Drop #2: Shield, Steadefi and Ylide
Web3Scout - Product hunt for Crypto - learn and invest in Web3
Welcome to the second edition of Web3Scout Newsletter by Cryptechie — where we will help you discover the latest Web3 products first with a curated list of the latest products and new companies before they publicly launch. As usual, promise to keep it high quality.
Hi friends,
We launched Web3Scout: Product Hunt for Crypto to help curate the top Web3 products. Every 2 weeks, we will also feature deep-dives into the top 3 most upvoted & innovative products for our 23K readers 👇
We are actively sourcing these products from (in decreasing order) our founder network, Web3 accelerators (Orange DAO, DeFI Alliance, Outlier Ventures, Beacon Accelerator), new Twitter/discord accounts, launchpads (Product hunt, Launchcaster.xyz) and various meet-ups & community groups.
If you’re building and launching a Web3 product or fundraising, we can help. Please add your product to Web3Scout website so our community can discover you. We will also include you as a featured startup (23K+ readers) if our community upvotes you in the leaderboard or you have an impressive demo :)
Editor’s Note: This week we also present a unique opportunity to invest in Shield, a web3 security tooling company, alongside top tier crypto investor and many strategic angels. You can view more details and invest here
Drop #1: Top products covered today 👇
Shield, security & Content moderation engine for Web3
Steadefi, next-gen leverage protocol on Avalanche
Ylide, web3 cross-chain communication protocol
1. Shield
Security & Content moderation engine for Web3
👷 Web3 Infrastructure
Shield is building a scam detection and content moderation engine for web3 platforms. They integrate as a scam filter API for NFT platforms and tooling. They offer cutting edge crypto scam detection models and content moderation tools to help web3 platforms protect their users from malicious actors and protocols, enabling users to eliminate scams from crypto wallets and apps.
They are quickly rolling out discord home security systems for NFT communities and DAOs and seeing significant traction with their subscription model - securing 100k+ crypto users via discord bot and API integrations.
Shield will emerge as a tier 1 home security system for web3 companies to protect their communities, and any web3 builder can grow their community securely with Shield at the center.
The company is solving a real web3 pain point: Security is more costly when you don't have it. Most platforms get audited, but users are still exploited by malicious content and scam actors across dapps. User threats are left uncovered (wallet drainers, phishing attacks, malicious actors).
Shield is founded by a team of ex-Facebook, McKinsey, V Combinator, Messari, MIT & Princeton technologists.
Product Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/a2444e28bd9846a8bbe2e833503bfef8
Documentation: docs.getshield.xyz
Stage
Pre-seed
Amount raised
$1.5M
Investors
In Stealth (Top tier Web3 investors)
Social media
https://www.getshield.xyz/
Editor’s Note: This week we also present a unique opportunity to invest in Shield, a web3 security tooling company, alongside top tier crypto investors and many strategic angels. You can view more details and invest here
2. SteadFi
Next-gen leverage protocol on Avalanche
💰 DeFi
Steadefi is a DeFi framework on Avalanche that combines risk management and leverage in order to enable trading strategies that are highly sought after by the market.
Steadefi is a new leverage protocol that boosts yield while managing risks automatically, which ultimately provides predictability to users for greater DeFi adoption. $STEADY is the primary token of Steadefi with limited supply and deflationary properties.
How It Works
TLDR → DeFi yield investors are subject to numerous position risks and yield shortcomings. → Steadefi aims to address these issues through careful risk management, real yields that align with our APYs, and an automated user experience that provides clear market views and historical data. They do so by introducing Auto Hedging, Fixed Rate Lending, and Isolated Lending Pools to leveraged yield farming.
The Risk and Unpredictability of DeFi
Since summer 2020, DeFi has attracted millions of new users through the promotion of staggeringly-high yields. Unsatisfied with “meager” 10-100% APYs, these same new users (aka ”yield farmers”) continued taking on increasingly riskier investments in order to “maximize their gains” in the shortest time possible. However, while doing so they remained unaware of the extreme risks involved through advanced DeFi concepts such as impermanent loss, market exposure, liquidations, yield volatility, code exploits, or insolvency. Then in spring 2022, with worsening market conditions and sudden downward volatility, this yield farming boom came to an abrupt end as yield farmers soon discovered that the only thing they had truly yielded was “disappointment.” Adding on to this sense of disappointment was that many users began to realize they were chasing those yields without an informed and actionable market view—most assumed it would all be “up only.”
The Steadefi team observed (and participated) in this yield farming boom, and soon used this market experience as a catalyst for the core of our protocol: offering institutional-level risk management and automation for individual DeFi users, while providing them with something they had not found over the previous two years—predictable real yields.
The Position Risks
Sensitivity to Market Movements Investors suffer losses (sometimes extreme) due to the high volatility of the crypto markets, especially when they set themselves in leveraged long OR short positions. Impermanent Loss (IL) An infamous term in the DeFi yield farming space, Impermanent Loss occurs when one asset in a liquidity pair fluctuates relative to the other asset, leading to an overall loss of equity. This type of loss is amplified in leverage yield farming positions as market movements may move the liquidity pair’s volatile asset (AVAX, ETH, BTC) more dramatically when leveraged. Liquidation When investors seek higher yields through leveraged positions, significant market movements against their position can lead to liquidation, which usually entails a 10-20% loss on the principal assets.
