Today, we’re excited to announce that leading DeFi trading desks and liquidity providers, collectively having managed trillions in on-chain volume, will be joining Skate’s Execution Network.

Tokka Labs, Selini, Flowdesk, Herring Global and Caladan.

DeFi innovations often remain confined to a single chain, limiting their addressable market to whichever user base exists on that chain. At Skate, we believe these breakthroughs deserve universal reach — spanning multiple VMs, with frictionless settlement and deep liquidity. Building on our recent integration with Polymarket, which settled $7.5 million in one week across Eclipse (SolanaVM) and TON, we’re now prepared to scale to more capital intensive usecases like yield tokenization, cross-VM DeFi protocols, RWA products and beyond.

Skate’s Execution Network: Your Cross-VM Clearinghouse for Next-Gen DeFi

Skate’s Execution Network is a universal settlement layer that eliminates the complexities of bridging and multi-chain interaction. It’s an integral part of our tech stack that will help us achieve our vision of connecting all VMs.

Instead of forcing users to bridge or manage multiple wallets, Skate captures “intents” on any chain — be it EVMs, SolanaVMs, Move, SUI, or TON — and routes them to professional Executors who finalize transactions behind the scenes. This gasless, slash-protected model, soon enhanced by Eigenlayer restaking, ensures trust and security at scale.

Whether it’s yield tokenization or advanced DeFi trades, a single click in Skate’s ecosystem can tap liquidity and settle across multiple VMs without any friction.

Polymarket on altVMs: Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Our integration with Polymarket demonstrated Skate’s potential:

• $7.5 Million Settled mostly in a single week — showcasing how cross-VM trading can attract robust volume.
• No Bridging Hassles — Traders on TON and Eclipse had zero need for extra wallets or asset migration.
• Minimal Inventory, Big Impact — The Polymarket settlements were handled by one single internal executor, operating with an average inventory of just $60k. Now imagine the addressable market and liquidity thresholds when major trading desks contribute their capital.

This is only a sliver of what’s possible when DeFi can move seamlessly across chains spanning every VM like EVM, SVM, TonVM, MoveVM, and more — free of bridging complexity.

The Potential of RWAs: Yield Tokenization & Beyond

According to RWA Market Metrics from the Tokenized Asset Coalition (TAC) report for 2024:

• Projected $30 Trillion by 2034, driven by broader regulatory clarity, institutional acceptance, and technological improvements.
• $186 Billion in tokenized assets overall, up 32% YTD; growth climbs to 53% if stablecoins are excluded.
• Dominance of Stablecoins: Represent 91.4% of the market share, with a cap of $174.6 billion.
• Private Credit: Over $8.93 billion (+40% YTD).
• Short-Term US Government Debt: Soared to $2.15 billion (+179% YTD), a strong sign of institutional appetite.

Despite these promising figures, most RWA activity exists primarily on EVM-based chains today. Skate is determined to expand those benefits to altVMs, opening up a vast global market for RWA and yield tokenization opportunities.

Why It Matters

• LSD Yields & Tokenized Strategies: Protocols offering LSD vaults or stablecoin yields can now extend effortlessly to altVM ecosystems like Solana, TON, Sui, Eclipse, and Movement without forcing users to manage extra wallets or bridging steps.
• Advanced DeFi Apps: From sophisticated yield-aggregation to undercollateralized lending, cross-chain synergy becomes a single-click operation, expanding the total addressable market for each application.

Scaling to Trillions

Now that top trading desks — collectively responsible for billions in liquidity — are joining Skate’s Execution Network, we expect:

• Deep Cross-Chain Execution: Large swaps, hedging, and complex strategies settled swiftly and economically.
• Arbitrage & Efficiency: Major desks continuously rebalance and compete across VMs, leading to tighter spreads and competitive markets.
• Professionalized On-Chain Markets: Institutional-grade capital meets slash-based AVS (Active Validator Set) security, raising overall confidence and reliability.

With cross-VM DeFi rapidly advancing, we see trillions in potential future activity as:

• Institutional Players find a slash-secured environment ideal for operating advanced strategies at scale.
• Tokenized Assets (RWA, stablecoins, LSD yields) proliferate across multiple chains and beyond the EVM.
• DeFi Protocols unify their user bases, bridging liquidity across diverse VMs through Skate’s single pipeline.

Final Word

From a single $7.5 million Polymarket pilot — accomplished with a modest $60k executor inventory — to a vision of trillion-dollar multi-VM markets, Skate is clearing the path for boundary-free DeFi. With major trading desks joining our Execution Network, yield deposits, tokenized asset strategies, and cross-chain swaps can all be done in one click, minus bridging complications.

Keep an eye out for our upcoming spot liquidity innovation, which promises to push our frictionless model to new heights. If you’re a protocol, liquidity provider, or institution ready to shape the next era of multi-chain finance, we invite you to join Skate’s Execution Network — the gateway to unstoppable DeFi growth.

Today, we stand at the dawn of the altVM era. Virtual Machines like the SVM and MoveVM are taking market share away from the EVM, offering faster performance, innovative architectures, and improved security.

That’s not to say that the EVM is fading. The EVM remains the cornerstone of blockchain applications, with the deepest liquidity and the most mature ecosystem — a position it will likely hold for some time.

We believe the future is one where both EVM and altVM ecosystems can thrive together — not in competition, but in collaboration.

But the multi-VM future comes with a cost — greater fragmentation for users, apps, developers, and liquidity. Each new VM brings its own set of tools, wallets, explorers, and architectures, creating onboarding issues and increasingly complex cross-chain experiences.

The answer isn’t more bridges. We need new interoperability solutions designed to connect the fragmented altVM future.

That’s where Skate comes in.

