[Proposal] ISC x INF - The yielding future

Sanctum Governance
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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:

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DeFi Currency Network:
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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 :face_vomiting:). 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:

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An army of Davids is more powerful than Goliath.

Feel free to discuss below, or ping me on twitter, telegram, or discord.

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@richard_ISC Not sure if it’s me but the hyperlinks don’t work for me.

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Hey Thanks! I fixed them. Linking using the typical way doesnt seem to work :slight_smile:

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Where have i been. ISC is very interesting. Gonna look more into it

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I love the idea of ISC and have been thinking of a different stable that provides an alternative to the two incumbents that dominate the entire market.

Choosing to partner INF and ISC as a pair to grow together could benefit both projects to capture mindshare and TVL (if done correctly).

Really keen for both projects to work together to further decentralise TVL Liq. out from incumbents.

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Thanks! Really appreciate. Yes, I think the mission is very much aligned. We’ve always been a big support of Sanctum, and they’ve been immensely useful to our project exposure.

We’re planning to include INF in our next quest on Prospera (ISC point system).

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Following up on this.

1 Month ago we launched our Prospera Quest on Meteora and gave user full flexibility; Any pair, users will get points.

It allowed us to discuss with the most advanced LPers (Goose Gang) and got great feedback. For normal user however, nearly all the liquidity went to…

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ISC/USDC CPMM pool. It’s not bad per se, but also not the most useful to the project, as they are both very stable to each other. We decided to let it continue as it nonetheless remain backstop liquidity.

Learning from our Meteora Quest, we took a different approach for our Quest on Orca.

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We decided this time to be laser focus and promote heavily only some pairs. We did JLP/ISC at the start, with some JUP incentives thrown in.

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Today, we are adding INF/ISC and also throwing in CLOUD incentives.

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The incentives for both JUP and CLOUD are coming from our Earnest allocations. We are using this because we want to experiment first before scaling this up. Also, what better use of the allocation than to promote ISCxINF?!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy to throw incentives. A part of me would love to just sit back and wait for that bag to 3-4x… But I also remember that we got this allocation for free, and that we are on a mission!

If this is somewhat successful, my hope is to see further DAO allocation to the ISCxINF liquidity.

So in short, there will be 35k CLOUD distributed over the next 2 weeks on the INF/ISC pool (0.16%) on Orca. The pool will also earn you 25 pts / 1 ISC per day on Prospera.

I invite you all to provide some liquidity and earn some rewards, points, and yield!

INF > SOL
ISC > USD

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Thanks for stepping up and do the grind! Hope this proposal can change the game on Solana

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incentives are a tricky one, but with clever minds we have at Sanctum, coupled with those you have in ISC then some interesting and sustainable incentives can be found i’m sure

and totally agree INF should be at the forefornt of Sanctum for LSTs to become one of the biggest if not thee biggest in its field, and some trickle incentives to holders, either beit in a increase INF value or a airdrop (personally the former is preferable but the how is the question) maybe there is something with holding ISC in the treasury that could be incorperated to the benefit of both, after all we want INF holders to 1st class citizens and not feel the need to have to dip into every defi platform to get a reward, simply holding should provide a % that doesn’t mean you have too)

I had come across ISC previously, not sure how, but it was prospera that brought me, tbf fair it was before i dipped my toes into defi with some seriousness, and in here we are blocked from using Orca due to regulations, and using a VPN didn’t appeal to me personally, as risk to far) but reallt liked the concept

hopefully the proposal is take a step further and those avenues explored

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Love the proactivity of ISC with the integration.

Will vote yes with regards to INF/ISC incentivisation if we do get to that point in time!

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  • Big Vision, Big Goals: Love how you’re aiming to take INF way beyond just a standard token. The idea of making INF the dominant SOL replacement is next-level ambitious and shows you’re not here for small wins. The whole “50x growth” thing? That’s the kind of moonshot thinking we need.
  • Smart Use of Incentives: Totally get why you’re not a fan of incentives, but you’re using them strategically to build network effects like Uber or Solana did. It’s smart to recognize that 7-10% APY alone isn’t enough to shake up the SOL network, and you’ve got a real plan to back it up with those incentives. Feels like you’re thinking long-term here, not just a quick pump and dump.
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Thanks guys for the kind word.

A quick follow-up.

First thing I’ve realized, is that rewards were way too high lol. This is the top rewards on Orca atm:
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Ours were in the $400~800 range (800 because $CLOUD pumped the day after we started… rip). I think it attracted a lot of eyeballs, and therefore TVL. My opinion is that it’s good to be at the top, but there was no need to overdo it. Lesson learnt.

Here is the result are the result after the rewards were over:

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Both pools had incentives for 2 weeks. JLP-ISC from 08/20~09/03 and INF-ISC from 08/27~09/10.

Conclusion: Rewards attract capital, some of it sticks, but about ~75% eventually leave the pool over the next days that rewards stop. This is neither particularly surprising nor bad. Those that put in TVL now know about JLP, INF and ISC. They bought into it, and provided liquidity to them. We’ve broken through their barrier of discomfort and uncertainty. This is really the task at hand, make people comfortable with $INF and $ISC.

Going forward, we have some new quest that will come online on Prospera, and we’ll see how to incorporate $INF into them, and probably throw extra $CLOUD rewards early on.

We are also paying attention to what PYUSD is doing, throwing MASSIVE amount of rewards in. time will tell if they manage to pivot into replacing USDC or not. It’s not something that we personally can do (we dont have ~$50M laying around), but nonetheless, there will be a lot to learn from that experiment. We have to remain frugal, but we have something that they don’t have:

A greater mission.

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We’ve integrated HawkFi on Prospera Point System, and we’ve started it off with a INF/ISC pool on top of Orca.

We have reduced the reward of $CLOUD to 20,000 for 2 weeks, and we’ll report back here on the result :slight_smile:

Cheers guys

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Thanks for the post, hadn’t thought about denominating currencies in INF moving forward but it does feel like a no brainer.
Will check out your profile and provide some liquidity, great info!

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Alright, we are concluding our incentives program on HawkFi.

Results:
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Similar TVL as for the Orca incentives. I was planning on less incentives (35k → 20k), but AGAIN, the moment we start, CLOUD pumps…

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I know unrelated… but…

The downside is that we’re trying to REDUCE incentives, and the price makes it so that it remains too high.

The reason we want to reduce incentives is because the current volume & TVL we are getting are ~way~ too expensive. We believe we can achieve the same volume & TVL with less incentives.

For now, we’ll stop the CLOUD reward, see how sticky the capital is, and most likely restart some incentives. We will continue to do small scale experiment to figure out what works and what doesn’t, while remaining efficient.

If we find something that works decently well, we’ll push for a CLOUD grant to scale it up. But for now, we prefer to operate this with full freedom so that we can try & fail faster.

All made possible thanks to the earnestness airdrop.

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Love the experiment, its great that it brings attention to the three projects thru just one medium, ORCA. Not only that, it brings defi integration for Sanctum’s LST token $INF further into the $SOL ecosystem. Would love to see $ISC TVL rise above thru further incentives fuelled by community incentives in the future.

Hence why we’ll be voting on your proposal as one of our favourite ones in the Cloudopedia.

Would love to talk about it a bit during the Townhall today:

Come vote for your pick of Proposals here and bring Cloudmen everywhere to unite:

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This is a real good case of utilising the earnestness airdrop.

SANCTUM ALIGNED :cloud:

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Great proposal and very sanctum aligned, glad to see you in the community

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Sanctum + ISC + Ore = ALPHA

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Awesome ideas, love the idea of ISC/INF.

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