The Bancorian | A Weekly Summary-October 31st, 2021

9 min readNov 5, 2021

💻Development

The current development of V3 is coming along and we are getting close to completion. At this point, we are close enough that we are ready to announce features later this month. The audits are going well and we would like to thank the community. We do not take your patience for granted and we appreciate the continuing support.

New UI screens have been pushed to the beta interface that we are looking to get feedback on. This includes:

A new pools🤿
A new voting interface🗳
A new tokens page💰

These new interfaces are being added to beta.bancor.network which is powered by our new APIs and performance will be faster. We will eventually shift the entire web app over to the new, faster interface.

🌐Ecosystem

🌀Bancor Vortex🔥

October 2021 ended with a total of ~218K $vBNT burned in total. On 10/31 we saw the highest amount (~40.4K) of $vBNT burned since the inception of the vortex

This is month is inline with the last 5 months in which we have burned >~200K $vBNT monthly 🌀🔥

+ — — — — — — — — + — — — — — — — +
| time            | burnedamount  |
+ — — — — — — — — + — — — — — — — +
| 4/1/2021 0:00   | 66613.12837   |
| 5/1/2021 0:00   | 234190.261    |
| 6/1/2021 0:00   | 240030.686    |
| 7/1/2021 0:00   | 212623.0538   |
| 8/1/2021 0:00   | 281869.4172   |
| 9/1/2021 0:00   | 214951.2059   |
| 10/1/2021 0:00  | 218338.8625   |
+ — — — — — — — — + — — — — — — — +

For this week, we saw roughly ~50K in $vBNT that was burned by the vortex. At current $BNT prices (~$4) this equates to ~$200K worth of $BNT locked forever.🔒

+ — — — — — — — — -+ — — — — — — — +
| time             | burnedamount  |
+ — — — — — — — — -+ — — — — — — — +
| 10/24/2021 0:00  | 5649.439292   |
| 10/25/2021 0:00  | 6457.265453   |
| 10/26/2021 0:00  | 4869.445646   |
| 10/27/2021 0:00  | 5914.547045   |
| 10/28/2021 0:00  | 0             |
| 10/29/2021 0:00  | 17365.09784   |
| 10/30/2021 0:00  | 9506.698719   |
| Sum              | 49762.49399   |
+ — — — — — — — — -+ — — — — — — — +

The cumulative burned amount increased from ~1.378m on 10/23 to ~1.428m on 10/30.

📊Key Metrics

7-day total cumulative fee revenue: ~1.1m

30-day total cumulative fee revenue: ~$4.3m

Source: token terminal

📈 The average daily revenue for different time periods:

7 days ~$157K
30 days ~$143K

The 30 days annualized daily revenue equates to ~$52.2m in annual trading fees paid to LPs. For the past 30-days, trading fee revenue is down (~$800k) as compared to the previous 30 days.

💰 In terms of protocol revenue, Bancor earned around ~$2.14m in monthly revenue for $BNT holders. It is ranked the 8th lowest by Price to Sales (P/S) ratio compared to other crypto projects

🔌Integrations and Updates

Volume is up on Bancor and metrics are up across the board. We hit an all-time high for volume in Q4. Today it is over 100m in the past 24 hours and a lot of the volume is being driven by the metaverse tokens that we have listed which include $MANA, $ENJ, and $ARCONA.
We will be announcing the first phase of Bancor V3 and any features included in that release later this month. This will happen on November 29th and it will be a day before we will make an announcement in person at DCentral Miami.
We recently had Tiago from the community join the project as a full-time contributor. This will be the second hire from the community with Mark being the first one. Tiago will be working with Steven and help out with a lot of the business development efforts, whitelisting, interfacing with projects, and integrations we are looking to build around Bancor. We are excited that he came through the Bancor DAO and it is an organic way for us to add to the team.

💪Social Channels

🍕Bancorians fake flexing? Never!

We have seen a lot of cameo personalized videos make their way to CT (crypto Twitter) these past few weeks. Popular among them are the Island Boys which went viral on TikTok and hardrocknick whose “where am i, where are you” skit led to countless remixes from the crypto community. #Bancorians not missing a beat decided to jump in on the fun with a cameo of their own 👀👇

🎲Random Musings

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Key among the survival of a project is its ability on whether it is capable of continuum innovation. If you are a leader, you are bound to have clones that will try to replicate your success. This reinforces the legitimacy of the original and leads to higher recognition. It is key to note that one can easily clone a project but its community, not so much. Case in point, there are Bancor community members that have been around since 2017 (looking at all you OGs). There are very few projects that can claim such an awesome feat! 🤗

👻👻I hope everyone enjoyed Halloween this past week 🎃. If you are a Bancor LP, no need to be afraid. We keep you safe from any 🧛‍♂️ whose purpose is to drain 🩸your tokens🍬🍭.

