This is not an investment advice. It's just a personal note on an emergent DeFi pritimitive. I am not affliated with anyone. I hold less than 50 USD worth of $YES.
THIS POST HAS NOW BEEN UNLOCKED AND IS FREE TO READ FOR EVERYONE.
Unbounded, unruggable.
These adjectives might sound bold and blunt. Yet, I get what a promising primitive a recombinant invention might offer.
/baseline markets are a decentralized liquidity engine based lending markets. They differ from existing services thanks to several features.
As i was reading the docs, & seeing clueless people labelling the currently-only available token on the protocol as another shitcoin, i felt the need for a simple intro unto the protocol.
Intro
/baseline is basically a liquidity engine that comes with cargo pants, and the pockets are basically deep. it's a novel DeFi protocol that builds on our shared legacy.
What it achieves can be easily overlooked since we are all used to primitives and structureds across DeFi.
Every 13 seconds i come across another promising project. i am a walking wiki of protocolized speculative markets—whether they work or not.
Simply, what Baseline Markets achieve are:
Infinite liquidity for ERC20s with a baseline value (BLV)
A lending market that this BLV unwinds
A self-sufficient liquidity bootstrapping architecture that is human-resistant.
Specs
"Anti-jeet tech"
"Built-in borrowing"
"Forever up only"
"Fair launch"
What is BLV?
Baseline value is BLV.
BLV is the anti-jeet tech.
Under the baseline market structure, protocols own the initial liquidity.
No external teams, or investors are given tokens that can be minted prior to the launch.
Once a token is launched on the baseline protocol, the initial liquidity is fed into a Uniswap V3 pool.
Since noone can mint tokens, protocol owns the tokens and liquidity—which in turn suffices a baseline value for the last token that can be sold back into the pool.
Lending
Baseline markets provides any token that is launched on top of the protocol with an intrinsic value thanks to BLV. It is a decentralized protocol with basic market making features.
Outstanding features of the protocol in line with the lending are:
protocol to peer lending
there are no external lenders
isolated risk architecture
loans are separated, and there is no shared pool that would socialize any risk
no interest rates
you only pay at the origination of your loan, or the extension thereof
no liquidations
the protocol does not need any liquidation engine for every token is backed by a floor price thanks to reserves.
when a borrower defaults, nothing is seized—but their initial collateral is burned at a ratio that hedges for the intrinsic value grow
no oracles
you do not need any oracles where there is no liquidation
What makes it more valuable as a market is that you can borrow any asset against your protocol-native ERC20 for a one-time fee. That is, you can be exposed to leverage without any bad debt.
You cannot pay back your loan? You just lose the initial fee. There is nothing else to lose—or do.
The Simple $YES Guide
The Summer of 2020 was evolutionary in that many base building blocks across DeFi, and other culturally-derivative markets, was then being constantly experimented so that we would have our day—today, we own the day and those of you who are power users know what i mean. 2022 was literally Late Bronze Age.
Back then, I encounter many experiments first hand without any mentor, or an iota of understanding of basic finance, let alone crypto-economics in detail per se. I was touching BASED, CORE, MEME, CURVE, LINK, YFI but without understanding their potential. I missed a lot just because i did not know what a "primitive" was.
Hence, here is a smol baseline markets guide:
Currently, there is only YES token available thereabout.
Baseline Markets, and hence YES, are on the Blast network.
Hence, we need to bridge to the Blast—however, the Blast bridge itself is only accepting from the Ethereum mainnet. Expensive as fuck, innit?
Thus, I just bridge from Base to Blast via Orbiter.
Then, I usually buy YES via the baseline UI with ETH
Congrats. Now you have have some YES. Wut do?
I'd just borrow some WETH via the borrow page.
You can have only a single debt position at once. That is, you need to repay your debt before opening another position of debt.
I did so, and sold that WETH into USDb via Ambient at ~4K
That's what I did. Had I been playing with larger clips, I'd just loop the credit, and play with re-staking knowing that my /baseline debt position is already safe with nothing to be liquidated off.
You can easily loop via Banteg's custom contract here if you are giga:
Now, please join the chat here.
Wait a min... No BLAST Points?
Well, you are lucky. Starting from the next Monday, that is tomorrow, YES will be allocating users who provide LP to high-volume pools for $YES pairs.
WUT DO?
It is easy.
Have some YES in your wallet.
First, you'll need to create an LP with YES and other available pool tokens such as USDB, WETH.
You can create a YES LP via Thruster as the primary step.
Then, you'll be able to provide your YES LP to Hyperlock here
These actions will provide you with an opportunity to stack BLAST, THRUSTER, HYPERLOCK and YES points together.
Here is the original YES X thread: