Ajna ARK - Ajna Rebalancing Kit
Request
Receiving Address: (0x9A22889a2Bb9712E3401de26985d66Aa776791cF)
AJNA Amount: (1,500,000)
Applicant and Team Information
Applicant Name: @Prototech_Labs
Email: info@prototechlabs.dev
About the team: A team of ex-MakerDAO engineers closely familiar with the Ajna codebase. We have provided two security reviews and conducted comprehensive invariant testing for the Ajna team already.
Additional Links: www.prototechlabs.dev
Project Information
1. What is it?
An automation solution for end users to gain the best rate from Ajna pools.
The ARK is a non-custodial, permissionless vault that automatically rebalances the user’s quote tokens across selected pools with the highest yield. This drastically simplifies the user experience for Ajna liquidity providers and ensures that the user automatically earns the optimal yield.
The ARK will be provided as a set of smart contracts that end users and interface providers such as SummerFi can integrate with. Because the ARK is itself a protocol, it will include a small fee component that can be split between the technical back end, and the interface provider to incentivize integration and usage.
2. What problem is being solved, how?
Ajna’s complexity has long been a high barrier to entry for increased user adoption. The ARK abstracts away Ajna protocol complexity by automatically moving user funds into the pool with the highest yield. This means that the user can now have a vault product programmatically and permissionlessly allocate their quote tokens without them having to actively manage their position or manually move it from pool to pool.
It is worth mentioning that as with any form of lending, the risk of the underlying pool remains on the lender who receives a risk premium in the form of yield. This underlying risk of using the ARK is no different to using Ajna directly today.
3. How will this project be a source of growth or success for Ajna?
The ability for users to move their liquidity across pools automatically and cheaply will be a source of success for Ajna. Users struggle to do this today because such actions are too complex and expensive.
Similarly, the ARK enables any 3rd party front end interface to integrate with it and offer rebalancing to their users. This will help attract and retain users to a protocol which is otherwise struggling due to protocol complexity. Users will therefore be able to more easily interact with Ajna and contribute to a growing and successful ecosystem. Additional quote token supply will lead to a more robust marketplace and will promote additional collateral deposits and borrowing.
This necessary addition to Ajna will also incentivize and promote a new keeper ecosystem to participate in ensuring consistent update-interest calls are done at regular intervals.
4. What is/are the objective(s)?
By automating and simplifying user access to higher yield it is expected that there will be an increase in user adoption and participation. Similarly, an increase in quote token liquidity will promote increased participation from borrowers, thereby helping the protocol’s overall health.
5. What is/are the deliverable(s)?
A completed Ajna ARK - Ajna Auto Rebalancing Kit, that front ends will be able to integrate with to give their users access to automated rebalancing. All code will be open sourced under a BSL license and will include complete unit, fuzz and integration test suites. The team will also provide interface and integration documentation to help 3rd party’s integrate with the smart contracts.
6. What is the timeline for completing the deliverables?
The team has been working on this software since January, and plans to have a solution deployed on mainnet by Q4 2024. We expect independent frontends will then integrate.
7. What level of support do you anticipate needing through the duration of the project?
Grant support for past and future work supporting the ARK. This will also help cover an external audit to support this deployment.
8. How often will progress reports be published to the forum?
During development, progress reports will be provided monthly. Once the vault is deployed, its usage will be visible through standard onchain analytics platforms.
9. What are the estimated costs associated with the full completion of this project?
Although not possible to cover the full expense of 4 engineers for 9 months, the proposed grant request will go towards this as well as covering an audit.
10. If applicable, How will the project be maintained after completion of the grant?
As fully permissionless and immutable software this software will not require any ongoing maintenance. Subsequent versions may also be developed to identify niches and/or improvements in solution offerings.
11. How will you handle a delay in your project timeline?
Now that an architectural schema is well defined, we do not envisage any delays to our roadmap. In the event there are unforeseen delays these will be reported to Ajna governance as part of our monthly update and an optimal path forward identified.
12. How will you handle a scenario where the original scope can’t be completed due to insufficient funding or other factors?
Governance shall be informed and an optimal path forward outlined.
In summary, this is a much needed enhancement to Ajna and will abstract away the underlying protocol’s complexity. Thank you for considering our proposal, we look forward to completing the smart contracts and their accompanying documentation.