Dear Community,
Since our IDO and IEO have taken place, we want to start giving you regular updates on developments at Acumen.
January was an important month for the Acumen protocol. Not only did we complete an IDO on Dexlab and an IEO on MEXC, but we also became the first DAO in the world to be named as an authorized lender by a Central Bank.
Our vision remains to use the tools of DeFi to power microfinance worldwide, starting in El Salvador. We encourage you to read our past posts to learn more about what this means specifically. This is a link to an article where Acumen was featured on CoinDesk that gives a high-level overview on Acumen’s goals: https://t.co/kPx91E7uFF
Updates:
Structurally / Legally
Acumen received authorization from the Central Bank of El Salvador to be an authorized lender in the country, which means that the Acumen DAO is legally able to give out credit and take collateral from borrowers, as well as take ownership in case of non-performing loans. This cannot be underestimated in importance as it validates the model of a DAO playing a role in the real economy.
Aside from that, Acumen has relationships in place with the El Salvador Small and Medium Business Association to facilitate the provision of microfinance loans in the country. The association will help with borrower evaluation, growing TVL, and collateral provision.
On a broader level, Acumen is working closely with the government to make DeFi returns tax-efficient and assure DeFi has a strong regulatory framework locally.
Team
As a community, you will have noticed that we have had our hands full. We apologize for not always being able to respond quickly to every question to not being in the project chatrooms 24/7 but we are a growing team with a very ambitious project to bridge DeFi and traditional finance. We hope you understand that, next to building the protocol, we also need to take real-world meetings with government officials, get on planes and we have families too that need attention from time to time. Acumen remains our top priority, but having financed almost everything ourselves to this point, we did not have enough staffing to fully cater to the community.
Hopefully, this will change soon as we are looking into a community and market hire and have also added several developers to the team. We now have a team made up of 7 developers, 4 administrative and lawyers, as well as 3 community-oriented folks. Over the next weeks and months, we will try to introduce them to you in the chat.
Rewards
Currently, there is 400 ACM / day emitted to liquidity providers on Atrix. We have an Orca pool and a Tulip yield aggregator pool planned but need to make sure it works well before we deploy. This offers an attractive yield (APY) of over 6,000% at the moment. It is also the best way to support the project for now. You can start farming here: https://app.atrix.finance/#/pools/8SQCVgTFJPWTrRJzF5nnPoaRff6vvqAqm1kxZaeFxXc2/deposit
Aside from the yield farming rewards, the rewards for using the Acumen lending platform are still accumulating and will be released alongside with the early user fair launch token on a schedule to be published in March. You can check them here (this shows the rewards per day per asset pool on the platform): https://docs.acumen.network/lending-protocol-v2/reward-distribution.
We are planning a major UI overhaul that will make these rewards much clearer, but if you are smart, you can make your own rough estimates of how much yield you can generate from supplying tokens on the lending platform. As we are still in our infancy — the rewards are currently huge. But do the calculation yourself. We are likely to introduce a tiered system based on TVL later so this is an opportune time.
StableDapp
As a reminder, the StableDapp is the main mechanism with which Acumen will power microfinance. It will allow crypto users to stake stable coin for an attractive, stable, and uncorrelated yield (ie the yield will not fluctuate with crypto demand, as it is based on traditional capital opportunities), while enabling Acumen to power microfinance, starting in El Salvador, but we have partnerships lined up for a move across the Ocean as well. Development is progressing nicely. We will keep you in the loop.
That’s it for now from us. We hope this is a useful update for you. You can check out our roadmap as well if you want to see more of what we are building. We are 100% committed to building a leading project globally that links DeFi with microfinance. We are grateful for your continued support.
