The Year In Review
Editorial
Dear Alchemix Friends,
We have arrived at the end of the year - and what a year it has been! It’s hard to believe that Alchemix was a secret skunkworks project at the beginning of 2021. Since its launch on February 27th, Alchemix developed into such an impactful project, with a vibrant community and a promising future.
In this issue we will take a nostalgic look back at the year that has been, revisiting protocol milestones and highlights from the community. It’s not all shoegazing though - we also have the latest news from the protocol and community, including the latest media appearances and an update on the Community NFT drop that has taken place in December.
As always, community submissions to the newsletter are welcomed and may result in recognition from the protocol.
Thanks to the Alchemix team, community, and broader Ethereum and DeFi ecosystem for an amazing year. Let’s look forward to an even better 2022!
Alchemix Protocol Stats
Total Value Locked (TVL) $1,530,000,000
DAI Vault TVL $437,582,506
DAI Vault APY 4.354%
ETH Vault TVL ETH 107,851 ($428,923,427)
ETH Vault APY 4.736%
Protocol owned liquidity via bonding 4.5% ($3,666,438)
Twitter Followers 55,300
Discord Members 11,000
News & Announcements
Alchemix v2 Audit Update
In the previous issue of the Alchemix Newsletter we provided a brief status of the progress of the Alchemix v2 audit. However, community interest is so strong that we continue receive enthusiastic questions about the status of v2 almost every single day in the Alchemix Discord!
Fortunately, we can now reveal that the audit process is nearing completion, and barring any unforeseen issues, is expected to be finalised early in the new year! Feedback from the core development team is that the process with Runtime Verification (RV) has been constructive, professional, and absolutely beneficial for the project. The decision to engage RV so early in the development cycle has proven to be a major win for Alchemix because it allowed RV the necessary time to gain a deep understanding of the project, and for the two teams to build a solid relationship upon which to collaborate for the audit process. Side note: subscribe to the newsletter for further insights into the audit process in a future issue!
Once the v2 audit is signed, sealed, and delivered by RV, the core team will be able to make preparations for the deployment of Alchemix v2. Stay tuned for further updates on these preparations, and an eventual launch date!
Christmas Eve Fireside Chat
This is a short announcement to remind you that the regular weekly Fireside Chat will run as normal on Friday the 24th of December. Interested parties are always encouraged to drop by the Alchemix Discord from 12.00 UTC for a chat with the team and the community, as well as the occasional sprinkling of alpha!
The 12 Days of AlchemixMas
In the previous issue of this newsletter we reported that the Alchemix team had quietly commissioned a series of Alchemix-themed animated graphics, to be issued as NFTs to community members. The 12 Days of AlchemixMas has now been underway for 8 days, with the following NFTs dropped so far:
There are still 4 days remaining, and today’s link is hidden somewhere in this newsletter (hint: it’s relatively close by…). Follow @AlchemixFi and keep an eye out in the Alchemix Discord for the remaining drops.
Never Get (Forcefully) Liquidated Again
Forced liquidations are a recurring theme in DeFi, and November and December have been no exception. Alchemix is designed specifically to prevent its users from being liquidated. See the video below for an explanation of the innovative lending mechanism pioneered by Alchemix.
Bank Error In Your Favour
A minor accounting error has been identified in the Alchemix vaults. An investigation has confirmed that the probability of encountering this issue is low, and that the impact is very limited.
Only a very small number of users were affected by this miscalculation, and all have already been compensated for at least their loss, with a minimum of 0.0042069 ETH or 16.9420 DAI respectively having been refunded directly to their addresses. Alchemix core team member Gorby has also provided a detailed explanation of the issue.
The Year In Review
It has been quite a year for Alchemix! But actually, only a year for the Core team - for the rest of us, it hasn’t even been a year! Alchemix, DeFi, and crypto have been building and growing non-stop in 2021, with plenty more to look forward to in 2022. The newsletter team thought it would be good to take a breather and look back on all that has happened in the past year - and there is a lot to look at! Please enjoy this Alchemix year-in-review featuring comments from the core team and other community members.
February - Pre-Launch and Launch
Alchemix was not always Alchemix - early versions were a future yield protocol that functioned very differently, and was called Cheese Fi. After the food token craze died down, Cheese Fi evolved into Alchemix (I think most of us are OK with that development). Around this time is also when devs realized that they could offer self-repaying loans in addition to loans based on future yield - which ended up being a big selling point of the platform.
Alchemix was launched February 27th, 2021, and immediately attracted a much larger TVL than was anticipated. This was also the moment everything the team had worked on got its first real test. Gorby revealed that his preferred method of coping with this sudden added pressure involved confirming with the rest of the team that “We’re still on Ropsten…right?”
March - Yunt Capital
For those who didn’t already know, Yunt Capital originated in the Alchemix Discord. Community Yunt Butler volunteered to share the story:
I love the Alchemix community, and of course my favorite memory is the creation of Yunt Capital! We met by chance and came together under common interests of shitposting, throwing ideas around with the Alchemix devs, discussing interesting problems in the space, and most importantly aping into new projects together. The name Yunt came from Sath using the word "shunt" to describe throwing his money into a new project haphazardly, and Rogue arguing that the proper term was "yeet". Sath combined them into Yunt and it became a meme. It started with all of us changing our discord handles to include Yunt Squad, then turned into us adding fictional job titles- even Scoopy and some of the devs joined in. We kept the meme going for fun and started referring to ourselves as Yunt Capital whenever we joined a new project discord and people started to know us as such. People started asking what Yunt meant, and our ambiguous answers only made it funnier to us and increased the stickiness of the meme.
I'm not sure I can point to a single moment when it went from meme to reality. At some point people started showing interest in us as advisors, contributors, and offering us spots in funding rounds, and it took off from there. So it sort of just developed organically as a result of Alchemix community happenings, our relationships with each other, our interest/involvement in the space, and the power of a good meme.
May - Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban bought ALCX! And then sold… and then bought back in! And then sold again. We’ve since seen him develop a bit of a reputation for his paperhands, so we can’t take it too personally. He also made a brief appearance in the project Discord to wish us well - pretty cool to brush shoulders with a billionaire on the internet! However, we’re already used to celebrity interactions due to CMSHoldings and Olympus rockstar Jawz popping in to meme with us on occasion.
September - Olympus Pro and Defi 2.0
Over the course of 2021, it became more and more apparent that standard liquidity mining was not a sustainable way to source liquidity. New strategies to address this problem emerged out of DeFi with Tokemak, Olympus Pro, and Curve/Convex offering creative solutions. Alchemix realized that these new developments could drastically rehab the ALCX tokenomics, which all culminated in Scoopy’s now famous (or infamous) Defi 2.0 thread. Alchemix was an Olympus Pro launch partner, which meant it was one of the first third-party bonding programs to launch on Olympus Pro. The program has since grown significantly, currently sitting on over $5 million total value bonded. Additionally, Alchemix is set to begin bonding CVX through Olympus Pro to more effectively incentivise liquidity on Curve.
October - Alchemix v2, Tokemak C.o.R.E & Goldman Sachs
October was an exciting month, with the reveal of the Alchemix v2 roadmap on Friday October 8th during the usual Fireside chat in the Alchemix Discord. This was followed shortly by another round of Alchemix media appearances, with co-founder Scoopy Trooples running the podcast gauntlet. Alchemix also pulled off an impressive result in the inaugural Tokemak Collateralisation of Reactors Event (C.o.R.E), finishing in 2nd place ahead of a number of other blue-chip DeFi protocols.
Later in October, Alchemix was named alongside a small handful of other DeFi groups/protocols in a Goldman Sachs internal DeFi report. However, this was quickly overshadowed by the launch of the official Alchemix Newsletter, which was launched shortly after!
November - Alchemix v2 Delivered for Audit
November capped off a momentous effort by the Alchemix core team, with the v2 platform being delivered to Runtime Verification for formal audit. Alchemix voters in the Tokemak CoRE event were also rewarded with the release of the Alchemech NFT. Time is running out for claiming, so don’t forget to get yours!
December - AlchemixMas
The core team has created a series of POAPs as a fun way to reward loyal community members. Don’t forget to claim all your P… your PO… your POAPs (phew) before the end of the year! (Got a little Gorby POAP bot PTSD there, sorry). Come to think of it, have you figured out how to claim today’s POAP yet?!
Other Notable Moments
Some members of the core and newsletter team wanted to share some moments that may not have stood out the community, but for better or worse became a significant memory:
Gorby: When DexGuru erroneously showed our ALCX-ETH SLP TVL going to zero on several occasions:
Scoopy: Realizing that people were liquidating their collateral to farm more in the alUSD pool, and then seeing over 100m DAI enter the transmuter this way. It was totally unexpected and has turned into a wonderful bonus for the Alchemix system.
