Armor has successfully rebranded to Ease and has launched its flagship Uninsurance product. With this milestone now past, the time has come to look back on our Armor line of products and the future they have under the Ease brand. Each product under the Armor line provided innovation and continued to build on our dream of covering all of DeFi, by offering flexibility and affordability to DeFi investors. However, some products have become redundant while others do no longer meet the standards we sought to achieve. In light of this, some Armor products will remain active and will be developed further, whereas others have reached their Product End Of Life (EOL). We will go over each product below.
Active products: arNFT and arNXM
arNFT
- Current URL: https://armor.fi/mint
- Usage: affordable and permissionless way to buy cover
- Future: The arNFTs will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, but the ability to stake them for arCore will end at midnight 31st May 2022.
The arNFTs are the backbone of Armor. They provide a new way for users to interact with Nexus Mutual and their coverage policies. arNFTs allow for policies to be traded on secondary markets. All of this in a completely permissionless manner that had not been seen before.
The arNFTs will continue to be developed further, with some exciting new features coming up, making permissionless cover easier and even more affordable.
The arNFTs were used to provide pooled coverage to arCore users. As the arCore product itself has reached its EOL, this arNFT staking will end as well.
Note: you will still be able to unstake them past that date and time, but they will no longer earn rewards.
arNXM
- Current URL: https://armor.fi/arnxm-vault
- Usage: Permissionless yield generation for Nexus underwriters using dynamic and optimized strategies
- Future: arNXM will continue to exist in its current state for the foreseeable future.
The arNXM product was initially intended as a secondary product for armor, but quickly grew in size. Currently, the ease DeFi arNXM vault yea provides about 45% of all staked underwriter capital for Nexus’ ecosystem. (Real-time amounts can be seen on https://nexustracker.io/staking)
The arNXM vault allows users who wish to provide collateral to the Nexus ecosystem to do so without KYC and in a flexible manner. The vault acts as a custodian on their behalf.
The Armor/ease team actively monitors the yield and risk factors and designs staking strategies accordingly. The arNXM vault handles all of the (un)staking to optimize the yield, so the underwriters don’t need to.
All rewards generated by underwriting the Nexus protocols goes directly to arNXM holders through the yield bearing nature of arNXM.
Sunsetting Products: arCore and arShield
arCore
- Current URL: https://armor.fi/protect
- Usage: flexible and permissionless way to buy cover
- Future: arCore coverage will end at midnight 31st May 2022. Earned rewards and ETH deposits can still be withdrawn after that date.
arCore was the first product to offer a “Pay As You Go” coverage model in the DeFi space and is still unique.
This product allowed users to purchase coverage from a pool of staked arNFTs so that users did not have to be locked into a fixed contract. All payments were done by the block, providing the flexibility to users that DeFi requires.In addition, the innovative user experience allowed a scan of the connected wallets followed by personalized coverage recommendations.
While a revolutionary coverage product, issues with gas costs on L1 Ethereum directly inhibit the flexibility that we sought to offer. Basically, the product works as intended, but high gas fees needed to use it keep it out of reach of the intended user base, those with smaller wallets.
Therefore, arCore will be sunset, with the product ending on midnight 31st May 2022 (UTC). Active coverage will be valid until that date and time, but any of hacks after that date will not be eligible for claims. Users will still be able to withdraw their deposited ETH and earned $Armor rewards past that time.
arShield
- Current URL: https://armor.fi/arshield
- Usage: flexible and permissionless way to buy cover, paid for by the yield generated
- Future: arShield coverage will end at midnight 31st May 2022. Earned rewards can still be withdrawn after that date.
arShield was Armor’s first iteration of a shared coverage system:
Users could deposit assets into vaults and receive passive coverage for as long as they remained in the vault.
Premium costs were taken out of the asset yield instead of the user’s wallet, removing the need for upfront payments. Utilizing a shared pool of coverage policies reduced the premium cost significantly below that of a standard Nexus policy.
This idea spawned the shared risk Uninsurance ecosystem that Ease DeFi is known for today. As Uninsurance is now live, the arShield vaults will be sunset. The product coverage ends midnight 31st May 2022 (UTC).
The vaults will no longer provide coverage against hacks after this date and time. However, you will still be able to withdraw your assets and any earned $Armor rewards past this date.
The Future of Armor.fi
The products that remain will still be under the Armor branding. However, with the sunset date, the Armor.Fi site will be shut down and redirect to armor.ease.org.
This will be the new location for all Armor branded products. A banner has been published to armor.fi to make users aware of this upcoming change. Ease deFi plans to support and further develop all remaining Armor products indefinitely. If there are further changes that need to be made they will be announced with a similar time frame used here.
About ease
The team at Ease shares a common vision:
- Blockchain technology and decentralization are a giant step forward and DeFi is a game-changer.
- Access to and usage of DeFi must be as easy and safe as possible. We do this by using the benefits of blockchain technology to bypass the negatives of TradFi.
- By covering Crypto risks easily and affordably, we can onboard many more crypto users.
- Crypto is just getting started, but the more users we can help get aboard, the faster the revolution will be.
In 2020, Armor.fi revolutionized DeFi coverage by making it flexible, automatic and not connected to memberships.
Since then, the team has been thinking about how to cover all of crypto. This is how Ease, and the model of Uninsurance came to be.
