The Empyrean Strength

Empyrean

Hey, everyone!

Let’s cut to the chase. Markets are red. There’s blood in the streets. Mt. Olympus fell brutally over last 7 days, other OHM forks got rekt, people are losing faith and even questioning the foundational principles like (3,3).

So how to survive?

Empyrean Dream

The word Empyrean means “highest heaven where celestials live”. The reason Empyrean exists is to provide a place where all us Celestials can live in peace & harmony and be affected as little as possible from all the externalities. It is our aim to collectively work together and strengthen it (always has been).

We think the best way to do it is by building financial tools which will generate additional economic activity in parallel within the Empyrean ecosystem. Creating a proper economy, offering new tools and activities for everyone to participate in, then redistributing the generated yields to EMPYR holders!

So without any further ado, our next offering is going to be around

Lending

We are working on a new lending platform to allow people to borrow against their collateral and hence being able to take leverage and have more efficiency around their capital.

The ability to leverage is probably one of the most desired financial tools in crypto, and it still doesn’t exist on Aurora. In our first article, we laid out our plans to have yield-bearing tokens like aUSDC as a part of our treasury. Aave is still not on Aurora and there’s just a very limited amount of things we can do to grow our treasury quickly. This is why we have decided to build the lending aspect ourselves. We’ll be taking inspiration from Aave v2 but will have very different tokenomics.

Some key points to note around our new product mentioned below.

Protocol

We’ll be starting off with blue chip assets as collateral like NEAR, ETH, and stables like USDC, UST etc. We also plan to offer bonds with sweet discounts in exchange of these yield bearing tokens (aUSDC equivalent).

We are targeting a testnet release for this within the next 5–6 weeks. It’s still a tough deadline as we’ll be working on adding new features and bonds, doing new partnerships, launching our DAO, etc in parallel as well, all with a small team.

Also, please note that a lot depends on basic infrastructure availability on Aurora as well (smooth oracles, liquidation bots functioning properly, and being well tested before mainnet).

Tokenomics

The new product will have its own token. Trying to tie in a whole new product without a token to an OHM fork is not trivial. We thought about this quite a lot and it is much more manageable to have a separate token with value accrual happening to EMPYR. That seemed to be the best overall design choice.

There’ll be no token sale, instead, it’ll be 100% community-owned. All EMPYR stakers will be airdropped 25% of the supply of the new token, more details will be out when we get closer to the launch. The airdrop calculation will be dependent on the staked time duration and the square root of the amount staked. Having quadratic invariant ensures a fairer distribution and prevents whale hoarding as someone staking 1000 EMPYR will only get around 10x more than someone staking 10 EMPYR (instead of 100 times more).

A big chunk of new supply would go to EMPYR treasury, and EMPYR DAO. Initially EMPYR DAO will be governing this new protocol till it matures enough to have a separate governance with its own token. DAO will be using the funds to different purposes like liquidity mining, incentives, DEX liquidity etc. The new token would also follow veCRV based model for its tokenomics.

Rough distribution as of now (subjected to change):

• EMPYR treasury: 40%
• EMPYR DAO: 35%
• sEMPYR holders: 25%

Aside from lending, we are making some protocol level changes in our current product to strengthen our treasury and curb high inflation.

1. Reducing rebase rate: Our initial rebase rate was set to 0.4% to offer really high APYs in the early stages. Over the next 7 days we’ll be reducing it down to 0.25%. This ensures that we don’t lose our backing quickly by reducing staking inflation. We have called the function to reduce the rebase rate and it’ll kick in beginning on the next epoch. The rebase rate will decrease down over the next 20 epochs with the target at 0.25%.
2. New bonds: We’ll be introducing more bonds in the coming weeks to have a solid treasury of blue-chip assets. Starting from this Friday, 1/21/2022, we will be offering EMPYR bonds in exchange for UST as our new reserve asset.
3. Wen airdrop? We are happy to announce the airdrop snapshot has been taken and we have identified 21,793 eligible addresses which can claim their share of a combined airdrop of 2500 EMPYR tokens (0.1147 EMPYR each). The claim button will go live on our website soon today.

You can expect more details around the new protocol and full detailed tokenomics and roadmap (along with the name) in the next few weeks for the lending platform.

Join our Discord to know more and be updated on all announcements as we will drop out alpha for our loyal Celestials!