Skate’s Two Phased Approach to Connecting all VMs

Skate introduces the new concept of app level interoperability across all VMs. By eliminating the need for bridging, Skate enables users to access apps from other chains and VMs while staying on their favorite chains with familiar wallets.

At the same time, developers gain the ability to scale applications across all VMs without sacrificing usability or liquidity.

By unifying the strengths of each VM, we can create a seamless, interconnected ecosystem where chains, apps, and users are no longer fragmented but empowered to scale collectively.

Skate is adopting a two-phased approach to bring this vision to life.

1. In Phase 1, we want to enable users across all altVMs to seamlessly access bluechip EVM Apps.
2. In Phase 2, we introduce Stateless apps that exist on every chain and VM simultaneously, with shared liquidity and userbase.

At its core, Skate isn’t just about connecting VMs — it’s about building a future where blockchain thrives as a single, cohesive system.

Phase 1: Enabling EVM Bluechips to AltVMs

In Phase 1, Skate focuses on bridging the gap between the established EVM app ecosystem and altVM chains like Solana, Eclipse, Movement, SOON, TON and more.

Users on altVM chains do not have access to the mature app ecosystem of the EVM, and if they want to, they need to navigate through clunky cross-chain interfaces. Developers of EVM apps wanting to move to altVMs need to completely rewrite their apps in new languages.

Skate eliminates these barrier and enables users on altVMs to natively interact with bluechip EVM applications — without bridging or using new wallets — we’re making cross-VM experiences intuitive and effortless.

The goal is to accelerate the distribution of established EVM dApps across untapped ecosystem opportunities, harnessing and amplifying existing network effects for maximum impact.

We’ve already demonstrated this with Polymarket, the top prediction market platform that currently only exists on Polygon (EVM). Powered by Skate, Polymarket is now live on Eclipse (SVM) and TON (TonVM), delivering over $6M in trading volume across our altVM deployments in a 2 short months (with the bulk coming over the past 2 weeks).

And this is just the beginning.

We are currently working on enable access to many more bluechip EVM apps for altVM users.

Phase 2: Stateless Apps for a Unified Blockchain Future

Building on Phase 1, Skate’s Phase 2 introduces a revolutionary concept: Stateless Apps.

Stateless Apps maintain a single, unified state across all blockchains and VMs, eliminating the need for separate deployments. Instead of siloed instances on each chain, a Stateless App exists on every chain and VM simultaneously, with shared liquidity and userbase.

This is a major paradigm shift away from the current model where every new chain forks the same building blocks (AMMs, Lending Markets etc.).

At the heart of this vision is Skate’s upcoming flagship Stateless AMM (Automated Market Maker).

Phase 2: Skate AMM — Single Liquidity Curve Across all VMs

This AMM features a shared liquidity pool that spans all chains and VMs, accessible to users from any chain natively. It continuously rebalances liquidity across chains, addressing critical challenges like Loss Versus Rebalancing (LVR) and adverse selection, while ensuring liquidity providers maximize their returns.

But the Stateless AMM is just the beginning. There are many great teams developing innovative use cases with this stateless architecture. Right from day one, an app can go live on SVM, EVM, MoveVM and TON leveraging their user bases and distribution channels.

By fostering an ecosystem of Stateless Apps, we’re creating a truly interoperable blockchain environment — one where fragmentation is a thing of the past, and applications thrive across all chains and VMs.

The Future with Skate

Skate isn’t just an interoperability solution. We are building infrastructure that will be critical for the altVM future. By solving the challenges of fragmentation and cross-chain complexity, we’re unlocking new possibilities for developers, users, and the entire blockchain ecosystem.

Join us as we redefine interoperability. Together, we’ll take applications to altVMs and beyond.

As 2024 winds down, we wanted to take some time to reflect on the year and summarize what we have been building at Skate over the past year.

Our mission has always been clear: Connect all VMs. Everyday, we move closer to our goal of Stateless Apps that run on all VMs and chains with one shared state.

Here’s a look at some of the highlights of the year and a sneak peek at 2025.

The Genesis of Skate: April 2024

In 2023, our journey began with building Range Protocol, an on-chain asset management platform that we rapidly scaled to a TVL of $35M across more than 15 EVM chains. However, this expansion exposed us to the widespread issue of application fragmentation — every new chain integration required more development resources, additional liquidity, and further audits.

These escalating demands quickly proved unsustainable. At the same time, new alternative VM chains started emerging and we found ourselves sidelined alongside many other EVM apps.

In April 2024, we took action by launching Skate, a dedicated infrastructure layer created specifically to tackle the issue of application fragmentation — a challenge we had become all too familiar with.

Concurrently, Range was rebranded to SkateFi, and repositioned to align with and advance our broader vision: to eliminate liquidity fragmentation from a DeFi perspective.

SkatePark Opens: April 2024

Shortly after announcing the launch of Skate, we launched the “SkatePark”: a place for users to interact with the Skate ecosystem of apps and earn Ollies points. Our first campaign on Skatepark received tremendous interest as 814000 users participated to mint a Skate Rebel NFT on our Nollie Testnet.

Skateboard Workshop on Nollie Testnet: August 2024

Our first major milestone came with the launch of our Testnet app, “Skateboard Workshop.” This app allowed users to mint and assemble NFTs seamlessly across 20 chains and multiple VMs including the EVM, SVM, and TonVM. Demonstrating true composability, users could mint different parts of their skateboard NFT on different VM chains — such as Solana, TON, and Base — and then assemble a complete NFT using parts from each chain.

The app was a resounding success, with nearly 6 million parts minted across 20+ chains, illustrating the potential of operating an application simultaneously across multiple VMs. This not only stress-tested our infrastructure but also highlighted the improved UX of apps on Skate.

