As 2022 makes way for 2023, let’s look back at what happened at Ease in the fourth quarter of ‘22.
The DeFi and crypto bear market continued in full (lack of) force, but the team continued to make Ease the best DeFi coverage system in existence. They improved the backend and front-end of the Uninsurance P2P coverage system, but a lot more has happened behind the scenes.
Ease has started to hunt bounties, which is a double-edged sword. We are also revamping the arNXM vault, ready for Nexus Mutual V2.
Let’s first dive into some of Q4’s highlights. Then we’ll detail some of the new things we have been working on.
Additions to the Uninsurance system
The team has added a new protocol to the innovative and unique zero-premium P2P coverage ecosystem: Badger Dao! Users will be able to enjoy our perpetual premium-free coverage, wrapped right into their tokens, for the following three BadgerDAO vaults:
- graviAURA
- auraBAL
- Badger/WBTC
The more protocols and vaults we add, the more secure the entire system becomes.
As mentioned in the Badger Dao announcement: let us know if you represent a protocol that would like to be a part of the Uninsurance ecosystem!
We are currently also working on adding more vaults, direct zaps, a user statistics/transactions page and many other smaller and larger additions to the app.
Also, check out the new Roadmap we added in October: https://ease.org/roadmap/, which will be updated soon as we have added more activities, see the next paragraphs:
More DeFi thought pieces and Long-Form info
As announced in our previous Q3’22 Recap, we have started writing some longer articles for our news section. The aim of these new long-form blog posts is to do greater in-depth looks at different areas and issues of the DeFi space and to further our goal: being an education platform in DeFi.
- We took a deep dive into the world of TVL and showed that not all is what it seems. We even made ourselves virtual Trillionaires to illustrate this!
https://ease.org/how-we-learned-to-start-worrying-and-question-the-tvl/ - The https://ease.org/the-case-for-ease-in-defi/ article explores the history of insurance systems and how these could be translated into current and future environments. Hint: Ease DeFi P2P coverage.
- We also added a detailed article exploring the world of DeFi Farming, with its benefits and pitfalls. Check it out here: https://ease.org/defi-farming-with-ease/
- Staking, Leasing and Bribing are important aspects of the new $Ease app, they started this quarter. The team wrote an explanatory article about it: https://ease.org/ease-defi-announces-lease-farming-apr-boost/. Lease Farming is born! To celebrate, the team boosted the lease rewards/APR.
- Of course, the biggest news from Q4 was the sudden and catastrophic demise of FTX. Is Crypto to blame? We think not and wrote this article that dives a lot deeper than most: https://ease.org/ftx-defi-and-the-regulation-game/
Our Crypto Glossary and DeFi Knowledge Base have also expanded significantly in the past months. Check them out and let us know on our social channels if you want us to explain more Crypto lingo!
Bounty hunting for the greater good
Early 2021, Ease (then Armor) started the Big Bug Bounty Alliance. It’s hard to believe now, but back then, many large DeFi protocols either had no bug bounties at all or these were so low that many hackers preferred to go Black-Hat instead of White-Hat.
Fortunately, Ease created awareness and many projects now pay for submissions of smart contract errors or other exploits. With the help of essential middlemen like Immunefi many hacks now have been prevented.
Due to the bear market, income from our products has lowered. We prepared a slide deck for investors for the 2nd round of investment, but due to the FTX fall-out, we feel it’s not the right moment. All market valuations (including $Ease) have lowered and don’t reflect the actual value.
Ease has a great team of not only smart but also complementary people. We always research protocols and vaults to add to our Uninsurance coverage system. To do so, we not only look at bugs in the solidity code but also think about economic logic, DAO aspects and much more.
While doing this, we discovered quite a few smaller and larger vulnerabilities ourselves in the past months! We decided to focus more attention on exactly this.
So for Ease, hunting and fixing bugs is therefore important in more ways than one.
- It’s to our users’ benefit that all of the protocols that are covered are safe from hacks.
- It actually generates income due to bug bounties!
Soon™ we’ll share some more details about exploits we found and prevented in the past months.
The arNXM Vault V2
Ease is the largest staker in the Nexus Mutual ecosystem, controlling nearly 1/3rd of all stakes.
Nexus Mutual V2 is coming out soon, and with that Ease is vying to become their most advanced syndicate.
We’re currently creating a comprehensive, very detailed Ease Risk Framework to grade and price each protocol on Nexus. Since we do not believe risk assessment is something that should be done based on guesses, feelings, and non-standardized grading, we’re creating the ultimate framework to avoid all of that.
We will get feedback on that framework from a variety of DeFi security experts, then release it publicly so that stakers in our syndicate understand exactly how our grading and pricing works.
This step both displays our knowledge of DeFi risk and adds yet another revenue stream for our treasury.
8 months of free coverage and counting!
December ‘22 also marks 8+ months of Uninsurance coverage in which users have paid 0% in premiums to enjoy covered DeFi assets. Meanwhile, their positions have grown as the generated yield has auto-compounded! They can add to or even withdraw their positions without any costs.
Remember: if there are no hacks, there are no fees. All users that have had 8 months of Ease DeFi Uninsurance coverage have paid a total of $0 in fees.
Here’s to many more months of premium-free coverage!
Spreading the word
- Ease got listed on DeFi pulse: https://twitter.com/defipulse/status/1578058260862623745
- Ease CEO Robert Forster did a great 25-minute live interview with Crypto researcher Mr Masa, check out the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNWqmcLjiK4
- Ease gvNomics APY got added to DeFiLama: https://defillama.com/yields?project=ease.org
- Ease got listed on the new Zapper.fi DAO section: https://zapper.fi/daos/ease-de-fi-dao
- Ease has been added to the Alchemy DAPP store: https://twitter.com/EaseDeFi/status/1603154973042577408
- Check out CryptoDoctor’s review of Ease and a few other coverage platforms: https://twitter.com/0xCrypto_doctor/status/1605848799880044544
Looking ahead to 2023
Crypto Winter is all around us and frankly, it doesn’t seem that 2023 will be much different. The team @ Ease is far from hibernating though.
Building during these times has proven to be the best thing to do. All value and infrastructure for the next bull run is created in the next 12 months and Ease will be a part of it.
Now that the uninsurance system is live, we can focus even more on marketing, expanding the products to other chains, and creating new products and services. Meanwhile, we’ll be creating even more valuable DeFi content for the crypto community.
Ease has been building non-stop for over 2 years now. Ease managed to turn the challenges of 2022 into opportunities, building some great ideas. There’s much more innovation where that came from, we’re just getting started.