Orion Money Roadmap Update
What’s coming for Orion Money in 2022?
It’s been a really busy year for the Orion Money team and community!
Since our start in April 2021, the Orion Money team has been tirelessly at work building the new golden standard for a cross-chain stablecoin bank. In only eight months, our team:
- Built and launched our first product — Orion Saver — on Ethereum and Polygon which now provides thousands of users with 15% fixed APY on any stablecoins, the highest savings rate in all of DeFi on ERC-20 stablecoins! Since launch, Orion Saver has reached $130m+ of TVL (Total Value Locked) and we’re just getting started!
- Minted our governance token $ORION with IDOs on the two most popular Ethereum launchpads — Polkastarter and DAOMaker — which has resulted in a community of 5,000+ $ORION token holders. $ORION token is already on six exchanges (Gate.io, Uniswap, Pancakeswap, Quickswap, Terraswap, and Astroport) and we’re in conversations with other exchanges to add $ORION trading too.
- Launched $ORION Staking and Liquidity mining on four chains — Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Terra, and Polygon — with users staking over $30m in $ORION and another crypto.
- Signed partnerships and kicked off integrations with many great DeFi projects, among which BlockBank, xDefi wallet, Dezy, GOGOCoin, with many many more to come in the next months.
- Engaged a loyal social community of over 150,000 members, across Twitter, Telegram, Medium, and Discord, which have been incredibly supportive for reaching all the great milestones mentioned above!.
And if you think that Orion Money’s current Total Addressable Market (TAM) is big already — $160B+ in Ethereum stablecoins — you should also know that it is also forecasted to grow to trillions of dollars (yes, with a T) in the next few years! And we want this all as TVL in Orion Money and Anchor Protocol!
In this post, we are very excited to share Orion Money’s plans for 2022 with you. These exciting developments not only will bring a full utility to the $ORION token and an all-new, more intuitive Orion Money dApp, but also much more value-added for Orion Money users and supporters.
As always we’re very grateful for your support of the Orion Money project. We would not be able to deliver what we have done already without your support. Orion Money community is at the center of everything we do!
Read on!
Product Roadmap Update
Our plans, in general, fit into three main themes:
- Create more value for Orion Money users, by making our dApp more powerful, and increasing the utility of ORION token,
- Bring Orion Money to as many users as possible, by building new social engagement features and campaigns, such as an upcoming Ambassador and Referral programs,
- Collaborate with other projects, especially the ones from the Terra ecosystem, double down on our cross-chain interoperability, and bring the value of Terra projects across other blockchains, bringing Orion Money to even more users.
Let’s now review the main products and features coming in 2022!
Q1 2022
Orion Money v2
We’re redesigning our Orion Money dApp from scratch to make it more beautiful, more powerful, and easier to use. It will be mobile-first and future-proofed.
Also, considering that Orion Money is already available across four chains — Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Terra, our new dApp will be natively cross-chain with token bridges available right within the user interface.
Extra APY and utility for $ORION token
One of our main goals for next year is to ensure that true long-term holders of $ORION governance tokens are rewarded with the highest yield possible.
As described in our Litepaper, we originally envisioned this implemented via APY Levels feature, but as the crypto landscape dynamically changes, we quickly learned about the major operational challenges of this approach. If we implemented utility with APY levels, we would have to:
- Constantly update $ORION stakers’ APY levels in real-time with every $ORION price change. This would require a significant amount of development resources constantly monitoring and updating APY levels instead of developing new features and products.
- Each month APY updates could add up to millions of dollars spent in gas fees for the protocol and our users, especially as the majority of Orion Money deposits are on Ethereum, where the gas fees are highest.
- This implementation would also be even more complex for cross-chain as Orion Money already launched on four blockchains and we plan to launch on many more.
Additionally, given the high level of involvement of the core team required for maintaining and switching APY levels, it would be hard to transition the Orion Money project to the full-DAO model that we envision to ensure long-term sustainability and decentralization of the project.
