With a growing number of decentralized ecosystems emerging year-on-year, it’s a full time job for many in the blockchain industry just keeping up with new developments. Within these explosive new ecosystems, decentralized finance — more commonly known as DeFi — has also broadened our understanding on what an idyllic financial system could look like on the blockchain.
Multiple new DeFi products have emerged, from lending and borrowing platforms, to insurance, synthetics, crowdfunding, derivatives, and asset management protocols. Over 230 DeFi apps were submitted to Dapp Radar in 2020 alone, with 45% of them running on the Ethereum network. Many of these projects have achieved market capitalizations in the billions of dollars. But what of the protocol itself? Who audits, explores, and chooses the right underlying blockchain for the next generation of finance, and where might we find the features needed to power the world’s decentralized financial system?
Building a Blockchain to Last
Longevity is rarely a word we encounter in the blockchain industry. Instead, we normally focus on sprints to the finish and innovation. But innovation for innovation’s sake is not inherently good. When billions of dollars of value is stored on-chain, can we really afford to move fast and break things?
The currently established DApps ecosystem has major faults. These include slow, non-inclusive high-fee environments — such as Ethereum missing native interoperability and scalability issues sometimes resulting in average transaction fees of over US$100 — to centralized nodes that undermine one of the three pillars of blockchain and security. The space is now ripe for a game-changing blockchain environment that can accommodate a wide range of participants, including general users, institutions, and enterprise, without losing its key underlying properties.
It was these issues, long plaguing the fledgling DeFi space, that formed the impetus for our choice of protocol. One built to last. We are talking, of course, about Cardano. Cardano is among the most precisely-built blockchains, and the only protocol to be built from the ground up based on peer-reviewed research. Not only is it built and deployed on solid code, but it has also given rise to one of the largest, strongest, and most intelligent communities in blockchain, with over one million users across its social platforms.
Up until recently, ADA holders could not use their stake in the protocol for yield generating purposes, providing limited use for ADA as a store of value, and limited utility. In fact, just over 16 billion ADA are in circulation, while some 22.7 billion are staked and locked in the protocol through staking. But staking and delegation only generate so much return, and only enable so many use cases.
The Cardano community could, therefore, benefit from this huge pool of untapped liquidity. But more importantly, Cardano itself will finally have the potential to grow into one of the largest DeFi ecosystem’s in the world — paving the way for a huge influx of new users and enterprises. With the arrival of the recent Mary hard fork, DeFi will finally be enabled on Cardano, providing a unique opportunity to capitalize on its unique core components. When this liquidity is served, we expect many hundreds of projects will seek efficient ways to raise capital to launch on Cardano.
This problem is compounded by issues with the traditional centralized fundraising paradigm; which is cost inefficient, exclusive, subject to adverse monopolistic effects. This makes it insufficiently flexible to accommodate the myriad of use cases that decentralized autonomous ecosystems, such as DeFi, have created. To counter these suboptimal solutions for the Cardano ecosystem, we present the Cardano-based decentralized fundraising vehicle, OccamRazer, the building block that will work as the foundation of the new ecosystem.
OccamRazer Arrives
Project Catalyst introduced new, decentralized ways of funding start-ups and big ideas on Cardano. But while Catalyst is an incredible achievement for the Cardano ecosystem, it can’t sufficiently meet the funding needs of enterprises, institutions, and professional start-up teams building on Cardano. We need to raise the bar, and this is where OccamRazer finds its niche.
OccamRazer is a decentralized fundraising vehicle, or launchpad, with a full suite of compliance and RegTech tools as well as feature-rich UX suitable to accommodate a vast variety of fundraising profiles, acting as the key that will unlock the Cardano ecosystems’ liquidity.
As AMM-based vehicles for decentralized fundraising, such as IDOs, are known to be an ill fit due to extreme volatility, front-running, and inability to reflect the intricacies of the fundraising process, we introduce a new family of protocols. Continuous and discrete in nature, these protocols would fill this niche and offer smart-contract vehicles designed for various fundraising use-cases, private and public, over- and under-subscribed, fungible and otherwise.
The Occam Association
At Occam.fi, we will never take the short and easy route, and that’s why the OccamRazer is not launching alone. As well as OccamRazer, the Occam.fi ecosystem will be supported by a soon-to-be-launched DEX and credit markets, and a single governance layer governed by a well-thought DAO base.
The Occam ecosystem, and it’s codebase, will be independently audited by leading blockchain security companies. Occam have already committed to an audit through Swiss-based Scalable Solutions, which will be made available shortly, and we will also arrange a number of other audits during major development milestones as required.
This ecosystem will be fuelled by OCC, a token that will enable a number of unique mechanics and potent flows of monetizable utility to its holders. Let’s look at some of the planned token mechanics.
OCC Proposed Token Mechanics and Utility
To support the Occam ecosystem, the OCC token will also be launched. The OCC token will allow access to premium liquidity pools, and the token will also be used for staking. OCC will also allow for continuous ecosystem diversification, allowing the Occam Association to invest a portion of a project’s allocation back into the ecosystem — with the proceeds airdropped to OCC token stakers.
This feature alone, unique to Occam, will open a cascade of reward-generating opportunities for both token holders and ecosystem participants — ensuring Occam becomes a thriving, self-sustaining, and prosperous ecosystem.
If you’re a participant in a liquidity pool and you take out your liquidity, the transaction fee you will pay will be distributed among those remaining in the pool, incentivising a long term staking economy. There are also plans to add airdrops of tokens raising capital through OccamRazer pools to OCC token holders.
Many of you may wonder, what Cardano components are being used to develop the Occam ecosystem? Naturally OCC will first be launched for trading — due to the current lack of available trading infrastructure on Cardano — as an ERC-20 token.
However, as we are a Cardano focused ecosystem, we will also launch OCC simultaneously as a Cardano native token, ensuring cross-chain fungibility through our tailor-made bridge as we move forward. More on this to come soon. The OCC token will first be available through Balancer LBP vehicle, and then UniSwap. We will provide more details on this in the following weeks.
However, that shouldn’t detract from the fact that the Occam ecosystem is being developed with Cardano in mind. We will accelerate and support projects building on Cardano through OccamRazer, and our vision is closely aligned with the Cardano community.
A Complete DeFi Ecosystem for Cardano
OccamRazer is a powerful, feature-rich, and intelligently designed solution that has arrived just in time to revolutionize the way decentralized projects raise and exchange capital.
Occam provides affordable, secure, and fast solutions to projects building on Cardano, without disregarding regulatory requirements. Every user will be able to participate in a secure and compliant environment and use all kinds of assets in a harmonic and incentive-based ecosystem.
Stay tuned for upcoming information on Occam’s unique features, and also to find out more about our first-to-market production bridge for bringing seamless migration of liquidity from Ethereum to Cardano. Make sure you follow our social media channels, and be the first to find out when we reach our development milestones and launch the OCC token!
- Visit the Occam.fi website here
- Follow Occam.fi on Twitter
- Join the Discussion on Telegram
- Get involved on Occam.fi Reddit
