Greetings fellow degens!

If you’ve been following us at Blocmates for a while, then you’re probably well aware of our affinity for the legends at Maia DAO. The team are absolute gigabrains who have built a suite of incredibly impressive DeFi primitives.

Well, we are now here to tell you that they are far from done. They have a whole suite of updates and new products on the way that are very exciting, and we will be covering all of it for you. However, before we get to that, I think it’s prudent we give you a quick recap of everything Maia DAO has accomplished so far.

Beginnings

Who remembers the early days of 2022? The bear market was just about to begin, although most people hadn’t realized it yet. LUNA, FTX, Celsius, and the others hadn’t collapsed as yet, and L2 szn was in full swing. People were essentially playing the alt L1 rotation game of 2021 but on a much smaller scale with the new L2s. 

One of the benefactors of this rotation was the Metis Network. A smart layer 2 offering users a quick & cheap transacting experience. A major part of what allowed the Metis rotation to last longer than others was the existence of Maia DAO, a protocol that was early to the ecosystem and benefited tremendously from it.

They positioned themselves perfectly to capture the majority of the L2s TVL. Being the yield powerhouse for the chain which raised liquidity through bonding and offered an efficient AMM in the form of Hermes protocol. Maia DAOs rise to stardom was impeccable.

Eventually, as the bear market continued to rear its ugly head, liquidity began flowing out of the ecosystem. This, however, did not phase the chads at Maia, who continued to build some very innovative products.

MAIA

It all began with the MAIA token.

Seeing the success the Olympus DAO and other OHM forks had with the bonding mechanism, Maia DAO decided to emulate the same to raise liquidity.

A MAIA Bonds event was launched where 2712 MAIA were minted. The protocol raised liquidity to incentivize their liquidity pools as well as to cover any other costs.

For these MAIA bonds to be valuable, the token needs to be demanded, which means there needs to be some form of utility. There are three ways through which this demand is derived:

·        Staking

·        Governance

·        Treasury Backing

For more detail on how exactly these three mechanisms tie into the broader Maia DAO ecosystem, check out our introductory article on Maia DAO here.

Essentially what you need to know is holding and staking MAIA gives you indirect exposure to the entire Maia DAO ecosystem. What is in this ecosystem? you may ask. Well, there’s a lot.

Hermes Protocol

Hermes Protocol was the first product built by Maia DAO.

It’s a DEX that forked solidly, the brainchild of Andre Cronje. It’s a DEX which allows you to trade pegged & non-pegged assets with low fees and low slippage. The first version of Hermes was similar to Uniswap V2, with the main differentiator being that pegged assets could be traded on it. Another point of difference was the unique reward distribution system with the HERMES token. Using the ve(3,3) gauges to align the incentives of all users with the protocol creating a sustainable flywheel effect.

While this initial version of Hermes worked perfectly, the team wasn’t satisfied to rest on their laurels. Eventually, they launched Hermes V2. The V2 upgrade came with a plethora of new features. The three core features were:

·        Omnichain Unified Liquidity

·        A tokenomics transition from ve(3,3) to b(3,3)

·        Decentralised liquidity management

The unified liquidity solution was a complete change in the DEX’s architecture. It’s an Omnichain DEX called Hermes Ulysses, and you can read more about it here. However, this is the general gist of it. 

They created an Omnichain DEX where users can seamlessly swap assets across different chains through their port architecture, which uses Layer0 for the messaging layer.

There are multiple ports. Each chain has its own port, and all of the ports are connected to one unified pool. Whenever trades are made, all transactions are routed through the main pool, and then the users receive their funds through the port on the chain they are transacting on.

What’s really mind-blowing about Ulysses is the SDK (Software Development Kit) offering. Any team can simply attach this architecture to their Dapp, and users can directly interact with Ulysses through that Dapps UI.

Suppose you’re on Arbitrum and only have funds there. Rather than going through the tedious process of bridging. You can simply interact with a Dapp on Arbitrum that has the Ulysses SDK integrated. It’s as simple as that. 

The second change was a change to the tokenomics structure. For more details on this tokenomic change, check our article on Hermes V2 here. However, the general premise of this shift was that for a user or a protocol to maximize their rewards from the Hermes gauges, it would be a very tedious task to do it manually. Therefore, the shift to bHERMES made it so that users would automatically always maximize their rewards without needing to manually re-lock or do any of the other tasks.

The third aspect of V2 is TALOS.

TALOS

TALOS stands for Transparent Automated Liquidity Optimization Strategies. It’s a product built for liquidity position management.

Uniswap V3 introduced the concept of concentrated liquidity which completely changed the liquidity-providing game. With the improvement in efficiency came some technical complications that made it more difficult for non-sophisticated participants to provide liquidity.

The TALOS smart contracts run automated strategies Uniswap V3 and generate consistent returns for those who invest in their vaults. Other teams in DeFi are already integrating and building strategies on top of TALOS, allowing users to deposit into those strategies and passively enjoy active liquidity management.

An additional benefit of this product is that Maia DAO can use the liquidity it earned through its bonds to generate consistent returns for the treasury, which indirectly benefits MAIA holders and stakers.

TALOS is, of course, a much more technical product which we have gone into detail about in this article. Check it out to learn more.

However, there is one more piece to the Maia puzzle, and that is Maia DAO V2.

Maia DAO V2

The main difference with Maia V2 is a change to their tokenomics.

As we know, the primary purpose of MAIA was to first generate liquidity through bonds and then provide holders and stakers with exposure to the entire Maia DAO ecosystem. While that premise still remains, they made changes to the tokenomics to increase users’ earning potential.

The entire tokenomic redesign was based around the Curve Wars. The synergy between Curve and Convex is exactly what Maia emulated with V2, except they leveraged Hermes to achieve this.

With V2, the only way for MAIA to be emitted was through strategic bonds, but the main difference was what could be done with the MAIA token. Not only will they be backed by a basket of blue-chip assets. But locking MAIA will give users vMAIA.

vMAIA gives users higher bribes, voting power, access to a share of treasury revenue, as well as exclusive access to TALOS vaults.

For more on Maia V2, check out this article.

What’s next?

After reading all of this, you may be thinking this is plenty. There are very few teams in DeFi that you see ship at such a prolific rate. Not only are they efficient in shipping, but they produce some of the best products in the industry.

Luckily for us, they are not stopping any time soon. If you’re a core community member of Maia DAO, then you may know that they are in the process of completing a full migration to Arbitrum. With this migration comes a whole new suite of products.

Arbitrum is a completely different playing ground from Metis. Competition is fierce, and to be the best, they will have to beat the best. I have no doubt that a team as prolific as the one behind Maia DAO can get it done.

Stay tuned with us at Blocmates because, over the next few weeks, we will be covering everything that Maia DAO has coming up. Trust me, you won’t want to miss it.

Quest for LARP 2

THANK YOU FOR READING THE ARTICLE... LARP BADGE ONE HOLDERS CAN NOW COMPLETE THE QUEST FOR LARP 2.

HAPPY LARPING!

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