During our thought process to create ZkPad, we used a lot of Launchpads on many chains and studied many of them. From this, we were able to find many possible improvements, which we would like to implement on ZkPad.
These improvements are fundamental to us, and represent a drastic change in the way we position ourselves as to the role of a launchpad, both in the community and in the projects we launch.
This change in ideological positioning could be called Launchpad 2.0
Here are the fundamental points that we believe describe what Launchpad 2.0 is.
On-chain system
A major point of dissatisfaction that we have had with Launchpad projects, is the global lottery system. Indeed, this system is 100% of the time off-chain, and very opaque for all users. We cannot know how lottery draws are made if there was cheating, why we got an allowance or why we didn’t. And it is impossible for us to verify because all this data is off-chain and private. The Starknet VM, and many blockchains allow us to perform these calculations on-chain, and therefore to benefit from a much clearer and fairer system for everyone. Besides, we believe that web3 is made for just that, ie to prove that we did things in a fair way, and to do it in a transparent way. Everything will be clear and transparent on ZkPad, with the provision of tools to analyze our lotteries, all of which will be on-chain and verifiable.
In addition, the Whitelists obtained for a project are final and non-exchangeable on other launchpads. Indeed, even if you do not wish to take part in the IDO, and you have nevertheless obtained lottery tickets, it is impossible for you to send this Whitelist, and to make another buyer benefit from it, who is interested and wishes to support the project for the long term. We are therefore going to develop our architecture entirely on-chain, and tokenize the Whitelists in the form of NFTs, in order to make them exchangeable before the start of the Private sale of a project. This will make our platform fairer and more transparent for everyone while offering possibilities never before seen elsewhere, especially with arbitrage.
Incorporating DeFi
On this point, we noticed that almost all the launchpads on other chains systematically offer the same system, which is to lock its native tokens of the platform, in order to have lottery tickets for future IDOs. We are fully aligned with the vision of forcing people to lock tokens for a fixed period of time and to encourage locking over a long period of time, giving away more lottery tickets based on the number of tokens locked, as well as the locked time. However, we do not find it normal, even bordering on laughable, the fact of not allowing the staking of LP in order to obtain lottery tickets. Indeed, liquidity is very important for any project, and allowing protocol players to lock LPs in order to win lottery tickets is, in our opinion, essential in order to build a solid project over the long term. We will therefore allow the liquidity locking in order to obtain Whitelists in IDOs on ZkPad, but we will also offer higher APRs for LP stakers, insofar as they take more risks, in particular related to impermanent loss, and also insofar as they meet a need of the protocol to have locked liquidity for the future of the project as well as its sustainability.
On the other hand, we find it absurd to have so many locked tokens on our contracts and let them “sleep” here. However, this is the case for all the launchpad platforms that we have encountered, the tokens are locked for a fixed period on the contracts, and they do not move and simply generate yield at a very low rate for users. We believe in ZkPad, that we can put these tokens to use in broader Vault strategies, in order to generate better income for our users. The strategies put in place will be explained later, but we want to change this traditional vision of launchpads, and propose, using DeFi levers, innovative strategies to make the best use of locked tokens in ZkPad vaults.
Endorsement of projects launching on the platform
We were able to observe and notice the difficulty that launchpads can encounter when it comes to checking and validating projects launching on the platform. Indeed, a problem often arises during the validation phase of a project on the launchpad. On the one hand, there is a tension between accepting only quality projects, bringing an answer to a real need of the users, and the fact of wanting to launch more and more projects, even if it means closing the eyes on some negative points of the project and to continue to launch more and more projects to favour the profit. On the other hand, we have also noticed that a lot of launchpad users use their IDO allowances for short-term profit, resulting in an overall lack of interest in the projects launched on launchpads. This raises a question for us, which is how to avoid overdoing it and launching anything and everything on the launchpad just to generate profits, to the detriment of the community, and how to keep our users interested in the projects launched on ZkPad for the long term. Both of these points are necessary to make a launchpad that is built for the long term and satisfies all parties in the ecosystem.
From there we made several decisions to address these issues. First, we believe that common sense in this situation, and this point is central to understanding what we call Launchpad 2.0, is to mix the functions of Launchpad, as well as an incubator. Indeed, as a first step, to benefit from our network made up of private investors, builders, developers, experts in marketing, blockchain, human resources, and in other sectors, to projects launching on our Launchpad is for us the minimum to do in order to facilitate the work of the projects, but also and above all to guarantee to our community that the projects launching on the launchpad are accompanied by serious and competent people, which is in our opinion the minimum of the guarantee that we can offer to our community, in order to always try to make them stay in the long term. A second point relating to incubation would also be to own tokens of the projects that we are launching, in order to financially guarantee our involvement and our confidence in the project. Initially as ZkPad, the company, but later as ZkPad, the DAO. Indeed, we will detail the subject later, but investing in projects as a DAO will also be a way of choosing the best projects to launch, but also encouraging holders to think in the long term with the projects that we are launching since they will own part of it also through the DAO.
Governance
This is where all the above-mentioned elements will finally make sense and will fit together. Before this last point, we have only mentioned improvements, but these improvements would be too little to justify the term Launchpad 2.0, what is missing is coherence between these elements. This coherence is brought about by the CAD. Indeed, the DAO will play a major role in motivating our investors to support projects launching on ZkPad over the long term. This is done through 2 mechanisms.
The first is the choice of projects launching on ZkPad. The governance will be able to veto if a project launched on the Launchpad is not interesting to them, and in this case, the project will not be launched on our platform.
In a second step, the DAO will be in charge of a part of the tokens of the projects launched on ZkPad. These tokens will be subject to vesting, this will encourage investors, and therefore members of the DAO to always think on the long term, either before choosing the projects, but also before investing in them.
In addition, the system governing the DAO will be ready almost at launch, but we will only launch its operation after a few weeks, or even months, in order to be certain that the protocol has enough token holders in order to have a DAO which has sense, and which is truly decentralized. We really want to bring added value via this DAO, and hope that it really makes sense.
Conclusion
Through ZkPad we want to bring a new quality standard in launchpad, for all the actors of the web3 ecosystem, this standard that we called Launchpad 2.0. We want to give the metronome to the Starknet ecosystem in terms of quality as well as innovation, and it is in this sense that we will present the detailed Whitepaper of the ZkPad protocol on Saturday, March 5 at 19:00 UTC.
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