After what proved to be an eventful 2022 in the crypto space, we were excited to be back from the holidays to hold our first community call of the year.

We hosted lots of guests on the call to discuss our latest collaborations and how we’re increasing the adoption of EQD. As usual, it was hosted by Alex Melikhov, our CEO, Natalie Cheah, from our business development team, and Peter Sergeev, our tech team manager.

Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

Equilibrium Blast: our farming campaign kicks off in February

BIG NEWS!

We’re super excited to inform you that our farming campaign begins in February. And guess what? You may be able to earn a maximum APR of 109% for the entire campaign duration of two months.

Now, the goal of this campaign is to showcase our farming products and bootstrap liquidity.

We’ll be supporting liquidity in Equilibrium lending, stableswap pool, and insurance pools. External Polkadot ecosystem AMM pools will be incentivized with EQD rewards.

The best strategy to maximize your APR will be liquid staking your DOT on the platform to get eqDOT, which you can then use as collateral to mint our native EQD stablecoin. Where it gets interesting is that you can put both your EQD and USDC in our stableswap pools and leverage the LP tokens up to 5x — this can give you a max APR of approximately 50%. Furthermore, you can multiply your APR up to 3.4x by locking your EQ tokens for up to 24 months. Locked EQ tokens maintain governance power.

You can further maximize your APR in the blast campaign by farming EQD stablecoins in incentivized external pools.

The EQ listing referendum on our new governance portal

If you missed the news on our social channels, we had conducted a referendum on our governance forum. The agenda was about voting on whether we should list EQ right away or wait for market conditions to become better. We value your opinion, so please consider taking part in our votings!

Also, we’re planning another vote in one-and-a-half-month time. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Discord channel to stay updated on the exact date and the delivery of the campaign and our next voting.

Equilibrium teams up with Astar to drive DeFi adoption

Natalie then expressed her excitement about our series of recent partnerships, especially regarding EQD stablecoin. The first of them is our completed XCM integration with Astar (a smart contracts platform on Polkadot). This partnership opens up opportunities for both our communities’ members to transfer native tokens between chains securely and trustlessly. Astar token holders will now be able to use their tokens on Equilibrium for various purposes;

• Lending
• Yield farming
• Providing collateral for minting EQD
• Providing liquidity in insurance pool to earn an insurance premium, etc.

Our users will also be able to transfer EQD to Astar Network. Currently, we’re driving DeFi adoption on Astar by launching the EQD-ASTR pool on ArthSwap — the largest DEX on Astar — to improve the ease of accessibility of EQD to members of the Astar community. Both communities will be able to use ASTR to mint EQD stablecoin and use it for yield farming on the Astar Network. Users will also be able to earn rewards on Equilibrium when farming campaign kick starts in February.

More details coming soon.

Mingshi shares his thoughts on the partnership

Mingshi Song is the head of ecosystem success and XCM collaborations at Astar Network. He began by expressing his excitement about the partnership with Equilibrium before answering questions from our team members.

Mingshi then talked about how they’re increasing DeFi adoption at Astar and providing users with the best user experience in swapping and trading. He said that they were getting funds from their foundation, collaborating with other ecosystem partners to provide liquidity for liquidity pairs, and incentivizing liquidity providers with partner tokens.

He also said that they’re not just an EVM-based chain, they’ll be focusing on building their ecosystem to support WebAssembly and other virtual machines. Another fantastic update he shared is their collaboration with ChainSafe to bring the Sigma bridge to the DOTSAMA ecosystem which will enable the transfer of assets between substrate level parachains like Astar and Ethereum and other Layer 1 protocols.

He also shared his thoughts on the future of crypto-backed stablecoins. You can read more about the interview in our in-depth transcript.

Major wallets are adding EQ and EQD support

Another great news is that major wallets like Subwallet, Talisman, and Fearless are adding EQD and EQ support. You can now store your EQD and EQ tokens on the wallets we’ve integrated with. You can also transfer Equilibrium’s native assets by connecting your wallet to Equilibrium.

We believe that wallets will help grow EQD and EQ adoption and onboard new users to our ecosystem. Wallets have the power to unify the fragmented user experience and provide a one-stop center for solutions like lending, borrowing, and EQD minting with just a click rather than going through several steps.

We then spoke with Agyle, Talisman’s founder, who gave us a quick comprehensive demo of how to use Equilibrium on Talisman. Talisman is one of the major native non-custodial wallets on Polkadot. You can watch the demo here.