Mainnet Live: October 2024

In October 2024, we launched Skate Mainnet, another significant milestone in our mission to solve application fragmentation across all VMs and chains. Mainnet launch included the following:

1. Skate Hub Chain live on Mainnet
2. Preconfirmation AVS live on EigenLayer Mainnet
3. Polymarket App live on TON Mainnet

Our Skate Hub Chain is an Ethereum L2 that serves as the central processing unit of all the apps the Skate enables on other altVMs. The Hub Chain maintains the unified state and core logic across all connected chains and VMs. The Skate Hub Chain was launched with the help of Alt Layer and with the dual data availability strengths of Avail and EigenDA.

Our preconfirmation AVS went live on the Eigenlayer Mainnet and was developed with Othentic’s tech stack. This component verifies all outgoing task data, ensuring secure and fast finality for operations across Skate’s platform.

Polymarket on TON: October 2024

In just under 6 months, we had our first Eureka moment. Polymarket was one of the breakout apps of 2024 leading up to the US elections. However, Polymarket is an EVM app that only exists on Polygon.

In 2024 TON and Telegram mini-apps also saw a huge influx of activity as Telegram served as a superior onboarding experience for a new generation of crypto users. Leading up to the US elections, we wanted to enable the millions of users on TON to be able to bet on Polymarket

In October, we announced that we had successfully brought access to Polymarket, an EVM app on Polygon, to the TonVM through Skate’s infrastructure. This meant that users on TON could use our Telegram Miniapp and directly place bets on Polygon prediction markets on Polygon. All without bridging. Truly seamless.

Since launch, we have have seen over 8000 orders totalling $1,162,387 USD in volume on TON.

Polymarket enabled on SVM on Eclipse: December 2024

Shortly after the success of enabling Polymarket on TON, we quickly set our sights on the SVM. Eclipse, Ethereum’s first SVM L2 was quickly gaining traction and we decided to bring access to Polymarket to users on Eclipse.

Since launching 3 weeks ago, we have seen over 14.6k trades with around $782.9k USD in volume.

Much more to come on Eclipse and the SVM soon.

What’s next for 2025?

The Skate team is incredibly optimistic about the potential of altVMs going into 2025. The rise of SolanaVM, TonVM, MoveVM and others is bringing a new multichain primitive but at the cost of increased fragmentation for users and developers alike.

At Skate, we are focused on ending application fragmentation and connecting all VMs via a 2-phased approach.

Phase 1 involves enabling access to mature EVM apps to users on altVM chains like Solana, TON, Eclipse and Movement. Polymarket on the TonVM and SVM is only the beginning. Look forward to many more of your favorite bluechip apps being powered by Skate in 2025.

Phase 2 is the endgame. Apps with one single state across every chain, and every VM. We call these stateless apps. And there’s one in particular that we are already working on to redefine DeFi.

Introducing the Skate AMM

Our upcoming flagship product, Skate AMM, is designed to elevate the native user experience across chains and VMs by introducing a revolutionary pricing and liquidity model.

Built on Skate’s core design principles of composability and single application state, the Skate AMM leverages an aggregated bitmap that delivers a single, unified price across all connected chains. This pricing mechanism mirrors the proven structure of a Uniswap V3 pool, yet extends beyond single-chain limitations to provide a truly cross-chain liquidity experience.

Closing

Looking forward to 2025, we are excited to expand the number of bluechip EVM apps we bring to altVMs and continue on our mission to connect all VMs. At the same time, we will be working tirelessly to bring Phase 2 of our vision to life starting with our flagship Skate AMM app.

We wanted to extend a warm thank you to everyone in our community who has supported us. We can’t wait to show you what we have in store for next year. Furthermore, we wanted to thank all our partners for their ongoing support and engagement. Especially: @eigenlayer @alt_layer @AvailProject @eigen_da @PythNetwork @0xOthentic @0xmantle @EclipseFND @vertex_protocol and many others.

2025 will be the year of Skate.

We at Skate are super excited to announce that we are live with our first Stateless App allowing seamless interactions across 20+ chains as if it were a single app with one unified state. This release marks a significant shift from the traditional, siloed applications approach and is a major step towards eliminating application fragmentation.

A Paradigm Shift in Web3 Applications

Traditionally, Web3 apps have operated under a monolithic structure, confined to a single blockchain. Successful applications often find themselves forked onto other chains, resulting in multiple isolated states. Skate’s Stateless App model is set to revolutionize this approach by enabling a consistent, unified application state across both EVM and non-EVM blockchain environments. Similar to traditional computing, where you can run the same app on an Android smartphone, on an iPhone, on a laptop browser, even though they are different devices. Skate is bringing this to Web3.

Introducing the Skateboard Workshop

The first pilot stateless app is a Skateboard Workshop where you can assemble your own skateboard across 20+ chains.

You can access the app here: https://park.skatechain.org/en/nft

Users can participate in crafting their unique Skateboard NFT by collecting three essential components: the truck, wheel, and deck. These parts can be minted across any of the supported chains, reflecting the true stateless nature of the app. Once all parts are collected, users can assemble their skateboard on the chain where the ‘deck’ part was minted.

The stateless app has two primary user interactions.

1. Minting Components: Users express their intent to mint one of the skateboard parts, receiving a random component.
2. Assembling the Skateboard: Upon gathering all three parts, users can assemble their complete skateboard.

Each assembled skateboard will also earn a user 250 Ollies. To be eligible for Ollies, please complete the task here as well: https://app.galxe.com/quest/Skate/GChsetvwYa

Users suspected of mass sybilling will have their Ollies deducted.

Stateless App Roadmap

The vision for stateless apps is to run across all EVM and non-EVM chains and we are rolling out this pilot in 3 phases:

• Phase 1: Integration with over 20 EVM-compatible chains. (Completed)
• Phase 2: Expansion to include TON.
• Phase 3: Extension to Solana and Eclipse.

