Liminal Protocol

Inspiration

With the myriad projects, protocols, and rugpulls out there in the Solana ecosystem, our team knew that it was time to build an index product that improves the useability and user on-ramp process on the fastest blockchain out there. Our product appeals to two subsets of customers: one is a customer who wants diversified exposure to the Solana ecosystem without the risk of investing in a single one, second is a customer who doesn't want to go through the hassle of holding, staking, and/or lending out a wide range of tokens but still wants the underlying yield/lending APY.

What it does

Our protocol MVP offers an SDI token (Solana Defi Index) that is a weighted bundle of 6 Defi tokens on the Solana chain. Liminal offers two ways to interact with our index token: 1. An early user or arbitrager can mint index tokens into existence by putting up the exact ratios of the underlying assets. They will be incentivized to do this for trading purposes, although our team will provide most of the initial liquidity 2. Regular users will buy and sell our index token products on the secondary market. Because our protocol also offers a "Redeem token" option, our index token will be pegged to the weighted average of its underlying asset token prices via arbitrage. After a user mints an index token into existence, our protocol will automatically lend out the underlying assets that constitute the bundle on a platform such as Solend and return the interest to the user. Lastly, our protocol will allow users to create and share custom bundles, creating an ecosystem of bundles for users with different risk profiles and preferences.

How we built it

Our team built our product with an Anchor backend for the Rust contracts and a React frontend.

Challenges we ran into

We heard that Solana development is not an easy task and this definitely held true this weekend. Rust development was new to our team, as well as the fact that Anchor's documentation is not the most complete. Therefore, there was a steep learning curve in Rust smart contract programming, as well as Solana's CLI tools.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our frontend and our UI/UX. We are also proud of our idea and our execution. Furthermore, all of us feel that we have a better understanding of Rust and Anchor, and have far more confidence in Solana's programming model than we started with. On Friday afternoon we started from an empty repository and ended Sunday with a well-rounded product that only needs a few more tweaks to be usable in MVP form.

What we learned

We all firmly believe that this weekend has made us more versatile, skilled, and confident developers and problem-solvers.

What's next for Liminal Protocol

Liminal Protocol will expand to offer more index products, including index tokens products for all major verticals in the Solana defi ecosystem, as well as allowing users to create customized indexes. Furthermore, we will improve our tokenomics and provide liquidity so that users can easily onboard and buy/sell our indexes on secondary markets. Lastly, our protocol will consider launching a governance token and/or considering alternate profit models.