As Bloq co-founder Matthew Roszak put it at this year’s Bloomberg Crypto event “Vesper … has been independently audited fifty times. Our next competitor was audited three or four times.” Now, Vesper is focused on allowing other DeFi protocols to draft behind this investment in software quality. On top of this, they stand to gain higher average APYs, and share in Vesper’s revenue.
While Vesper has historically attracted a risk-conscious segment of DeFi users, it has discovered it resonates even more strongly with other DeFi protocols. Vesper has thus revealed itself as a DeFi middleware engine — a way for other protocols to inherit Vesper’s unique level of trust and security while supercharging APYs.
DeFi Comes Back to Earth, Not to Crash but to Refuel
DeFi has in many ways lost its lust for Ponzi APY thanks to some high-profile hacks and dramatic market crashes. Amid this more sober environment, other protocols are looking for ways to quickly build trust and offer additional reliability.
In these early stages, smaller projects have started to reflect this trend and begun integration with Vesper. These include Thor Finance (Avalanche: Nodes-as-a-Service), Arable Protocol (Avalanche: Synthetic Farming), and Saddle Finance (Ethereum: StableSwap). Alchemix integration (Ethereum: Self-repaying loans) will be quietly launching soon.
“Some bigger DeFi players are working out how to build with us,” Bloq Chief Strategist Zane Huffman said. “Integrating with Alchemix is another good example of what we’re currently up to. Having been fully tested by the bear market, we’re integrating with other DeFi protocols and therefore positioning ourselves well over the long term.”
Layered Approach
Bloq DeFi Growth Manager Michael McQuaid sees those sky-high APYs once so common in DeFi today as signposts warning some users to stay far, far away. The draw, then, comes from presenting a set of DeFi components that can be both exciting and sustainable.
“Vesper is a bet in favor of this trend, as we natively offer a boost to projects when they integrate productive, yield bearing Vesper Pool shares,” McQuaid said. “In this scenario, Vesper doesn’t need to have the highest APY on the market on its own — it needs to be the safest, most scalable way to add a 2-4% APY boost to whatever a third party protocol is already doing.”
It’s a layered approach that combines elements of quality-management (on the order of aforementioned 50 independent audits) and revenue sharing that will position Vesper as one of the most useful bricks in the DeFi-money-LEGO box.