The team is incredibly excited as the launch of this stateless app represents a fundamental shift in how applications can operate in an increasingly fragmented blockchain world. We invite developers and users alike to join us in this exciting journey, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in blockchain technology. Stay tuned as we continue to expand and enhance the stateless app experience, bringing more chains and capabilities into our ecosystem.

“Skate empowers apps to run on 1000s of chains with one state.”

Introduction

We are beyond excited to announce Range Protocol’s expansion to Skate, the universal application layer that empowers applications to run on 1000s of chains with a single state. Any new blockchain can easily connect to Skate, while both users and developers only need to interact with Skate alone to instantly access each network with unified liquidity.

Scaling solutions such as rollups have been rapidly expanding, but come with their own set of problems that include poor user experiences, redundant development efforts, liquidity fragmentation, and toxic liquidity flow.

These problems are merely symptoms of a larger issue: Application Fragmentation. In today’s multi-chain landscape, applications have the costly, time-consuming need to deploy, customize, and maintain their projects across an ever-increasing number of chains. Each deployment on each chain represents a fragmented state and for every new deployment, it only further fragments the application’s state.

Skate provides an easy means for new applications to deploy on any network, whilst connecting all existing liquidity through a hub-and-spoke architecture. This relies upon transactions being matched and executed by users who sign intents, which are executed in real-time by using EigenLayer for faster finality.

Why are we building Skate?

Application fragmentation is the root cause of many of Web3’s current liquidity challenges, and is the result of applications having differing “states”. State refers to the current status of the system at a particular point in time, such as how many items/assets each user has.

Consider DeFi alone: there are currently 1,200+ decentralized exchanges, 380+ lending protocols, and 220+ derivative protocols, each deployed across up to 30 networks. This means countless states must interact with one another, introducing immense complexity and incoherence. Other areas of Web3 face the same challenges and this is a major inhibitor to growth and ultimately industry adoption.

The issues can be summarized as follows:

• High Development Costs: Deploying and maintaining individual application states on new networks require significant developer resources and liquidity bootstrapping.
• Poor User Experience: In today’s multi-chain environment, there is increasing user friction. Users must bridge assets, learn about different applications on each chain’s ecosystem, and search for the best rates. This is a major barrier to onboard new users on-chain.
• Fragmented Liquidity: Fragmented liquidity on each application state leads to suboptimal pricing and slippage for end users. This is becoming increasingly prevalent as the number of chains are increasing yet not all of them are able to build deep liquidity pools.
• Toxic Flows: The current application fragmentation landscape leads to toxic liquidity flows like arbitrage and MEV. Arbitrageurs and MEV exist solely to extract value from LPs, instead of adding value to the chain.

Applications are intrinsically monolithic, resulting in different states across each network upon which they’re deployed. This means that every new network supported is a significant undertaking, and while existing liquidity and interoperability solutions focus on solving this at the network level, this is insufficient. Applications have differing states, which is the root cause of application fragmentation, and this cannot be addressed through network-level solutions alone.

True interoperability requires networks and applications to work hand-in-hand, and without solving this, every area of Web3 will struggle to scale.

Skate Introduces the Universal Application Scope

Skate introduces the concept of a Universal Application Scope, whereby Skate maintains a global state and application logic accessible to all chains.

We’ve made this possible by creating Skate based on the OP Stack, and using a hub-and-spoke model to connect to other networks. Transactions are executed by having users sign intents, and executed in real-time by relying upon EigenLayer for fast finality.

This means that Skate can monitor information such as pending orders, available liquidity, and an application’s internal mechanics (application logic), across all networks simultaneously. The Skate network itself will only hold application logic, rather than any assets. This means that an application leveraging Skate will have its state and application logic reside on the Skate Chain so that parties known as Executors can monitor for signed intents and help to execute them.

What does this mean?

The result is that applications become multichain, while developers can easily deploy an application of any type, on any network. There is also no need to expose oneself to bridging risks or to keep liquidity fragmented; instead, intents are simply signed and matched.

This has major implications for nearly every area of crypto, with use cases extending across all verticals including DeFi, NFTs, Gaming, SocialFi and more.

Imagine an Ethereum application focused on asset tokenization. With Skate’s innovative technology, the same application can now be extended to support Solana, Arbitrum, and 100s of other chains of differing tech stacks, allowing users to interact with it through intents while maintaining the same state across all blockchains. This means that actions taken by users on Solana will be reflected on other chains and vice versa, providing a seamless and unified experience.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, with Skate, a myriad of possibilities unfolds, as innovative cross-app and cross-chain products emerge.

Who are we?

Our highly skilled team consists of financial engineers and Web3 developers with a wealth of experience in digital asset trading. During our time as Range protocol, we supported 10 blockchain networks, reached $30M+ in TVL, and developed partnerships with leading DeFi networks and applications. We previously completed a seed round led by Hashkey Capital and Nomad Capital including participation from Symbolic Capital, Mantle EcoFund, Comma3 Ventures, Spark Digital Capital, Mirana Ventures, Asymm Ventures.

More recently, Skate has secured the backing of Web3 founders from EigenLayer, Polygon, Manta, Axelar, Biconomy, Pendle, A41, Vertex, Navi, Pontem, Galxe and more.

Over the near term, we’ll be focused heavily on integrating with top-tier partners and applications. We’ll also be sharing more specific information relating to our architecture at a technical level.

What’s next?

In the coming days, we will be launching our first campaign for early supporters of Skate.

Make sure you follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/skate_chain or join our Telegram https://t.me/skatechain to be early!

Stablecoins are crucial in decentralized finance for preserving on-chain value. Leading stablecoins like USDC and USDT, backed by the U.S. Dollar, dominate the market with ~85% share. They invest in yield-bearing assets like Treasuries but keep the yield for themselves.

