What are Andre Cronje and Daniele Sestagalli collaborating on?

Daniele Sestagalli of Wonderland fame tweeted on January 5th the incoming launch of a new coin as part of a collaboration with veteran DeFi software developer Andre Cronje.

If you’re asking, me and Andre are launching a new coin on #fantom and it will start Fantom Season! We started here, is natural we now come back to growth the ecosystem and tech that made me who I am today. ?

— Daniele ?✊ (@danielesesta) January 5, 2022

Just earlier this week, Cronje himself tweeted out that he was “deploying a new experiment on Fantom this month.”

I’m deploying a new experiment on Fantom this month

— Andre Cronje ?? (@AndreCronjeTech) January 1, 2022

Background

Both men are no strangers to the world of DeFi. Sestagalli maintains an active social media presence with the #frognation community and is the brain behind several high-profile protocols. He first rose to prominence with the launch of Wonderland on the Avalanche blockchain, an OlympusDAO fork. Soon after, he launched the wildly successful stablecoin issuance protocol Abracadabra that has overtaken MakerDAO in revenue. His latest project is Popsicle Finance, a multichain yield aggregator.

Cronje is best known for founding the blue-chip DeFi protocol Yearn Finance and the lesser-known DevOps automation Keep3rV1 protocol. Cronje is also closely linked with Fantom, having served as chairperson of the Fantom Foundation’s Technology Council and a technical advisor to Fantom for the past 3-4 years.

 What is in the works?

What could two of the brightest minds in DeFi be building? At this point, all we know is that the project would be launched on the Fantom blockchain, which has been seeing a surge in TVL and the price of its native token FTM lately. As with Sestagalli’s other protocols, the new project is also likely to tie in with the existing #frognation ecosystem.

Based on a Medium post by Cronje, the upcoming project involves some variation of the prisoner’s dilemma game theory that usage was popularized by DeFi 2.0 protocol Olympus DAO, merged with the vested escrow concept pioneered by Curve Finance.

Users will be incentivized to stake and lock their token, of which there would be an overall diminishing emission effect by the protocol (thereby attracting early birds but deterring latecomers). However, the longer users stake their holdings, the more incentives they would receive when new tokens are minted by the protocol:

“Assume 1,000,000 weekly emission, a total_supply of 20,000,000, and a locked_supply of 10,000,000. This would mean that 1,000,000 new tokens are minted and provided as incentives, a 5% supply increase. Our goal is to ensure that ve lockers are never diluted, as such, ve lockers have their holdings increased by 5%.”

Finally, token stakers receive a “lock” for staking their tokens – similar to a liquidity provider token – which would be a non-fungible asset in itself that can be traded on secondary markets.

Another tweet by Cronje on the 3rd of January indicates that the tokenomics of the upcoming project is allocated 100% to the public community.

pic.twitter.com/UDhxU9oI40

— Andre Cronje ?? (@AndreCronjeTech) January 3, 2022

This suggests that the project would be heavily decentralized, and could allude some form of a fan/social token that will come in the form of an airdrop.

It may also be tied to a Metaverse or NFT-related project. This is not out of the realm of possibility in light of the Fantom Foundation’s recent expansion of its ongoing $370 million liquidity mining incentives to GameFi projects.

Exciting things ahead for Fantom

At the time of writing, crypto is going further into a bear market as BTC dipped 9% in the last 24 hours to $42,683. Despite that, Fantom seems to be one Layer-1 that is defying this price trend, with FTM surging 27.23% in the past week to $2.74. This surge is a continuation of FTM’s bull run in the past month that has seen a rise of over 132% since 20th December 2021, setting FTM apart as a big gainer from other top market cap coins.

Fantom’s other growth metrics also indicate that big things are happening on its chain. TVL has risen from $3.81 billion to $5.71 billion within the span of 2-3 weeks. Its unique addresses have enjoyed a relatively linear growth, almost doubling from 832,000 at the start of October to 1.5 million as of January. Daily transactions have dwindled to the range of 500,000 to 900,000 from an all-time high of 1.8 million in 12th September but still remains higher than before September.

As Sestagalli and Cronje gear up to their big announcement, the Fantom ecosystem may see a further boost in activity.