Polis 2.0 — the new era What’s next for Polis?Polis must be a leader in innovation to become a widely used digital asset. The best way to achieve that is by focusing on building new technology that attracts customers in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space rather than maintaining an entire codebase just to run our own blockchain. This will allow the developers and management to focus on features, tools, and services that they can offer through other existing networks. The Polis Foundation has decided to migrate the chain to the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) so that the development team can focus on new products in the DeFi Ecosystem while continuing to provide value to our current community.
The Core Team at our partner Kindynos has focused its resources over the past year on delivering the Olympus blockchain. However, resource constraints caused delays that hindered delivery. During this time, the team monitored market conditions and current business strategies. Outsourcing the blockchain infrastructure to Binance enables the project to drastically shorten the time to market and maximize the return on investment at this early adoption phase of DeFi.
Blockchain: An Evolving IndustryNew projects, services, and technologies appear every day with innovative ways of using blockchain. DeFi is a service that is experiencing exponential growth.
The concept refers to the ecosystem of financial applications built on blockchain as an alternative to traditional financial systems. This sector’s market cap grew from $500 million to $10 billion in 2020. Some use cases for DeFi are borrowing, lending, monetary services, decentralized marketplaces, lotteries and many more.
DeFi applications involve creating and using smart contracts. A smart contract is a computer protocol designed to digitally facilitate, verify and enforce a contract without a third party. It is faster and easier for everyone.
Binance Smart Chain: the new home for PolisBinance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, with the goal of becoming the world’s leading exchange. It was at the top three global exchanges, with a market capitalization of $1.3 billion in less than 5 months after its launch. Its user base grew from two million to 10 million users in six months. This rise was possible due to its infrastructure; the platform has the ability to handle 1.4 million orders per second. Binance released BSC as a competitor to Ethereum in September 2020 with significantly lower transaction fees.
BSC supports features such as Trezor and Ledger support, integration to light wallets such as Trust Wallet, Exodus, and many more.
Why migrate?It is well known by the community that Olympus has been in development for close to 2 years at this point. So understanding the key factors that drove the team to put Olympus Development to a halt in favor of migrating to another chain is crucial.
Time to MarketWhen Olympus development started in late 2018 there were no competing chains to the goals and feature set of Olympus. Since then, millions of dollars have been invested by big industry players into blockchains that solve the issues Olympus had targeted.
Today, there are several projects that have already built ecosystems of products and services on other blockchains that far outmatch any sort of funding that could be provided by The Polis Foundation and the current governance.
At its current status, Olympus is a vanilla blockchain. This means consensus is implemented, it is able to run a safe and stable network that allows users to make transactions and have governance votings. Smart Contract execution would arrive Q4 of this year to the chain. By that point in time, the DeFi ecosystem on other chains will only improve and consolidate, making it harder for Olympus to attract a similar investment.
Decentralized Applications, Oracles, Decentralized Exchanges, Automated Market Makers are examples of products and services backed by companies that invest millions of dollars a year. It is smarter for the Polis Project to take advantage of these services rather than assume these ecosystems will be able to migrate into our chain.
Evolving Market ConditionsOlympus understood the importance of smart contracts far back when it was designed. So did the rest of the world. Decentralized Finance is taking the world by storm, and we are excited to bring Polis values and spirit into this world.
The DAO is convinced that evolving the project to keep up with demand and market conditions while keeping its core identity is key to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project and it is in the best interest of our stakeholders and long-term supporters.
Participating in this new chain with support for smart contracts will allow Polis to create innovative use cases and add new features to our token, bringing a level of usability and scalability that has never been seen before in our chain, and that will make our project more competitive and interesting for new investors.
One Door Closes, a Thousand More OpenBy migrating into the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) there’s some head start benefits for the project, such as:
- Default Integration on popular hardware wallets: Trezor and Ledger support from day one.
- Default Support in Industry Leading Wallets such as Metamask and Argent Wallet.
- Adding support for new exchange listings is easier, faster, and cheaper for the project as exchanges start adding DeFi features and interest in BSC increases. Olympus exchange listing integration prices were up to tenfold and the process is slow.