However, newer models, especially yield-generating stablecoins, are gaining prominence. Among them, stablecoins backed by real-world assets (RWAs) like Treasuries and bonds are significant due to their appeal to institutional investors.

This article will delve into five models of RWA-backed stablecoins experiencing swift growth:

1. Ondo Finance’s USDY
2. Mountain Protocol’s USDM
3. Angle Protocol’s stEUR
4. MakerDAO’s sDAI
5. Verified USD Foundation’s USDV

All of these assets in turn necessitate an efficient manner of handling secondary market liquidity, such as in optimizing liquidity provider yield. By the end of this article, the reader will understand the potential growth in this sector and why Range Protocol has introduced various RWA-focused DeFi vaults to handle such liquidity effectively.

Ondo Finance

Ondo Finance, a prominent player in the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape, has introduced various on-chain assets, including OMMG (tokenized U.S. Money Markets) and OUSG (tokenized U.S. Treasuries). However, it’s their latest offering USDY that has been garnering significant attention.

USDY represents a tokenized Treasury note that is secured by short-term U.S. Treasuries and bank deposits, and yields 5%. A key safeguard is its “bankruptcy remote” feature that ensures the protection of funds even in the unlikely event of a critical service provider like Ondo facing bankruptcy.

The asset is over-collateralized by 3%, with Ondo contributing to a first-loss position. This mechanism acts as a reliable price buffer, mitigating the effects of potential short-term price fluctuations on U.S. Treasuries.

While both non-U.S. individuals and institutional investors have the opportunity to mint and redeem USDY directly, they are required to undergo Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures. Consequently, USDY is exclusively available to whitelisted participants. Nevertheless, it remains accessible for use within various decentralized applications in the DeFi ecosystem which opens up room for innovation.

Ankura Trust plays a pivotal role in this ecosystem, serving as the Verification Agency and Collateral Agent on behalf of USDY holders. This includes the provision of essential daily transparency reports, enhancing the trustworthiness of this innovative stablecoin offering.

Additional information on USDY can be found here.

Mountain Protocol

Mountain Protocol has issued their own stablecoin USDM that offers a 5% APY and is backed by short-term T-Bills. What sets it apart is that they have secured licensing from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, making USDM the world’s first nationally-regulated yield-bearing stablecoin.

They issue rewards through daily rebasing, which works by increasing supply rather than increasing the token’s value. For instance, if a user purchases 100 USDM tokens at $1, after one year, the value remains at $1, but the user now holds 105 tokens. This mechanism resembles the approach taken by Lido’s stETH, and a key reason for this is that it simplifies composability with other DeFi projects and ecosystems.

Like Ondo’s USDY, USDM is exclusively available to non-U.S. investors. They’ve also established bankruptcy-remote accounts as well, ensuring that asset redemption remains feasible even in the unlikely event of bankruptcy. Adding another layer of trust to the ecosystem, Nephos Group offers independent attestation reports, affirming the adequacy of reserves and the adherence to policies and regulations in all transactions involving USDM.

More information on USDM can be found here.

Angle Protocol

It’s first important to know that agEUR is a crypto-collateralized Euro stablecoin issued by Angle Protocol. In September 2023, Angle announced stEUR with the core idea being that they can automatically distribute protocol revenue to agEUR holders. This works by having users stake their agEUR in exchange for a share of protocol revenue. For example, Angle controls BC3M, Backed’s tokenized representation of Euro government bonds.

Anyone may hold agEUR or stEUR, with no deposit or withdrawal fees. Additionally, there is no lock-up period or minimum deposit required, providing flexibility for users. The expected yield is ~4% based on current estimates of their excess revenue, but this may vary depending on factors such as the proportion of agEUR holders that elect to stake for stEUR.

More information on stEUR may be found here.

It’s also worthwhile to note that they do not use an attestor, but provide all collateral data publicly here.

MakerDAO

MakerDAO is the largest collateralized debt position (CDP) protocol in DeFi, enabling users to lock-up cryptocurrency assets as collateral in order to borrow the decentralized stablecoin DAI. They currently have over $8B in TVL, which they in turn invest elsewhere, such as by buying Treasury Bills for yield.

They are currently making ~$165M in annualized revenue, leading to the creation of sDAI, standing for savings DAI. Users may lock up their DAI into MakerDAO’s Daily Savings Rate (DSR) module which allows them to mint sDAI. This is done through Spark Finance, a MakerDAO project.

The DSR yields sDAI holders a 5% APY, and holds a total of $1.6B DAI making it the largest yield-generating stablecoin. Adjusting this APY also acts as a monetary policy lever for MakerDAO. For example, if DAI falls below $1, they can increase the DSR’s yield to incentivize more DAI buyers (and thus more sDAI).

MakerDAO does not have bankruptcy remoteness in itself, but instead relies upon the security of the tokenized Treasury issuers. Huntingdon Valley Bank (HVB) is a debt ceiling participant, receiving a loan in return for their collateralized assets.

It appears that Spark Finance does not have attestations, but all data is publically viewable on-chain and they provide various resources for viewing this data.

Verified USD Foundation

Verified USD Foundation has launched USDV, a yield-generating stablecoin backed by tokenized Treasuries and overnight repurchase agreements.

To begin, it is backed by STBT, representing MatrixPort’s tokenized short-term treasury bills. Moving forward, they will seek to diversify collateral to include other real-world assets that qualify as being fully transparent and verifiable on-chain.

To mint USDV, one must be whitelisted to become a “Minter”, at which point the USDV can be freely circulated throughout DeFi.

It is built using Layer Zero’s OFT Standard, meaning that it’s omnichain and can be deployed across many different networks including Polygon, Optimism, and more.

Proof-of-reserves are attested to by Chainlink.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored five different RWA-backed stablecoins that are arriving on-chain. Their high yields represent an attractive alternative to fiat-backed stablecoins and will attract capital, but require liquidity to be efficiently managed.

