 1-minute timeout, so the creator will fill it semi-manually by running a script, so there will be no need for having a backend.

The downside of this system is that all NFTs will be separated into lootboxes of 1, 2, …, 8. So it may happen that all lootboxes with 1 NFT will be sold, and you will not be able to get 1 anymore, only more. Also, users will have to wait until lootboxes are filled (it should not be too long, though).

However, we believe that the benefits of our system are more than enough to make it worthwhile for other large generated NFT collections on Algorand soon. We plan to open-source our system after some clean-up.

Use AR Metapunk and it in the real world

1. Open Chrome browser on Android or Safari on iOS.
   Notice that mobile MyAlgo doesn’t work with incognito mode.
2. Go to app.metapunks.world mobile website, connect your wallet, and click “show metapunks”.
3. Click the “TRY AR” button near the 3D model.

Use the “Download model” button to download 3D model in GLB format.
!! Please, change the file extension to .glb

Create a QR code and show friends your Metapunk

1. Go to the MyWebAR app to create the QR code.

Make your Metapunk DANCING

1. Convert GLB model to FBX or OBJ using an online converter or blender (preferable).
2. Go to mixamo to create an animation.

Make a party in Mozilla Hub

1. Go to Mozilla Hub and upload your GLB model there.
2. Here is the Mozilla Hub instruction on how to upload your own model.
3. If your avatar is too big, you can use an online GLB converter to make it smaller. For example, this one.

Show Metapunks in VR Gallery

1. Go to VR Gallery
2. Connect your wallet and click “Gallery”

Create a scene with Metapunk in Decentraland

1. Go to Decentraland and create a new scene.
2. Import your GLM model, save the scene and share it with friends.

The following options require the VRM model.
We are going to make a VRM converter, but now you can convert GLB to VRM by yourself.
Here is an instruction.

Use your VRM Metapunk as avatar in Webaverse

1. Go to Webaverse and drag-n-drop VRM model there.
2. Press E to use this model as your avatar
3. See the full instruction on the Webaverse interface.

Import VRM Metapunk to VRoid chat and use it in 100+ apps

1. Go to VRoid Hub and submit your VRM model.
2. Now you can use the model in different games e.g. a fighting game.

Use VRM Metapunk in VR Chat

• VR Chat
• Here is the VRChair instruction on how to create the avatar.
• TBD

Have fun!
Please, tell us if you find other integration options.