Application for 0x Grant from Rake Capital

Objective

Rake Capital is bringing lending and borrowing of infinite assets on Polygon using Rari protocol, with close collaboration with Rari Dao. We are starting with Fuse, an isolated interest-rate market developed by Rari Capital. We have a 50-50 partnership with Rari DAO and are fully committed to create value for both projects via close collaboration.

Our goal is to leverage low fees of Polygon to increase participation in the Rari protocol and build exotic DeFi products on top of it.

For the next 2 months our focus is to build a strong developer community to stress test our contracts and improve the utility of the Fuse product.

How will Rake Capital use 0x?

  1. Liquidation of assets
  2. Swapping tokens when entering pool

How do we intend to use the funds?

  1. Hire talent (2 full time DeFi engineers, 1 UX designer, 1 product developer, 1 community head)
  2. Legal fees (incorporating an entity in Singapore)
  3. Product development and Cloud infrastructure
  4. TWAPs to provide prices to the Fuse product
  5. Audits

What does our Roadmap look like?

  1. Initial deployment of Fuse on Polygon
  2. Adding Polygon-specific assets to Fuse
  3. Implementing new product development

How do we create value for 0x ecosystem?

0x is working towards creating a tokenized world, one with value freely able to traverse via blockchains. While 0x serves as a strong liquidity endpoint, the natural next step after trading the limitless assets on a blockchain, is being able to borrow and lend any of these assets. Not only does Fuse, specifically on Polygon, enable 0x to come closer to their mission but it also provides some concrete value accrual methods for the ecosystem, including:

  1. Trades via liquidations: providing liquidators with bots that liquidate via 0x. There have been over 321 liquidations on the Fuse platform on L1. With the higher CF’s Polygon will enable, we expect this number to be much larger on our deployment. 0x is at the basis of the liquidators and all of the templates we create (which are essential because liquidators need to stay up to date with all our new asset types) and will consume plenty of 0x orders.
  2. Trades on entry: when a user deposits into an asset pool that is not the asset they are depositing with, it will use 0x on the backend to make the trade into the desired asset. Rari’s L1 deployment transacted over $90M through dexes in 3 months through this technique.
  3. Trading director: One of the largest use cases of Fuse is to provide margin on long-tail crypto assets. We have created an interface that makes margin easy through flash loans and we can directly plug into the 0x for this. In the meantime, we can ensure that trades re: margin are done via 0x by providing a route through our interface. This is likely to be the largest driver of volumes to 0x as it will be the basis of an entire margin service.

With Fuse and 0x on Polygon, we can realize that vision of a tokenized world while making it accessible to all.

Contact information:

Email : hq@rake.capital

Team : Rahul Agarwal (@r9hul), Erik Allberg (@erikallberg)

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Hi! I’m Jai Bhavnani, co-founder of the Rari Capital DAO. I came here to show my support for this proposal. Rahul and Erik, the leaders of this project have been able to accomplish months worth of work in the few weeks since they’ve begun this project. While I wish we could help them with resources directly from the Rari Capital DAO, our treasury balances are nearing 0 and we have never taken VC money. I will be supporting this proposal so that the Rake team can build and ship the most robust lending and borrowing platform that Polygon has ever seen.

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Samuel from Rari Capital here

Having personally interacted with the Rake Capital team on numerous occasions, I can assure you that Rahul and Erik are very competent product managers with a key eye for the numerous aspects that go into a project of this scale. Be it their understanding of the market behaviour and risk, or developer management, or knowing what is actually required to attract a community. This project has the potential to match if not exceed the quality and product-market fit that Rari Capital is beginning to achieve, and I would love to see it gain support from any and all possible sources.

Thanks for the clear and detailed post !

From what I understand most use cases will benefit from the aggregated swap feature of 0x protocol which will be initiated by the UI using the 0x API for building the optimal route

Could you please clarify if you see an opportunity for integrating 0x orderbook (limit orders) in the described solution? maybe for the margin part…

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Thanks for bringing here the proposal, can you share how much funding you are expecting from 0x DAO?

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We can expose a direct interface to 0x for trading assets in our UI. Using both market orders and limit orders.

  • Our current source of capital is the polygon grant, 15k USD from a total of 30k.
  • We’ve developed a new UI and made 2 early hires and have established a clear product roadmap. We have solved core problems for our deployment and we are currently testing contracts on a private testnet, with improvements to the core functionality of fuse.
  • We have to hire 2 full time DeFi engineers and 1 full time front end developer. Our monthly burn rate post hiring (total team of 6 full time, 2 part time, 2 contractors) is projected to be around $25,000 per month. We believe we can be market ready within 2 months and reach tvl of 10 million USD.
  • We are looking for a total grant of 50k USD from 0x which will cover us for the next 2 months, post which we will be self sustainable with our growth.

Thanks for sharing this proposal! I have a few other questions:

Trades on entry: when a user deposits into an asset pool that is not the asset they are depositing with, it will use 0x on the backend to make the trade into the desired asset. Rari’s L1 deployment transacted over $90M through dexes in 3 months through this technique.

Is the plan for 100% of this volume to be routed through the 0x exchange proxy (whether aggregated through on-chain DEXs or using 0x limit/RFQ orders)?

I also understand that there will a $RAKE governance token associated with Rake Capital. Where can I learn more about the distribution and use cases?

Indeed we will have 0x as the exclusive DEX for entrance. This is obvious to us because 0x is a rapidly evolving and transparent protocol that simplifies our product experience.

As for the token, we are tinkering with many ideas to include some more sophistication upon its initial deployment. Some of the choices in tokenomics are non-reversible so before launching the token within the coming few weeks we’ll finalize the token model. In short, the aim is that the token will be a combination of both a governance and utility-token.

As for governance, we are taking their best DAO practices, but instead of using Snapshot we’re implementing our independently developed human coordination models (certainty based voting, argument mapping via networked text and scoring, reputation scores) to improve upon the current standard of governance among DAOs.

Thanks for the answers @rakecapital. In case you missed it, I would encourage you to apply using this framework that @nikita outlined yesterday: 0xDAO Grant Program Framework (v1). This will be the most efficient way to move things forward since your grant request is within the $50K limit.

Thanks for the link. We made the application using that framework a few days ago. Keen on this moving this forward.