Technocratic: I joined the Alchemix core team about a year ago, and it has absolutely been the wildest year of my life. Trading in my cushy fintech startup job with real-world co-workers for a shadowy team of anons I met on discord sounds insane when I say it out loud, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I think the thing that impressed me most about jumping into Alchemix & DeFi full-time is just how much everyone is actively looking to help everyone else out. The amount of giga-brains in this space is amazing, and even though we all work on/for different protocols, and some of them might even compete, there is still a sense of camaraderie among DeFi builders in that we're all on the same team just trying to push the space as a whole forward. I'm really grateful to be a part of that, and I'm proud of what we've done and are doing with Alchemix. 2022 is going to be HUGE.
Biddls: I was working on the problem of affording sufficient liquidity in my own time. Scoopy found me building this hybrid abomination between a uni V2 and curve (I'm still not convinced that I was able to get the message across about what I was trying to build!). So I was passed to the Doc who reached out to me asking for a call, and he tells me I’m solving a problem that doesnt even exist yet and demolishes my idea. Before I could feel too down, he tells me that there is something for me to work on instead… and the rest is history. The Doc changed my life and I'll forever be grateful (also shout out to Gorby). [Editors note: the something is StreamPay]
Ov3rkoalafied: This was my favorite moment of the year, courtesy of #degenerate-yunting.
Butler: Two of my favorite memories are the creation of the #degenerate-yunting channel, and the legendary BigDickBandit audit. The #degenerate-yunting channel came about because any non-crypto related talks in off-topic would always get drowned out by YC member talk on the latest shitcoins, yield farms, and NFTs to ape into. Although YC doesn't spend a ton of time there anymore, it still exists and sees a lot of activity from all sorts of lovable degens. The BDB audit was the very first Alchemix audit, written by one of the funniest OG community members in that Discord. You can still access it by typing the !bandit command.
Snape: I've been with the team since way before it was called Alchemix, over 18 months ago. Previously I ran a successful media production company that I’d spent 10 years building up following an even longer term in traditional employment. It wasn’t easy to accept the concept that something so fragile and conceptual could lure me away from what I’d spent so long building. Being part of something like Alchemix has turned everything I thought I knew about communications completely on its head. Whilst I’ve been lucky enough to utilise my own skillset. I’ve learned so much about the growing world of crypto communities and DeFi from other more experienced people in the team. We’ve also managed to stay strong as a group for all this time which is pretty amazing for an anon team from all corners of the globe. The growing team of community contributors is nothing if not inspiring. How is it possible for decentralisation of a growing platform in a nascent space to thrive? It’s still a mystery to me but one I’m infinitely curious about. Do I feel safe where I am now? I wish! Do I feel excited about the next year, hell yeah!
Alchemix Real World Use Cases
To wrap up the year in review, we’d like to list some creative uses cases we saw emerge for the Alchemix vaults. Let’s take a look at a few of those now.
James Krahula is saving up capital to eventually put a down payment on a rental property
mZeroNine started depositing his entire salary into the Alchemix vaults to live off the loan.
Hource financed a Tesla Loan.
Forester is financing repairs to a used timber sawmill.
Some users including Ken Savvy have begun investigating mortgages through Alchemix vaults as a service.
2022 And Beyond
Well, that was quite the year - but 2022 is shaping up to be even bigger! In the next year, there are plans to launch V2 and lever its modular architecture to extend beyond its launch configuration, turn on revenue sharing, expand Alchemix to other chains, and numerous other small and large projects to continue Alchemix’s journey towards bringing self-repaying interest-free non-liquidatable loans to the masses. LFG!!!
Community & Media
Tech Talk with Chainlink
Alchemix co-founder Scoopy Trooples appeared as a guest on Chainlink’s Tech Talk series for a deep dive into Alchemix. The session was held on December 15 and covered Alchemix v2, the recent Chainlink <-> Alchemix integrations, and general trends in the DeFi (2.0) ecosystem.
Probably Nothing
Bear Insurance With Alchemix
Alchemix community member RandCorp explains their defensive market strategy, which uses Alchemix to protect against potential downside movements in the markets.
Governance
See below for a summary of all governance proposals since the previous issue of the newsletter.
References
Stay safe online! When using Alchemix, always be sure that you are interacting with the official resources:
Website: https://alchemix.fi
Twitter: @AlchemixFi
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/alchemix
dApp: https://app.alchemix.fi
Medium: https://alchemixfi.medium.com