Yield Shortcomings
Unpredictable returns and misleading APYs In order to secure TVL, many leveraged yield farm protocols advertise high rates of return (APYs), which inevitably fall short of their investors' expectations. This means that investors are unable to predict what their yields may be in the long term, in addition to feeling "misled" by returns that end up below the original target. Requires excessive position management Most leveraged yield farming protocols require their investors to manually set up their own market-neutral positions and then also manually rebalance them to ward off liquidation or bad debt ratios. This can result in being both time-consuming and overly-complicated for the majority of users. Mismatch of risk vs reward Conservative lenders looking for safe (albeit slightly lower) yields on an asset may suffer exposure to the risks involved with highly-leveraged borrowing. Aggressive lenders seeking higher yields may receive lower "risk-reward" gains as they are forced to share those yields with the more conservative lenders.
SteadFi Approach
Risk Management Our strategy vaults are designed to provide institutional-grade risk management for individual DeFi users (and institutions, of course!). Our Strategy vaults undergo rigorous testing for handling almost any market movement by effectively balancing both long and short positions. These “rebalances” are performed at multiple parameters for ensuring minimal issues with impermanent loss.
Real Yields Our strategy vaults provide real yields, which means our rebalancing mechanisms have been carefully designed and tested in order to provide investors with predictable returns that align closely with our advertised APYs. See our backtesting data here.
Automated Positioning
For our strategy vaults, we have automated all of the processes, including the initial market-neutral setup when depositing assets. Yields gained over time will be automatically compounded into the principal, allowing our investors to simply deposit and relax. Offering an Informed Market View With the help of clear guidance and an intuitive UI, our users can use historical data and vault analytics to craft and implement a fully-informed market view. After forming their strategies based on their market outlook, the user’s only responsibility is to deposit the correct asset and enjoy their steady returns.
Optimizing Risk-Reward Profiles By creating isolated lending pools dedicated to the risk profile of the lender, we can offer yields that better align with the user’s risk threshold. In this system, for example, a conservative lender's assets will only be used for more low-risk vault leveraging, while a more aggressive lender's assets will only be used for higher-risk vault leveraging. The yield rewards will then match with the use and risk profile of the funds.
Stage
Pre-seed
Amount raised
$1-2M
Investors
Ava Labs
Social media
https://steadefi.com/
Launch timing
Q1 2023
Media
3. Ylide
Web3 cross-chain communication protocol
🌉 Interoperability Protocol
What is Ylide Protocol?
Ylide Protocol is an open-source cross-chain wallet-to-wallet communications solution for Web3 projects. We anticipate that for the mass adoption of the Web3 it is crucial to have native decentralized and secure communications layer. That's what Ylide's purpose is.
Ylide Protocol consists of four main parts:
[ ] Client SDK Ylide Client SDK is a “just-add-water” solution for integrating decentralised end-to-end encrypted communications right into your existing or new application.
[ ] Prebuilt smart contacts It’s a core of our product. Smart contracts used for storing, transferring and managing messages on the blockchain. Contracts pre-deployed by Ylide can be used and seamlessly integrated. Or founders can create a customised solution on the top of it. Ylide will provide contracts for multiple mainstream blockchains with cross-chain facilitation.
[ ] Admin Tools It is a solution to forget about coding at all. Deploy, monitor, manage smart contracts and set custom monetisation parameters of your choice from the handy UI.
[ ] Pre-build products To save even more time of the founders we provide open-source product templates for typical communication use cases, so you can focus on the customisation and skip the hardest part.
Use cases for Ylide
True interoperability Generalized messaging for any type of communication that is open to integration by design and compatible with other apps
Flexible monetisation Financial transactions with arbitrary logic: subscriptions, pay per transaction and split payments
Web3 architecture Decentralized storage, E2E encryption, no more hosting — pay once, and a smart contract will work without interruption
Secure and open-source Audited, verified by numerous clients and available to be verified by you
Blockchain agnostic A multi- and cross-chain solution with optimal routing inside with clear customization management if needed
Something really new Send your users actionable messages acting as a one-click checkout button, pay them to see ads, and countless other possibilities that we haven't even thought of yet
Product MVP
Check out their latest beta version of B2C product called Ylide Social Hub (link: hub.ylide.io):
- Smart feed with crypto content from Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Medium, and Mirror in one place. - Decentralized mailbox to send and receive encrypted mail across 17 chains. - Quick sign-in with wallet via popular options like Metamask, WalletConnect, and others.
Mail client: mail.ylide.io Demo video: ylide.io/demo-mail
Stage
Seed
Amount raised
<$1M
Investors
Symbolic Capital, Polygon
Social media
https://ylide.io/
Launch timing
2023
Media