Always good to see some of our token communities tell us why Bancor is the best place to LP. We are already aware of the unique capabilities that our protocol provides but there is a large ocean of LPs that are still suffering when their token moons. Unfortunately, most won’t realize the loss that they experienced until they withdraw their positions. 😓

Some tweets from the official Bancor account in case you missed them

🎩Bancorians in the Wild

A collection of weekly tweets from some of the greatest Bancorians🧠💪

☑Governance

👈Previous Proposals

This past week (10/25/21), we saw two proposals on snapshot that were able to meet quorum and supermajority requirements:

👉Current Proposals

For this week (10/31/21), we have several proposals on snapshot for voting:

Head over to snapshot to cast your votes.

❗If you aren’t voting regularly make sure you unstake your vBNT from governance and delegate instead. Self-nominated delegates maintain a page on Discourse to inform other community members of their intended voting behavior. If you disagree with the way your delegate votes, you can always vote manually to override their decision on your behalf.❗

☎Bancor Weekly Call

In this week’s Community Call recording, Bancor shared the development updates above and featured the Railgun team to discuss a collaboration with the Bancor ecosystem.

An introduction to Railgun (14:17)

“A small community of passionate and skilled privacy enthusiasts are developing RAILGUN, a privacy and anonymity system built directly on-chain on Ethereum, from which you can interact directly with DEXs, lending platforms, and popular smart contract applications. RAILGUN keeps your actions secret, protecting your privacy, and allows you to keep your identity secret — thus giving you anonymity. RAILGUN does this without you ever having to leave the safety and liveliness of Ethereum and its booming ecosystem. Not only that, RAILGUN will bring its revolutionary advantages to other blockchain ecosystems in rapid succession.”

Christopher from Railgun believes that the current x * y = k model for other AMMs is broken, rendering liquidity provision a type of “soft rug” due to IL. Pool ROIs for RAIL have actually been negative on Uniswap, Sushiswap and Balancer. Railgun would therefore like a Bancor whitelisting.

A deep understanding of the IL issue is currently lacking in the Railgun community, but their core contributors will work to increase that awareness and Bancor community members are welcome in their Telegram!

Q&A (05:53 and 26:32)

Why is the ARCONA pool’s fee 5%?
That pool has been around since 2017 or 2018 and the fee hasn’t been updated since. The Arcona team wants all ARCONA liquidity on Bancor, so the fee can be relatively high. It can always be re-visited in the event of competition. The Arcona team also bootstrapped the liquidity with their own BNT, and have integrated Bancor’s swap feature.

Once V3 is out, we should prioritize an automatic fee structure. Connect with @MB_Richardson on Telegram if you have expertise in dynamic fee-setting.

Should Bancor be offering larger bug bounties?
There’s a compelling argument for it, especially as V3 rolls out. Currently, the Bancor Foundation pays bug bounties, but perhaps the DAO has the power to decide on the size of the reward.

What’s Bancor’s vision on (re)branding going forward?
We’ve hired a full-time creative director, Sruly, who has helped us build out a more attractive and consistent brand and UI. These will be live shortly.

We will likely retain the name and logo, as rebranding so close to V3 is too short notice. The brand isn’t unattractive, it was just underutilized currently. Take a look at the new colors and UI later this week!

Another pitfall of rebranding is becoming associated with the hundreds of new projects cropping up every week that lack trust and proven track records.

What are the current problems with Bancor’s marketing, if any?
We are product-oriented marketers, and V2.1 had some deficiencies (high gas fees, lack of composability) preventing us from being able to pitch the protocol as extensively as possible, despite having a superior LPing solution. These are being fixed in V3.

Upcoming studies into IL will help us expose the unprofitability of LPing on other AMMs, and we’ll contact influencers and media thereafter.

Some community members still believe a re-design of the logo would be useful, drawing on the example of Apple and the brand loyalty it has created with its stylishness. Trader Joe is another great example of memorable branding.

Will we be on other L1s or L2s quick enough to stem the growing frustration around gas fees?
Ethereum is the whale’s chain right now, and we’re planning to deploy on L2 shortly after V3 is live. We’re deploying on Ethereum first simply for technical and governance reasons. We acknowledge that our gas optimizations on Ethereum won’t be entirely sufficient to provide the solution many users seek.

Why don’t we give specific release dates?
Because development takes time and can be unpredictable, so it’s better not to raise expectations and then encounter unforeseen delays.

🤝Connect Projects with Steven, Bancor Business Development Lead:

Are there tokens you’re holding that we should whitelist on Bancor? DM @FoxSteven about it or connect us with any community leaders/core contributors on the project. Steven leads all our BD efforts and will connect with the team and work with them to get whitelisted or build a deeper pool.

📔Bancor Grants:

We have content grants active at all times. Any users that want to create videos or guides, please reach out to Nate Hindman (@NateHindman on Twitter or telegram).
We have analytics grants. If you want to work on Bancor data projects or if you are good with working on blockchain data and APIs, we can always use your help!
As always, we have rolling developer grants for those who want to build and innovate on Bancor’s infrastructure.