- Will allow Polis Token to interact with quality services such as Pancakeswap, Burgerswap, and others that exist on the Binance Chain.
- Opens up our project to a whole new community.
From the technical team standpoint, there are also some current limitations that are improved by migrating into the new chain.
- The core developer team’s strengths are more aligned with the development of smart contracts, given the current know-how and developers that Grupo Kindynos is able to provide.
- By not having to maintain a network (this includes wallet updates, block explorers, full nodes), the developers can focus on building better services both on and off-chain that make use of Polis as a payment method and a utility coin at a speed we have not seen before.
- Creating new technology on BSC is cheaper, increasing the return on investment and value to our community on all the services and decentralized applications built from the governance funds.
Future of OlympusThe Olympus codebase will become a community project. It is and will always be Open Source. If a given set of market conditions allow for funding in the future, the project may be reinstated and become, but the DAO cannot prioritize its development at this point in time.
Polis 2.0Building on BSC will allow Polis to become part of the extensive Binance ecosystem. This will expose the project to a new community of users.
The Polis project will focus on developing portfolio management strategies and other new products in the DeFi ecosystem built using Smart Contracts.
Polis native features such as staking and governance will still be migrated to similar mechanisms. Users will be able to submit and vote on proposals and the election of DAO members as stated in the DAO Manifesto.
A new block reward structure will be proposed by the DAO team, as masternodes and staking will no longer serve a functional purpose on the new chain. Staking will be maintained in order for our current community to migrate.
Index FundsThe first product developed by Kindynos that uses the Polis 2.0 will be a set of capitalization-weighted index funds.
Index funds will simplify asset management for investors in the same way that index funds do in the stock market: creating a single asset representing ownership in a diverse portfolio that tracks the market sector defined by the index.
How will Polis holders benefit from Index Funds?Polis holders will receive a percentage of the earnings from the funds.
Yield FarmingYield farming is the practice of staking or lending crypto or digital assets to generate returns or rewards in the form of additional cryptocurrency. In other words, yield farming protocols work in such a way that it incentivizes the liquidity providers to stake or lock up their digital assets in a smart contract-based liquidity pool. These incentives can be a percentage of transaction fees, interest from lenders, or a governance token. These returns are expressed as an annual percentage yield (APY). As more investors add funds to the related liquidity pool, the value of the issued returns increases.
Yield farming is currently one of the most significant growth drivers in the DeFi space.
The Next StepsPolis holders will have access to the above mentioned features and a variety of new features and services that will be developed in the future. A Point of Sale system and a gift card marketplace will generate additional revenue for Polis holders. The Polis Foundation will partner with other projects such as exchanges. PancakeSwap will be the first exchange available at launch.
Kindynos, The Polis Foundation development partner, has experience with DeFi projects. Kindynos has the expertise to transition the project smoothly into the Binance Smart Chain, with 70% of the codebase already written.
The swap is being coordinated with exchanges, not all of them will support the swap. So detailed instructions will be provided on how to migrate your coins. As always, the best place to guarantee a smooth migration is having your coins on a PolisCore Wallet.
The DAO is working on a business plan, branding plan, new communication and social media strategies. This is the beginning of a very bright future for the Polis project and its holders.
This article may contain certain forward-looking statements relating to the Polis that are based on the beliefs of the teams management as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to the DAO management. These forward-looking statements are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties.
Ask Me AnythingThere will be an AMA on Wednesday, March 3rd, 12:00 PM PST. Everyone can send questions before the AMA session. As usual, it’ll be streamed at YouTube.
https://youtu.be/qllHo05Gxg4).
It has been exciting to see the participation from our community, that is why we want to provide a way for you to access the team directly and specifically, depending the department you wish to approach.
DAO Technology Manager.Luis Correa —
helios@polispay.orgDAO Marketing Manager.Maria Sidorova —
maria@polispay.orgDAO Adoption Manager.Frank Servedio —
frank@polispay.orgDAO Community Manager.Marc Rapf —
marc@polispay.orgDAO Business Manager.Andreas Meyer —
andreas@polispay.orgFrom everyone in our team we would like to sincerely thank you for your constant support.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
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