Over the past couple of months, Acumen has made tremendous strides toward fulfilling our vision of leveraging DeFi to power microfinance. We are gearing up to launch the StableDapp which allows users to earn a real-world generated, attractive, uncorrelated yield and ultimately improve the lives of the millions of entrepreneurs in emerging economies that lack access to cheap and affordable capital, starting in El Salvador but expanding globally. This blog post will cover the StableDapp test case, multi-chain expansion, and how the Acumen token will benefit from this ecosystem structure.
StableDapp Opportunity:
We are getting ready to deploy the first test case of real-world loans in the Acumen ecosystem. The first deposit pool for the Acumen StableDapp will be opened this Friday, following a one-week grace period, where user’s funds aren’t earning interest, users’ funds will be deployed throughout financial channels in El Salvador for a year and depositors will earn 10% APY. Acumen depositors will be able to take part in changing the lives of struggling entrepreneurs in El Salvador while being able to earn an attractive and uncorrelated APY on their Stablecoin deposits.
The initial Stabledapp test case will offer yield on USDC. After the test case is completed, we will open up deposits for major stable coins: USDT, DAI, etc. The StableDapp in its nature provides a hedge against risk associated with holding algorithmic stablecoins. Funds don’t sit in Stable coins, instead, they are in fiat, meaning that if a stable coin depegs, the overall Acumen ecosystem will remain healthy. This also means that the StableDapp is safe from DeFi exploits like flash loan attacks: since the funds will be in fiat exploiters cannot take any of the funds as they will be securely deployed in El Salvador throughout traditional financial channels. As the Acumen ecosystem becomes more mature, we look to expand The StableDapp’s yield offering to volatile tokens like BTC, ETH, etc, price volatility risks would be mitigated with a hedge, which would allow users to earn a Stable uncorrelated yield on assets other than Stablecoins. This provides yet more utility to the overall DeFi ecosystem.
Since the Acumen DAO has been recognized by the El Salvadoran Central Bank as an authorized lender, this means that the Acumen DAO can begin to deploy capital in the ecosystem. The loans are also secured by the Acumen DAO having legal rights to any collateral backing the loan. This mechanism provides a degree of security ensuring depositors can receive their principle and interest if loans default. The Acumen DAO has partnered with large traditional financial players, such as the Small and Medium Business Association of El Salvador, which ensures that the team can accomplish democratize access to cheap capital. The Acumen team has identified the initial capital deployers and are confident of their ability to deploy capital.
Below is an illustration of how funds move throughout the Acumen ecosystem:
Acumen Token(ACM):
The Acumen token will benefit from the mutually beneficial ecosystem created by the Acumen StableDapp. All ACM token holders will receive staking rewards from excess protocol revenues that are generated by the delta between the staker’s apy and the rate the loans are being lent out at. To demonstrate, here is a table that shows how much USDC an Acumen user would earn when holding 10k ACM tokens.
The ACM token will also delist from MEXC as the liquidity has been concentrated on DEXs and frankly, the team was not happy with the market makers we chose to operate there and a few other points. We are actively in conversations with Tier one exchanges to list the token with larger liquidity, but we also wish to time this with our cross-chain move. As we are branching out from Solana, the token will remain tradeable and StableDapp will be open for deposits.
A word on why we are moving from Solana. There are numerous reasons, but the main ones are as follows: firstly, the Solana network has had many periods of poor performance. That always reflects on the projects using it and it impacts many aspects, among them withdrawals, oracle price feeds, and the general operation of the protocol. This is also one of the main reasons that we are deprecating the lending dapp. The lending dapp for us was more of a minimum viable product to build a community and to show that we can build. With the issues that the Solana network has been experiencing, we find it more reasonable to concentrate on our main project as it is much less likely to have an impact from network issues. We like Solana and it is still our home, but these issues are making it difficult for us to be a respectable counterparty to our users and we need to diversify from them. Secondly, the liquidity for what we are doing is good on Solana, but it is better if we can include EVM-compatible chains. This goes for trading the token, but also for depositing funds. We did not set out to build microfinance on Solana, we set out to build it “on” DeFi and hence it makes sense to become more chain agnostic. Finally, while we remain a member of the Solana community, other chains have been in contact with us about helping us grow with their ecosystem funds, and tier 1 exchanges have suggested a move to EVM-compatible chains would be beneficial as well. We have never had that kind of support from Solana itself and it will be helpful to the project. Taking all this together means that it is a beneficial move for us and we are therefore going to make it.
Finally, regarding the token, together with the StableDapp, we will be releasing single asset staking of ACM, so that our supporters can stake their tokens and receive an additional yield in ACM, next to the yield on ACM that is provided by Stabledapp operations.
Conclusion:
As we pursue our multichain expansion we will release what chains we officially partnering with; these chains will help grow and support the overall Acumen ecosystem to ensure the Acumen is doing good in the lives of its borrowers and community of token holders. The Acumen team thanks our community for their continued support and we are excited to continue to develop our vision of Doing DeFi and Doing Good, championing the idea that users can do well economically (earn an attractive, stable, and uncorrelated yield) while being able to do good by providing cheap access to capital to people that are otherwise cut off, not because they cannot afford a loan, but because the current system discriminates against them. We hope to continue to develop our true vision and help the millions of entrepreneurs that need cheap and favorable access to capital instead of being stuck in the unfair fiat systems where because of your socioeconomic status basic access to financial tools is restricted.
