The Method Finance Roadmap
The world of DeFi moves at a blistering pace. In fact, it moves so fast that it’s easy to lose track of time altogether. It’s humbling to reflect on the fact that it’s been less than 2 weeks since the Method Team published our first blog post. In it we laid out our vision to build the future of liquidity mining via NFTs and help shape the next wave of DeFi… And then we got to work.
Since that post, we’ve already hit some major milestones and the team has been heads down working to deliver a ton of value in a short time period. As we begin to approach the conclusion of our LBP, people are rightly asking for a sneak peak into the future of Method Finance, and what they are becoming a part of.
This post is dedicated to answering some of those questions and giving you all an idea of the direction we are going. Below you will find a mix of items ranging from already shipped roadmap features to items that we are still actively exploring. We are always sourcing new ideas from our community and have even begun to implement some of them, so please keep them coming!
But before looking to the future let’s do a quick recap on…
📍 Where We Are
🚀 Shipped: Launch Method Finance Website, Kickoff Post & Community
On March 21st, Method Finance was born. Like many great projects it started simple with a blog post, a website and a passionate early community.
It’s always a positive indicator that you are solving a big problem when despite not even having a fully built product yet, there is a community rallying around you.
🚀 Shipped: Launch Method NFT Minting
The first step in our plan required us to set up the contracts & an app for minting NFTs. However, we didn’t want to simply overlook this stage. While we want to move beyond the typical value prop of NFTs as primarily a piece of rare digital art, we also didn’t want to completely disregard the opportunity to bake intrinsic value into the NFTs from day 1.
That is why we decided to launch a few tiers of rare NFTs called Platinum (first minted 1–100), Gold (first minted 101–1000) and Mint (first minted 1001–5000). Each tier comes with its own set of rewards, and has been a great mechanism for rewarding our early community.
This was an approach to the NFTs that other players in this space overlooked, and has been a key initial differentiator for us. Our rare Method NFT tiers helped drive our community to mint 1,000+ Method NFTs in the first 24 hours and currently has us ranked #44 in the OpenSea top NFT rankings at the time of this writing (4 spots ahead of CryptoKitties).
🚀 Shipped: Method Finance Governance
From day 1, we wanted to make it clear that our community is what will ultimately drive the direction of Method Finance. In order to do this, we proposed a token (MTHD) that could help create decentralized governance.
You can access our Snapshot page here, in which members of our community can propose and vote on changes to our protocol.
⏱️ In progress: Method Finance LBP on Balancer
In order to ensure a fair and equitable launch for the members of our community we chose to launch an LBP on Balancer for 72 hours, and did not have a private sale or pre-mine. We will also lock up the liquidity to ensure that the funds are kept safe.
In our blog post, we stated the following purpose for have the liquidity bootstrapping event:
We’ve seen a lot of excitement and support during our LBP already, and we are excited to be listed on CoinGecko so early.
Now that we’ve recapped where we are right now, we’d like to turn the attention towards the future. As a reminder, it is important to stay nimble when operating in DeFi. And we never make a decision without deeply investigating it as a team and sourcing input from the community. But without further ado, let’s take a look at…
🗺️ Where We Are Going
🛠️ Actively Building: Method NFT Staking
In parallel with our LBP, the team has been hard at work building out the next set of features for our community. The next key feature is the staking interface in which members can stake different assets to their NFT and begin earning rewards.
We take a common set of principles to every feature that we build, namely we strive to make sure that our products are secure, usable, and well-designed. These aspects can sometimes be overlooked, and we see our approach as a tangible differentiator, as they increase the rate of adoption and drive confidence in the product.
Our current plan is to release the NFT staking functionality ramped soon and will have prototypes out for you all to look at beforehand.
🛠️ Actively Building: Method Finance Rewards
Once we have NFT staking built, we will then begin enabling rewards in the form of weekly airdrops and liquidity mining multipliers.
We have laid out an in-depth explanation of how our rewards program works. Reminder, that there is still time to mint your own Method NFT, before the rewards go into effect. Our goal is to also have this functionality ramped as soon as possible so you can all begin collecting your well-deserved rewards.
🔎 Exploring: Launch Method multi-chain compatibility. Make Method available on L2 solutions like Polygon, Xdai (also exploring BSC).
Problem: Gas fees are really high on Ethereum right now (it’s a substantial cost just to complete the process of minting, staking, claiming). This often makes liquidity mining only a viable option for whales.
Solution: Deploy on L2 solutions to mitigate gas fees. We believe this will help democratize access to our solution and allow us to bring the value of Method Finance to more members of our community.
🔎 Exploring: Onboard projects from the Polygon ecosystem.
Problem: We need to continue to drive widespread adoption of the NFTs. This is a relatively new concept to DeFi, and the more projects driving awareness the better.
Solution: We are actively working with the Polygon team. We have known them for years and are big fans of how quickly they innovate. Our first step is to onboard projects from the Polygon ecosystem so they can reward LPs who stake to Method NFTs. Expect more on this soon.
🔎 Exploring: ERC-1155 / tokenizing NFTs
Idea: Tokenize NFTs to allow fungibility of unique items.
Examples: The ERC-1155 standard allows for both fungible and non fungible tokens to be built using the same contract. We’ve seen this implemented by groups like Ark gallery, which allows people to crowdfund rare digital art pieces by owning a fraction of the token and then voting on whether or not to sell it if there’s an offer.
Another interesting use case has been what NIFTEX has been doing with their NFT indices, such as digital real estate or digital cards.
The Method use case: An idea we have been exploring is allowing members to tokenize a Method NFT and sell pieces of it. An NFT that has a large amount of staked tokens has an outsized value. This NFT can be tokenized to allow for division of ownership.
🔎 Exploring: Decentralized Identity for Verifiable NFTs
Problem: Hard to trust the NFTs and their owners since there is no good way within DeFi to associate a real world identity.
Solution: Bringing decentralized identifiers to NFTs that will provide trust in NFT ownership and the DeFi ecosystem with verifiable data tied to them and the addresses that own them.
This is an area that members of our team have worked on for years, providing us with unique domain expertise.
🔎 Exploring: Liquidity allowance directly from Vaults
Problem: DeFi protocols have seen a number of attacks. They ranged from flash loans to smart contract bugs to team rug pulls. How can we mitigate these?
Solution: Not pooling funds in a central contract reduces these risks to a great extent. Instead of central pooling, protocols can build interfaces to the Universal Vault Standard that can pull liquidity from vaults directly when needed. LPs can set allowances on how much liquidity each project can pull from their vault. They maintain full custody of funds at all times and can reset allowances at will.
🏡 Community idea: Nesting Method NFT vaults.
Problem: It can be difficult to keep track of a lot of NFTs, and can quickly lead to compounding gas costs.
Solution: Many members of the community have minted more than one Method NFT and have been raising concerns around manageability and ease of reward claiming. It becomes tedious to stake to different NFTs and claim rewards for each one of them. So we plan to upgrade the vault template and allow nesting multiple Method NFTs under one.
If you want to see an example of what this would look like, check out ethitem.
For competitive reasons, we have intentionally left out some of the details of how we will be implementing some of the above roadmap items. However, as our team has shown, with the help of our community we can accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. We can’t wait to share more details with you all soon!