This is why Range Protocol has developed systematically managed DeFi vaults for every risk appetite. These include our USDV/USDT vault, USDY/USDC vault, USDM/SDAI vault, and a few of our stEUR vaults. We have plans launch many more focused on other RWA-backed assets in the future!

In turn, Range is becoming the go-to on-chain platform for all DeFi yield, connecting DeFi users with professionals who deploy systematic yield strategies for all cutting-edge assets.

Those interested in exploring our vaults can test them out on our platform here.

In the meantime, we post frequent updates on our Twitter — don’t miss out!

We are thrilled to announce a complete redesign of our Range Protocol app! We’ve worked hard over the past few months to bring our users a much more streamlined, user-friendly experience. Let’s dive into the changes below.

So What’s New?

Seamless Navigation: We have introduced a new dashboard that is both intuitive and efficient. You can now navigate between our different product offerings, chains, and AMMs, all with the click of one button. This makes it much easier to compare and find the right vault for your risk profile.

Highlighted Vaults of the Week: We now are curating some of our very best offerings. Find these vaults pinned to the top of the dashboard with tags describing why they are special.

Track Your Positions: We added a new section called “My Vaults” so users can now see all their held positions in one place.

A Glimpse into the Future of On-Chain Asset Management

Range Protocol is building the Universal On-chain Asset Management Platform, providing the gateway for investors to access trading strategies run by professional traders, in a fully non-custodial, trustless manner.

As more assets migrate to the blockchain, we recognize the growing complexity of DeFi protocols for the average user. Our revamped app is tailored precisely to address this challenge, ensuring that you have seamless access to a diverse range of systematic trading strategies while maintaining complete control of your funds.

This is just the first of the many steps we are taking to become the on-chain asset management platform of the future. Stay tuned for more exciting updates from the Range team on Twitter and try out our new app at: https://app.rangeprotocol.com

Aave’s decentralized stablecoin GHO is a game-changer, and Range Protocol is here to help you maximize your yield with it. But first, let’s understand exactly what GHO is?

What is GHO?

GHO is an overcollateralized decentralized dollar-pegged stablecoin native to the Aave Protocol. Overcollateralized assets like GHO maintain reserves in several other crypto assets, with the reserve’s value exceeding the stablecoin’s value in circulation to account for market volatility. Given Aave’s status as a leading decentralized lending protocol spanning multiple blockchain networks, GHO is strategically positioned to establish itself as a widely adopted stablecoin within all of DeFi.

Range’s GHO-USDC Vault

Range has launched its GHO-USDC Vault that aims to maximize GHO-USDC trading fee yield while also bootstrapping deeper liquidity for future use cases of GHO. The vault is on top of Uniswap V3 on Ethereum and the position will be managed by our experienced vault managers. LPs will only need to deposit USDC to participate in this vault and our vault managers will handle the rest.

The vault’s security has been audited by our experienced auditing partners at Veridise. You can find the full smart contract audit here: https://github.com/Range-Protocol/Range-GHO-Vault/blob/main/audits/Veridise-Audit-GHO.pdf

LPs of the vault will get exposure to the following streams of yield:

1. Lending yield on Aave.

2. Trading fees from Uniswap pool.

3. Incentives in Aave token.

In the future, as use cases for GHO develop, LPs will also get access to yields from arbitrage opportunities when GHO diverts away from peg.

Range’s GHO-USDC Vault consists of the following functions.

Liquidity Providers (LPs)

1. Mint (Deposit USDC)
2. Burn (Withdraw USDC)

Vault Managers:

1. Swap
2. Supply Collateral
3. Withdraw Collateral
4. Mint GHO
5. Burn GHO

Liquidity Providers (LPs)

Mint (Deposit USDC)

“Mint” occurs when an LP deposits USDC into the vault contract, which, in turn, mints vault shares representing their ownership in the vault. The number of shares minted depends on the ratio between the user’s USDC deposit and the vault’s underlying balance, converted to USDC.

The deposited USDC remains idle in the vault contract until the manager deploys it to the Uniswap pool. Minting is restricted when the GHO price from Uniswap and the Chainlink Oracle deviates by more than 0.5% to protect against the attack vectors involving pool price.

Burn (Withdraw USDC)

LPs can “Burn” vault shares to redeem their share of the USDC balance in the vault. The vault holds both GHO and USDC, but withdrawals are only in USDC. The vault manager monitors the vault’s passive USDC balance to ensure there’s enough liquidity for withdrawals. Temporary withdrawal restrictions may occur due to low passive USDC balance, requiring manager intervention to increase it by swapping GHO for USDC with the “Swap” function or repaying GHO debt on Aave with the “Burn GHO” and “Withdraw collateral” functions.

We will launch an incentive campaign where LPs can stake their LP Tokens through the stake widget on app page to earn AAVE incentives.

Vault Managers

Swap

The “swap” function within the vault contract, allows vault managers to add passive USDC by exchanging it with GHO.

Supply Collateral

This is a manager only action that supplies USDC balance deposited by users via the “Mint” function to Aave as collateral. This provides collateral to Aave for collateralized debt position. The vault manager will only supply a certain percentage of passive USDC balance to Aave.

Withdraw Collateral

This is a manager-only action that withdraws USDC collateral from Aave when either all of the GHO debt has been repaid or when the post-withdrawal health factor of the Aave position remains above the threshold health factor. The manager is responsible for withdrawing only the amount of USDC collateral that does not pose a liquidation risk by maintaining a buffer between the health factor and the liquidation threshold.

Mint GHO

This is a manager-only action that mints GHO tokens as debt against the deposited collateral on Aave. It creates a collateralized debt position on Aave, and the amount of GHO that can be borrowed or minted is restricted by the health factor. The Aave position is liquidated if the health factor drops below 1. The manager bears the responsibility of minting only the amount of GHO that does not pose a liquidation risk.