Taking all of these points into account, we came up with a more decentralized and value-adding approach where:
- Orion Money users will get a Base rate of 15% APY on all stablecoin deposits by default,
- Will need to stake $ORION tokens in Boost APY pools to increase their total portfolio’s APY from 15% to a maximum of 100%+.
More details are below.
1. Base APY
Users who deposit stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, DAI, BUSD, wUST into Orion Money will receive an initial 15% APY on their stablecoins. Also once we develop the Orion Yield feature (see below for more), we plan to increase the Base APY to match Anchor Protocol’s Earn rate (currently 19.48%).
Users who make a stablecoin deposit will receive as a receipt oUSD derivative token — an interest-bearing ERC-20 token (Orion Money USD, powered by UST).
oUSD will have many use cases:
- oUSD will serve as a receipt for the deposit. Users will be able to send oUSD between wallets and use oUSD to withdraw their stablecoins interest or deposit from any wallet. This will also help to integrate Orion Money into many more projects and crypto wallets as they usually require token receipts for deposits.
- Users will be able to send oUSD to another chain to withdraw their interest or deposit there.
2. Boost APY
The opportunities are endless for oUSD, but we envision as one of the main use cases, staking your oUSD with ORION in 50–50 proportions to increase the yield for your total Orion Money deposit via Boost APY pools.
IMPORTANT: Users typically hold and deposit into Orion Money more stablecoins than they have $ORION tokens. As Boost APY pools will have 50–50 proportions with $ORION-oUSD, most of the users will need to purchase $ORION to achieve their desired APY rate for the portfolio. We expect that this will create an organic buy pressure for $ORION token once the Boost APY pools are live.
Users will be able to earn higher APY by staking their oUSD derivative token with ORION tokens or supported stablecoins into Boost APY pools. By staking into Boost APY pools, users can increase their Orion Money total portfolio APY from the 15% base to 25%, 50%, or even to 100%+, depending on how many oUSD and ORION tokens they staked. All Boost APY pools will have incentives paid in $ORION tokens, with ORION-oUST pool having the highest rewards.
Users will be able to stake as little or as much of oUSD and $ORION into Boost APY pools as they decide. For example, if you are aiming at 25% APY for your total deposit, you would need to only stake 10–20% of your oUSD and the corresponding value of ORION tokens. However, if you would like to achieve a higher APY for your total Orion Money portfolio and have a higher risk tolerance, you can stake all of your oUSD and corresponding ORIONs in the same pool to achieve 100%+ APY for your full Orion Money portfolio.
It is up to each Orion Money user to decide their desired risk-reward balance and choose how much they are willing to stake in the Boost APY Pools. Please mind that Boost APY Pools will be DeFi (AMM)pools and will have a risk of an impermanent loss. Also as usual with DeFi pools — the yields will be the highest right after the launch.
We will provide a detailed explanation and a video guide on how to use Boost APY pools as soon as they are finalized and in advance of the launch.
To summarize — this new approach will provide:
- A much more scalable and efficient way of providing utility to our users who own and stake $ORION tokens, proportionally to their deposits (oUSD),
- Users will be able to choose what total portfolio APY they will get based on their Boost APY pools staking amount,
- Orion Money TVL will be more sustainable as depositors will be receiving at least two yield types for their deposit/stake.
Shortly after launching Boost APYs, there will be more unique products and features added into the Orion Money v2.
Vesting
We learned from $ORION IDO unlocks that monthly vesting is quite inefficient as it brings large amounts of project tokens to market at the same time. Hence, for the protocol’s and token’s stability in the future, we will be introducing daily linear vesting for all future token distributions — starting from Community Farming (early January), Seed, and so on (detailed info about ORION token distribution is in the Litepaper).
Users will be able to choose between several options for their vested tokens — Auto-Stake (ORION tokens will be automatically staked in governance as they vest), Claim & Stake (similar to airdrops on Terra — users claim vested tokens and stake them at any time), and only Claim (withdraw to a wallet). We will post more details once the daily vesting is implemented.
