A crowd loan is a Polkadot (DOT) crowdsourcing event in Polkadot that allows the community to support project bids in upcoming parachain slot aucti
A crowd loan is a Polkadot (DOT) crowdsourcing event in Polkadot that allows the community to support project bids in upcoming parachain slot auctions. Users contribute DOT, receive rewards in project tokens and get their DOT back in two years (a standard slot lease duration). This mechanic helps projects raise substantial capital in DOT tokens that may even exceed a few hundred million in dollar notion value.
The obvious downside for users is the need to lock their DOT for two years where they don’t have access to their liquidity during this lockup period.
In mainstream finance, there are private companies and initial public offering (IPO) lockup agreements. The lockup agreements prohibit company insiders — including employees, their friends, family and venture capitalists — from selling their shares for a set period of time. These shares are “locked up” to ensure that their owners don’t enter the public market too soon after the public offering.
To work around restrictions on lockup stocks, people could enter arrangements where they lock in their gains or even get some money in advance toward the day they can sell their holdings. Corporate lawyers started prohibiting these arrangements because they would create unnecessary market pressure and, in some cases, introduce the legal risks that lockups intend to avoid.
The concept of liquid staking
Fortunately, this scrutiny has nothing to do with the blockchain realm that is not restricted by the concerns of private lawyers. We may very well create claim rights on the locked assets by issuing a special type of derivative tokens that represent these rights on the underlying principal assets.
Derivative tokens are usually minted at a 1-to-1 ratio for the locked tokens. They can be issued by a liquid staking provider if users send initial assets to their custodian address or the target staking protocol may send derivative tokens directly to every depositor to simplify accounting. The latter mechanism is widely used in Ethereum-based automated market makers (AMMs) and pooled lending protocols that issue liquidity pool tokens — e.g., AAVE, Compound, or Curve.
In any case, there is always a clear arbitrage between the market and the eventual custodian. Every user can claim underlying at some point by submitting derivative tokens back to the staking protocol. If the arbitrage is immediate, the ratio between derivative tokens and locked assets nears 1-to-1. Otherwise, it may deviate depending on how fast the underlying can be unlocked.
This concept opens up an emergent market for many decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. You may already see quite a few of them bringing liquidity for various types of collateral, active stakes in proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and other non-fluid assets. For instance, Lido has absorbed over $6.7 billion worth Ether (ETH) staked in Ethereum 2.0 (which is almost 19% of all ETH staked in Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract). Marinade Finance managed to get over $1.6 billion worth of Solana’s SOL locked via its protocol on Solana.
The success of liquid staking providers is highly dependent on the potential size of locked assets and the activeness of investors they target.
Liquid staking and crowdloans on Polkadot
The design of Polkadot crowdloans quite naturally marries with liquid staking too. The anticipated volume of liquidity to be locked in crowdloans may reach 20% of the DOT supply (which comes to an impressive eight billion U.S. dollars). Secondly, crowdloan participants are usually the most active investors who always look for maximizing their gains. Liquid staking seems to be an attractive opportunity for them.
Certainly, the most advanced DeFi teams of Polkadot are already leveraging this use case. Each of them has introduced its version of liquid DOT that is minted on their chains at a 1-to-1 ratio for initial DOT locked via their platforms. This is what these projects are currently offering for their users:
Liquid staking is pretty much an excellent opportunity for Polkadot-based DeFi projects to boost their total value locked (TVL) significantly from the get-go. Liquid DOT will be the liquidity that sticks with them for the whole parachain lease period of two years.
Major market players could not miss this opportunity as well. For instance, there is a liquid DOT introduced by Binance, called BDOT, and the exchange plans to make use of that liquidity both in trading and speculation. But, we will be considering only liquid staking by ecosystem projects, so Binance USD (BUSD) and wrappers on other exchanges will be out of our today’s scope.
Liquid DOT’s traction so far
Before we delve into the actual mechanics behind each setup, let’s consider some numbers we’ve gathered as of November 15 at 9:00 pm UTC:
As we can see, definite leaders here are Parallel and Acala. Acala handles this huge amount thanks to its primary positioning as a top project in the ecosystem. Parallel managed to get a good head start by offering…
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