Burn GHO

This is a manager-only action that involves burning GHO tokens to repay the debt of a collateralized debt position on Aave. When the manager burns GHO, it frees up the vault’s USDC collateral on Aave for improving the position’s health factor or to withdraw USDC collateral to vault to increase passive USDC balance

The Range team is extremely excited about the potential of GHO and are committed to further developing the GHO ecosystem. Be sure to follow us on Twitter to get more updates and try out our new GHO Liquidity vault at: https://app.rangeprotocol.com/gho

Range Protocol is excited to announce the successful closing of a $3.75M seed funding round, co-led by HashKey Capital and Nomad Capital and with participation from Spark Digital Capital, Mirana Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Asymm Ventures, and Comma3 Ventures.

The funds raised will be used to continue building out Range’s all-in-one on-chain asset management platform and to further scale the team and community.

“Range understands that democratization is a core component of decentralized finance, and that this wouldn’t be complete without equal opportunities to trading strategies. As the new financial system continues to grow in the coming years, we believe that Range is well-positioned as the upstream of this value and will help drive systematic trading strategies forward for all.” — HashKey

The major milestone comes in anticipation of several key partnerships, and the launch of new verticals across the DeFi ecosystem.

“We need a professional investment infrastructure platform that can help crypto investors manage their assets in a trustless and professional way. Unlike the traditional finance vintage products like Fidelity and BlackRock, Range is combining the best of both worlds, sophisticated strategies and non-custodian execution.” — Ricky Li, GP of Nomad Capital

Range Protocol at a Glance

Range believes that DeFi will undergo the same transition seen in traditional finance: a wide-scale shift towards public access to advanced trading strategies that were once reserved for a select few.

As DeFi continues to mature, Range levels the playing field between retail investors and professional digital-asset managers by acting as a full DeFi Asset Management platform. We offer on-chain trading infrastructure so that the average DeFi user can get easy access to professional automated trading strategies on-chain to enhance their yield. This includes trading strategies for liquidity provision, derivatives, NFT Finance, and liquid staking derivatives. These are all multi-billion sectors despite being in their early stages and lacking systematic trading strategies for the average user.

Range Protocol is currently available on Ethereum, BSC, Mantle, Polygon, and Arbitrum.

The Path Forward

This investment marks a significant step forward in Range’s goal of becoming an all-in-one on-chain asset management platform. We are incredibly grateful to HashKey Capital, Nomad Capital, and our other investors for their support.

And we’re excited to continue the journey to build out the future of on-chain yield!

Those interested in learning more can check out our website at https://www.rangeprotocol.com/ or by following along on Twitter @Range_Protocol.

With Uniswap v2 and similar AMMs with xy=k , there were mainly 3 factors in play —

1. Trading Fees Earned
2. Liquidity Mining Incentives
3. Impermanent Loss

LPs need to quantify the potential gains from fees and incentives with the potential losses from impermanent loss.

But with the launch of Uniswap v3, the calculation of real return got even further complicated. Uniswap v3 introduces the concept of concentrated liquidity, which means that liquidity providers can choose a specific price range for their assets, instead of providing liquidity across the entire curve. This can increase their capital efficiency and potential returns, but it also introduces new challenges and trade-offs, such as amplified impermanent loss risk, more active management required, and more exposure to price movements.

Compared to the 3 factors mentioned above regarding LP’s yield in Uniswap v2, LPs in Uniswap v3 have to be even more careful because -

1. The narrower the Liquidity provider sets liquidity for their position, the more fees they can earn but impermanent loss also amplifies.
2. The narrower the position range is, the higher the frequency and cost of rebalancing for any active liquidity deployment strategy.
3. In situations of volatile market swings, liquidity in the pool could be thin around the current price leading to higher slippage for rebalancing.

In this article, we want to focus on one subset of the current defi liquidity infrastructure and provide awareness to the liquidity providers on the yield they are seeking and the associated risks.

Before we move forward, it is important to illustrate how impermanent loss gets amplified in Uniswap v3 and similar concentrated liquidity AMMs compared to Uniswap v2 like xy=k curve AMMs.

Uniswap v2

Suppose you add 1 ETH and 1800 USDC to Uniswap v2 when the price of ETH is 1800 USDC. The pool requires the assets to be of equal value, so your initial deposit is worth 3600 USDC.

Now suppose the price of ETH goes up to 2000 USDC. This means that there will be more demand for ETH and more supply of USDC in the pool, as traders swap USDC for ETH. The pool will automatically adjust the ratio of the assets to maintain a constant product (x * y = k).

As an estimate, consider that now your portfolio is 0.9 ETH and 1900 USDC
If you decide to withdraw your liquidity at this point, the value of your withdrawal is (0.9 * 2000 + 1900 = 3700 USDC).

However, if you had just held your assets instead of providing liquidity, you would have 1 ETH and 1800 USDC, which is worth (1*2000 + 1800 = 3800 USDC)

So if the liquidity mining incentives during this period are worth less than 100 USDC, you are net losing money compared to holding on spot, no matter how lucrative the APY number appears on the Farming page frontend.

Uniswap v3

Uniswap v3 amplifies this risk by putting impermanent loss on steroids. How strong the steroids are depends on how narrow the liquidity position is. For an Uniswap v3 LP, consider he/she provides the same liquidity, i.e. 1 ETH 1800 USDC for ETH-USDC pool in price range 1790–1810 when ETH price was 1800. The initial deposit is worth 3600 USDC.