Swaps and in-app bridges
In the v2 dApp, you’ll be able to swap $ORION token with other crypto or other stablecoins directly within the dApp UI and bridge it to any blockchain where $ORION is supported.
This way, it’ll be much easier to manage your $ORIONs across different networks, and without leaving Orion Money dApp.
Q2 2022
xORION staking and governance
Based on your staked $ORION tokens, you will also receive xORION derivative tokens that earn staking rewards and allow voting on governance proposals.
We’re working out details of governance to make sure the long-term Orion Money users and token holders will make the most out of the Orion Money governance process — and while building this, we’re getting inspired by the recent successful implementation of token governance by Yearn Finance.
As ORION staking is live already on four blockchains (and will expand to many more), we need to come up with a good cross-chain proposal snapshot solution to ensure that Orion Money governance is including every ORION staker, no matter where they are. We will start experimenting with xORION voting and proposals in Q2 with a view of Orion Money becoming a full DAO in Q3.
Ambassador and Referral Programs
We are planning to launch our very own Orion Money Ambassador and Referral programs shortly after our dApp v2 launches with the Boost APYs feature. We have already picked up a great deal of interest from many communities, platforms, and influencers from around the crypto world for this and are extremely excited about building and bringing you the programs very soon.
While we’re still ironing out the details of the program, we want to give you a sneak peek. The incentives for our programs could look like this:
- You invite a friend or follower to make a deposit in the Orion Money using your referral link
- They make a deposit and start receiving their 15% APY.
- You will receive a regular referral fee based on the yield they earn — calculated and paid as 10% of their Base Orion Money yield in stablecoins or 15% in ORION tokens
- Rewards from referrals will be regularly deposited into your Orion Money account and will also earn 15% APY as stablecoin deposits or ORION staking rewards until you decide to withdraw them.
We will post more about the Ambassador and Referral programs as we are preparing them for launch in Q2.
Orion Yield
Our dedicated Yield product will integrate directly with other groundbreaking protocols from the TeFi ecosystem — such as Nexus, Mars, Mirror, and many others — to enable users to build high-yield, net-neutral strategies that further compound Orion Money Base APY.
With these products, Orion Money users will be able to match Anchor Protocol’s Earn rate, while also having separate stablecoin vaults with even higher but more variable yields.
Orion Insurance
Currently, Orion Money has already partnered up with selected smart contract insurance providers to bring you four insurance policies, protecting you from smart contracts bugs, UST de-peg, or a mix of both.
Next year, we’ll be looking at bringing you even more choice and protection options, including the native Terra insurance policy from Risk Harbor.
Q3 2022
Orion Pay and crypto debit cards
While these products are still planned for the later part of 2022, we have already started to speak with people that we might collaborate with to build them. We all know that crypto moves fast, is unpredictable, and things might shift around, but there is also a chance we might even be able to deliver them sooner than Q3.
As well as building the products and features described above, our engineering team is already working to solve key tasks that will enable the release of Orion Money v2. Rest assured though — we’ll put together detailed help center articles, and video tutorials to walk you through them right after their launch.
We’re incredibly excited about all these developments and we look forward to creating even more value for Orion Money users and our community in the New Year!
But until then, make sure you take time to switch off, relax, and enjoy some quality time with your loved ones — because 2022 will be even busier and more interesting than this year. We’re off to a great start, so fasten your seatbelt!
Happy New Year from the Orion Money team! 🎅🚀
About Orion Money
Orion Money’s vision is to become a cross-chain stablecoin bank providing seamless and frictionless stablecoin saving, lending, and spending. Within the Orion Money stablecoin bank, we have three main products planned — Orion Saver, Orion Yield and Insurance, and Orion Pay. Orion Money uniquely brings high yields from Terra to users on Ethereum protocol in easy-to-use dApps.
