2020 has been a year like no other in our lifetime, in all areas we can possibly imagine - personal, social, and crypto. Last new year eve, dForce was just several months away from closing our first strategic financing from CMBI and launching our second protocol.
We started 1Q 2020 in full speed ramping up our lending protocol, adding a variety of assets and becoming the lending protocol with the highest number of supported wrapped BTC tokens and stablecoins. Our stablecoin lending volume toped the rank globally in March 2020. We completed our second institutional fundraising round led by Multicoin and co-invested by CMBI and Huobi. Then the once-in-a-lifetime financial turmoil hit the market, and crypto had its worst week since 2013 and the broader capital market had its worst drawdown since the global financial crisis in 2008 with deep corrections and liquidation on March 12 (aka “Black Thursday”). dForce managed to navigate the market turmoil unscratched and our TVL grew substantially since Mar 12 and ranked 7th globally.
2Q 2020 began with the biggest setback in dForce’s history, followed by the most dramatic turn of events, with lendf.me hacked. It took the dForce team less than two weeks to remedy this unexpected event. Within two weeks, we managed to secure all the funds back and distributed them back to all our users in full. Although this incident took us by a huge surprise, we recovered swiftly and came back even stronger. Immediately after all remedies were taken, we launched our first version of dForce Trade (stablecoin swap) in May.
Q3 began with the launch of two new protocols, Goldx and Yield Markets. The DeFi space then entered the Great Season of Agricultural Revolution, the hot summer of yield farming began, and we launched our very own yield farming in August, the first farming launched in China. DF token also listed on Huobi, our first major exchange listing. Our Yield Markets attracted at its peak close to $300m TVL and we became the largest DeFi project from China.
We upgraded dForce Trade into a liquidity aggregator in October and became a general aggregator connecting most liquidity in the market and now formed the very nascent form of a protocol matrix, with assets protocol (USDx, Goldx, dToken), trading protocol (liquidity aggregator) and integrated with close to a dozen protocols and wallets. We were developing our new lending protocol and we started a snapshot governance system, a step towards gradual decentralized governance. December came with Binance listing and our first venture into other blockchains (Binance Smart Chain) to expand beyond Ethereum. We deployed our Yield Markets and Trade aggregator on BSC and launched dForce Labs with our partners with $25m funding secured to fund and support the dForce ecosystem.
2020 has been tremendously surreal both on personal and social levels. On a positive note, crypto and DeFi also had its biggest market validation, with Bitcoin being institutionalized and DeFi across its verticals (stablecoin, lending, AMM etc) largely found their product market fit and went mainstream with industry’s TVL grew 20x over the year.
dForce also built a solid protocol bedrock and formed its very own version of protocol matrix.
As we march into the new year with great hope and excitement, we are confident 2021 will be a year of unforeseen growth, as we come close to the launch of our lending protocol, featuring:
- A more robust risk model
- Flash loan support
- Multicurrency support, natively support to borrow any local currency, truly open the door for a global multicurrency lending platform and liquidity market
- Public-private pool support and catered for customized CeFi support
- Fine-tuned features for supporting fixed term and fixed interest rate loans
- Unsecured lending
On security, security is above all our decision making, and there is no budget cap for matters related to improving security. It is mandated to engage at least two top tier audit firms for all our critical protocol security review. Our previously engaged auditors include Trail of Bits, Quanstamp, Peckshield, Slowmist. On the asset support, all assets required to pass our thorough risk assessments before onboarding into our protocols.
On the development front, in addition to the launch of our much anticipated new lending protocol, our core development priority will center around our key protocols, adding more features of our core lending engine, connecting our yield markets with our lending protocol and building AMM within the lending protocol itself. In the meantime, we will leverage on ecosystem project and community development resource to explore other protocols, i.e algorithmic asset/stablecoin etc. Our priority is also to integrate with more protocols with our core engines and build synergies and network effects around the core protocols.
On governance, dForce will begin to further delegate its governance to its token holders and start with full on-chain governance for our asset protocols and gradually expand the governance to our lending protocol. Our goal is to achieve complete on-chain governance for all our key protocols by end of 2021.
On community efforts, we recently launched our volunteer and evangelist initiatives to actively engage with token holders and community members. We have a strong local community in China, and will be expanding into other markets. We hope our vertical integration will help expand the user base to an even broader public.
On ecosystem, apart from the dozen protocols we’re integrated with, in the new year, we will form a closer integration and synergies with our key protocol partners, with investment and liquidity support from dForce Labs to further expand our portfolio of integrated protocols. At dForce, we’re committed to continue and expand the efforts for full open source and open collaboration.
On a closing note, we believe 2021 will be a great year for both the crypto industry and dForce alike. We are beginning to witness one of the greatest transformations of the financial system as we know it.