Now suppose the price of ETH goes up to 2000 USDC. This means that at 1810, the whole position is converted to 100% USDC. Estimating for trading fees earned during this period, say the 1 ETH was converted to around 1820 USDC. So the current position is worth (1820 USDC + 1800 USDC = 3620 USDC)

However, if you had just held your assets instead of providing liquidity, you would have 1 ETH and 1800 USDC, which is worth (1*2000 + 1800 = 3800 USDC)

The numbers above are again random and exact numbers will depend on trading fees accrued but this will give a perspective on the higher risk for LPs

Active Liquidity Management Products

The faster change in asset composition of your liquidity position makes it difficult for passive LPs to be able to quantify their return and actively rebalance the position themselves. This gave rise to active liquidity management platforms that help LPs optimize their returns. Some of the current big players in this space are Arrakis Finance, Gamma etc.

Both Arrakis and Gamma provide a fungible wrapper on top of Uniswap v3 LP position enabling the similar liquidity mining incentive models that used to work with Uniswap v2 like AMMs.

We will do a brief overview of the approach these two platforms have taken with their strategies and then elucidate our vision with Range Protocol and what we are trying to build with our active liquidity management product.

For a similar frame of reference, we will consider the most liquid ETH USDC vault’s performance for the two protocols -

1. Arrakis’s ETH USDC 5 bps Uniswap Pool Vault on Optimism (1.04 million TVL)
2. Gamma’s ETH USDC Dynamic Fee Narrow Quickswap Pool Vault on Polygon (5.26 million TVL)

For our analysis, we have looked into a volatile price window for ETH-USDC pair. The time window is taken to cover the first two weeks of April

Both these protocol show APY on their frontend by extrapolating trading fees earned over a certain period to an annualized number. We feel that this doesn’t depict the real return that LPs are making. For our analysis, we will use the similar approach to Uniswap v2 by comparing against if you were just holding the assets on spot instead of providing liquidity.

Arrakis Finance

Arrakis Finance uses a conservative approach for their strategies by providing liquidity in a wide range and being relatively passive when it comes to rebalancing positions. For the Arrakis’s ETH USDC 5 bps Uniswap Pool Vault on Optimism, the liquidity is currently provided over a price range of [ 1 ETH = 999.3022 USDC , 1 ETH = 3001.904 USDC ]

Because their position is relatively conservative, the performance and the way position’s asset composition is quite similar to interacting with an Uniswap v2 pool.

Compared to holding the assets on spot, the vault’s performance was around -1.18% for this time period.

Gamma

Gamma has two strategies active, one passive which provides liquidity in a wide range and one aggressive, which provides liquidity in a narrow range. The Wide strategy follows a similar liquidity range and performance to Arrakis’s vault (price range around [0.5x , 2x] if x is current ETH price)

We will focus on the narrow strategy. Gamma does not hedge back the exposure by swapping on the pool even for the narrow strategy but actively keeps moving the liquidity with triggers for rebalancing set pretty close to the centre of the their liquidity range.

Because of being in narrow range, the rate of change of position’s composition is high. For the initial hold composition, we take the genesis of the vault in January where composition was around 50% ETH — 50% USDC by notional value.

For the volatile time window we are looking at, the vault ratio got skewed significantly towards holding a higher percentage of USDC and due to that, any price increment in ETH would further amplify the impermanent loss for LP compared to holding on spot.

For the same time window, the Gamma vault’s performance was -9.58%

Our Vision

Over the past one year, a lot of discussions have taken place about the significant risk of impermanent loss for Uniswap v3 LPs but there is still a lot of confusion among passive LPs about the real return they are making.

At Range Protocol, we have worked closely with Private Market Makers and Trading Partners to look into how we can tilt the scale a little in the favor of Liquidity Providers.

For our v1 strategies with Tokka Labs, we are focusing on these key optimizations —

1. Using volatility prediction models to stay passive during trending periods

The Liquidity Providers in Uniswap v3 lose the most money during volatile price swings in trending markets. Other active liquidity management vaults always keep the liquidity active in the Uniswap v3 pool. We have done extensive research on how we can optimize LP’s return by being passive in trending markets.
https://www.rangeprotocol.com/files/active-liquidity-management.pdf

2. Maintaining Base Asset Exposure for the vault

The benchmark for Liquidity providers is the return they can get by providing liquidity instead of just holding the assets in spot. Our strategies are designed so that we try to optimize for the following equation when our liquidity is actively deployed in the pool -

Trading Fees Earned > Impermanent Loss + Rebalancing Costs

And during passive windows, we maintain the base asset exposure (like ETH exposure in ETH USDC vault) for the pool as a whole. This will reduce the correlation of vault’s return with the base asset’s price movement and also lays foundation for enabling single sided staking on top of Uniswap v3 pools.

3. Optimizing Rebalancing using RFQ quotes executed in a trustless manner

The biggest reason for other active liquidity management vaults to take the design choice of either being conservative by providing liquidity in a wide range (Arrakis) or not hedging back exposure and expect market to follow mean reverting characteristics (Gamma Narrow Vaults) is that if a vault running on top of a Uniswap v3 pool is incentivized, then all rational LPs providing liquidity to that vault will provide liquidity through the vault to not miss out on incentives. But the dynamics of that is that the vault may become a significant % of the pool.

We try to optimize this by creating a payment for order flow model where different PMMs, arbitrage bots can place bids to do the rebalancing efficiently and in a trustless manner by providing Just in Time liquidity on the pool. This will enable us to provide liquidity in narrower price ranges and earn a more significant share of trading fees. We will share more details on this in a separate article.

This illustration depicts the following optimizations of our strategy for the same time window

For the same time window, the strategy’s performance was +1.99% compared to just holding assets in spot

To summarize, passive LPs need to be more aware of what the real return they are earning by providing liquidity to Uniswap v3 pools. Many protocols only show the trading fees earned as an indicator of return but you might be losing money compared to just holding the assets in spot due to impermanent loss.