After the demo, Agyle then shared their plans for offering users more robust DeFi functionality on their wallet and how they’re working to add multi-chain functionalities.

Crust adds EQD as a means of payment for storage

On increasing EQD adoption, we’re excited to announce our partnership with Crust Network which has added EQD as a means of payment for storage fees. Crust Network is a decentralized cloud storage provider — they’re mostly used for metadata storage like personal data storage for NFTs and the metaverse, and website hosting.

EQD will be of great value to Crust developers as it’ll help them benefit from a stable and predictable operational cost structure rather than bother about the fluctuating market rates.

We’re also working on our XCM integration with Crust, and we’ll let you know once it’s completed.

On the call, we hosted Ludwig Clay, the business development lead at Crust Network, who told us how stablecoins will give developers a guaranteed stable price for the payment of services. Read more about his insights here.

Ajuna will support EQD payments in their games

We’re happy to inform you that we’ve also partnered with Ajuna. Ajuna is a decentralized gaming platform — they provide developers with the fastest way to develop decentralized games while providing ways for gamers to monetize their in-game assets.

The protocol will be adding EQD as a means of in-game transactions payment, so users will have a secure and stable means of payment without price fluctuations. Also, users will be able to use their DOTSAMA assets to mint EQD and use it in purchasing in-game items and doing other transactions.

We couldn’t get a hold of the co-founders– Cedric and Nicholas — as they had other engagements.

What you can already do with Equilibrium

At the moment, the core functionalities of Equilibrium include staking your DOT to earn a staking reward and receiving our liquid DOT wrapper (eqDOT). You can then use your eqDOT to;

• Provide collateral to mint EQD stablecoin
• Lend assets to the lending pool and earn rewards
• Provide liquidity to the insurance pool and earn an insurance premium

What’s coming up?

As discussed earlier, our farming campaign where you can maximize your APR up to 109% starts in February. More details coming soon.

We’ll also be launching our Curve pool, and the first pair is the USDC/EQD pair to enable users to swap USDC with EQD and vice versa. The launch of EQD and USDT pool for swapping both stablecoins with minimal slippage comes next.

The other core functionality in the works is our orderbook-based DEX which will allow the trading of DOT, BTC, ETH, and many other parachain crypto-assets in a non-custodial way on Equilibrium.

Progress on the 2023 roadmap

While we’re working on some pretty interesting projects, these are highlights of the things we’ve worked on so far.

Our priority is pushing forward our stablecoin: hence, we’re doing lots of integrations. Currently, we’re working on our integration with Ajuna, Crust, Bitgreen, and Litentry. We’ve completed the integration with Bifrost, awaiting their opening of the channel.

Furthermore, we’re finalizing our Epsilon pool — our stableswap protocol where we’ll be bootstrapping USDT/EQD, USDC/EQD, and USDT/USDC/EQD pools.

We also have lots of partnerships underway, and we’re working on our proof of concept to allow for ledger support (cold wallet support) for multiple parachains — this way, instead of using multiple apps to access Equilibrium and Polkadot on your ledger, you’ll only use one app. This should be out in two weeks.

We’ve also done some UI/UX improvements and are carrying out lots of product testing.

Development Updates

We’re almost done with the bridge setup — Multichain, Moonbeaam, EVM, and XCM connections. And we’ve begun testing the transfer of USDC and ETH between Ethereum and Equilibrium: our goal is for users to be able to transfer these assets between both networks in one click. After this, we’ll move on to Polygon and other EVM-based chains.

We’re working on more XCM integrations to increase EQD adoption with the aim of making EQD the ecosystem’s primary stablecoin.

Lots of UI work is on the horizon as we’re preparing new landing pages for our state block solution for EQD. We’ve also created a new landing page for our website to get users closer to interacting with the application from the landing page.

There’s also lots of work going on at the backend: development of our farming prototype and EQ staking where you can use your staked EQ on Equilibrium governance are underway.

About Equilibrium

Equilibrium is a one-stop DeFi platform on Polkadot that allows for high leverage in trading and borrowing digital assets. It combines a full-fledged money market with an orderbook-based DEX. EQ is the native utility token that is used for communal governance of Equilibrium. Equilibrium’s USD-pegged stablecoin, EQD, is collateralized by a weighted basket of assets and functions as a unit of value within the DeFi ecosystem. eqDOT is a liquid DOT staking wrapper that allows users to participate in DeFi on Equilibrium while earning DOT staking yield.

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