Money as Energy: Introducing Liquidity mining with Router Protocol
Route Liquidity Pools launching on Uniswap
One perspective on money is to view it as energy. Cash in a red envelope gifted during the holiday season to loved ones gives them the ability to direct that energy to acquire or create products, services or experiences. Capital from investors provides entrepreneurs the necessary fuel to further their vision and their ambition.
We can easily extend this analogy to see how most functions of the modern financial system are fundamentally platforms for this energy interchange. Banks ‘store’ energy, as potential energy until it needs to be used as kinetic energy and get deployed into other forms of energy, such as cash, stocks, bonds, or indeed, cryptocurrency.
In the current Web 2.0 paradigm, the spade-sellers, the infrastructure providers such as the banks and exchanges, end up rent-seeking for providing what are essentially pipes that allow for energy interchange. Note that this is a bit different from how modern communications have evolved, where the optic fibre and the spectrum owners charge nowhere this level of premium, and are fundamentally viewed as commoditized service providers.
The grand promise of Web 3.0, and the decentralization movement, anchored as it was in the post-credit crisis libertarian resurgence, was a world where the rent-seekers’ influence would wane. Banks were supposed to go the way of dinosaurs, and the modern financial system was supposedly about to be overhauled. Bitcoin’s arrival was followed by Ethereuem, the easily programmable global computer that would make possible automation of that core functions that we take for granted as modern civilization.
Admittedly, this has worked, to a fair extent. One could even argue that the DeFi boom is clear evidence of how well Ethereum has worked. Unfortunately the side effects have also been unforeseen, and in keeping with Chaos theory. Speculation in Ethereum’s value has made it a priced asset, furthering speculation in Ethereum’s value. This reinforcing cycle has made the original purpose of Ethereum rather difficult. Gas costs are rising, and transactions are slow.
Clearly, the financial system overhaul process is in need of an overhaul.
This is where Layer-2 comes in. There are multiple Layer-2 approaches, multiple chains and multiple liquidity pools. This will not be a winner-take-all market for quite a while. This is alos where, as we pointed out earlier, Router Protocol comes in. On which, we will have, of course, much more to say over the coming weeks and months.
Our progress so far
Meanwhile, in the near term, In line with Router’s vision to build out an overarching cross-chain liquidity aggregation ecosystem, we are happy to announce the successful launch of our spacefarm. TVL, or Total Value Locked is approaching $3 mn as we approach the third day of farming. Some key highlights from the farm are as follows
Current value locked in ETH: $1,700,000
Current value locked in Layer-2 (MATIC): $403,000
We are also happy to note that within 36 hours of the spacefarm launch we were listed on Bitmax. The Route token is also now being tracked on CoinmarketCap and on CoinGecko
The way forward
Now that the token has been listed and the community has a sense of the potential that Router holds, it is imperative that we start giving the community the ability to derive value from the Router token. While the long term roadmap for Router to accrue value from being a foundational layer on the Polka parachain is very important, in the medium term, we are happy to note that ‘Routers’ ( as Router Holders are beginning to call themselves) will be able to use Route token to stake and provide liquidity on the Router platform, starting with Uniswap. Uniswap is a key element of the trading ecosystem and there is strong demand from the community to see ROUTE listed on Uniswap. To this end, we will be allowing liquidity reward provision in the following two pairs
ROUTE/USDC — 2500 ROUTE/day reward.
ROUTE/ETH — 2500 ROUTE/day reward
Staking in these pools will also enable Route holders to earn Uniswap LP fees for this pool, in addition to farming Route tokens. The specific reward structure of this program will run for only a limited period of time but we feel it will be of good use in rewarding our current early adopters and attracting new users to learn more about journey
This is one of the many upcoming community programs, with our users at the center of our token model and vision. Over the coming weeks and months, we are cooking up multiple initiatives and partnerships; the two key ones to look out for are our upcoming community governance initiatives launch that will have big say in the evolution of the ROUTE token economy, as well as the ability to stake ROUTE and earn relevant rewards. Stay tuned!
ROUTE/USDC PAIR — 2500 ROUTE/day reward.
ROUTE/ETH PAIR — 2500 ROUTE/day reward
Website: www.routerprotocol.com
Telegram: https://t.me/routerprotocol
Telegram announcements: https://t.me/router_ann
Medium: https://routerprotocol.medium.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/routerprotocol
