INF > SOL
ISC > USDC
The road to >50B Market Cap
I’ve said this multiple times. INF is superior to SOL, and ISC is superior to USDC. Despite this, neither have replaced their incumbent.
I want INF market to grow not only a little, but by >50x. I don’t want INF to just be a LST DEX token, or just the biggest LST. I want INF to become the dominant SOL token. The token that people use in DeFi, replacing SOL itself.
It should be easy, right? A SOL token that yields 7-10% per year on top of SOL… It’s the superior product!
Think again.
Currency Networks:
DeFi Currency Network:
Currency networks are a cycle that will make you use a certain currency because everyone else is using that currency.
7-10% extra APY is not enough to break SOL currency network effect. It’s sad to say, but we need to throw incentives at it. I personally hate incentives, so I don’t say this lightly. Incentives are often used in a toxic cycle simply to raise more money until it all comes crashing down when the incentives eventually stop.
This does not apply to the building of network effects.
Uber, Airbnb, Coupang, Amazon, nearly all Social Media, Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and more: they all used some form of incentives to build their network effect. And it worked.
If you have a good product, but require a network effect to unlock it, incentives are there for you.
Focus:
INF powers an infinite number of LSTs, and that’s really what makes it better than mSOL, bSOL, and others (Lido 
). There are many great ideas that came out of it, were well executed, and turned out to be very successful. All nearly overnight. More will come, it’s great, and we should continue to support this. However, this will not bring the >50x growth that we need.
Jupiter has been magical for Solana. A lot would think that it’s because they have a great UX (which is true), but from a DeFi perspective, they’ve removed any desire for anyone to compete. How? By making it free. You will not get a better price even if you go directly on Raydium. Or Orca. Or Meteora. They’ve effectively destroyed the network effect of DEXes. You can provide liquidity anywhere, and all users on Solana will have equal access to it. On the other hand, Uniswap still has a massive network effect.
Similarly, they’ve reduced the network effect of currency drastically. But they have not completely removed it. There’s an extra hop, and therefore the currency network and other factors like familiarity remain.
This is why we should not attempt to make every LSTs the replacement of SOL. We should focus on one specifically. We should focus on INF, as it already encompasses the other LSTs. When INF grows, so do the other LSTs. This seems to be an equitable distribution of success between Sanctum and all its LST partners. If INF wins, everyone wins.
[International Stable Currency (ISC): https://isc.money:
I’ve left out ISC from this wall of text, but the analogy of INF to SOL and ISC to USDC is effectively the same. At ISC, we are facing very much the same currency network issue. Ours is further exacerbated by the fact that we are smaller than INF, and USDC borrows the currency network effect of the USD. However, I believe in the mission. Ultimately, the better product will prevail.
In order to bootstrap our own network effect, we’ve also started our point system (incentives, yay). Our next quest in our point system, we are planning to incentivize a liquidity pool of ISC/SOL, to allow better routing for people who would LP token/ISC.
Then it struck me. I’m about to enable the same trap that I myself am trying to get out of. My project (ISC) would benefit the most from being heavily paired with the major currency (SOL, USDC). I only help myself out of this pit, pushing down on everyone else. And they obviously do the same to me. We all do it to each other. All our actions are taken for what’s best for our own project. None of us succeeds at breaking the network effect of the incumbent.
The Proposal:
Much tighter coupling of ISCxINF. We are on the same mission. We are facing the same difficulty. I want us to promote ISCxINF liquidity, and to not default to the easier path of INFxUSDC & ISCxSOL.
We want to incentivize ISCxINF liquidity, and skip over ISCxSOL liquidity completely. We’ve been behind this mission for awhile now (eg: our ISC pool on save.finance having INF, jupSOL but not SOL itself). Wonderland points came in which triggered a massive influx of deposits into that pool.
We have many upcoming quests at Prospera (https://prospera.isc.money ISC point system) that would work very well with INF. We are asking the Sanctum community to throw in some $CLOUD incentives to help bootstrap the liquidity.
The future we want to build:
An army of Davids is more powerful than Goliath.
Feel free to discuss below, or ping me on twitter, telegram, or discord.
