Dark horse: “a competitor about whom little is known but who unexpectedly wins.”
It's been two years since Redacted's token generation event (TGE) and a lot has happened since then. With the new year underway, it's a good time to look back and see what Redacted has achieved and where it's headed in 2024 and beyond.
I’ll try to keep things brief.
Builders Build
If you've been following Redacted since the early days, you'll probably remember when the DAO tapped its warchest to acquire Votemak – a bribe market inspired by Votium, tailor-made for Tokemak. For a project centered around governance power, it made perfect sense for us to takeover a tool that could influence decisions in a growing ecosystem.
Votemak played a pivotal role in shaping Redacted to what it is today. It marked our first steps into product development, and we've become pretty good at it since then. Although Votemak initially focused on Tokemak, the DAO decided to leverage its underlying tech stack to create a generalized bribe marketplace we now call Hidden Hand.
Hidden Hand has been a hit. In two years, it’s facilitated around $25 million in cumulative bribe volume across different DeFi verticals, from DEXes to stablecoins.
The success of Hidden Hand confirmed what we already knew: We understand the long tail of DeFi and can build products to serve that niche. So it was time to double down.
After launching Hidden Hand the DAO voted to build and launch Pirex CVX. The goal was simple: improve the user experience of vote-locked CVX (vlCVX). We understood that the vlCVX was clunky for the average user. Since the treasury was (and still is) long CVX, it was in the DAO’s best interest to build a user friendly solution.
After Pirex CVX went live it soon became the #1 protocol for liquid vlCVX, a crown that it still holds today. The DAO then went on to build and launch Pirex GMX and Pirex BTRFLY, but we started to hit a ceiling.
Everything we’d built relied on other protocols, and we had exhausted the most successful ones. In the direction we were going, there wasn’t a lot of room for growth. We needed to think bigger.
All Roads Lead to Dinero
That ambition led us to Dinero, which the DAO has voted to build and launch. Dinero is a stablecoin project that consists of three parts: a liquid staking solution (Pirex ETH), an over collateralized stablecoin (DINERO), and an MEV-resistant transaction relayer (The Redacted Relayer).
Each part of Dinero supports the next. Pirex ETH provides a liquid version of staked ETH to back DINERO and enough ETH to run validators for the relayer. It’s a cohesive system aimed at DeFi's most active users, offering ETH yield, a stablecoin, and MEV-resistant transactions.
Dinero will allow us to control our own fate and dramatically increase our total addressable market. We’ll no longer be building on top of existing protocols and will instead become our own baseplate.
Launching "phase 1" of Dinero, Pirex ETH, in December was just the start. It's already at $7.8 million in total value locked (TVL) and offers the highest ETH staking yield of any liquid staking solution.
How it works is deceptively simple, but this isn’t the time or place to dive into mechanics. If you’re interested read here. If you want ape go here.
The DAO’s focus for 2024 is to scale TVL and develop the next two phases of Dinero: the stablecoin and the relayer.
BTRFLY
For those new to this, BTRFLY is Redacted's governance token. As part of the DAO, holders use it to vote on key decisions—what to build/launch, what incentives to offer, etc.
They can also lock their BTRFLY as rlBTRFLY, earning rewards from the DAO's treasury yield and product fees. At time of writing, over 70% of BTRFLY is locked as rlBTRFLY… a positive vote of confidence for the DAO. As Redacted thrives, so do rlBTRFLY holders.
Why should you care? I believe that Redacted is an underrated contender, a dark horse as they say. Crypto-Twitter hasn't yet caught up with our recent expansion. They’ve yet to realize that we've moved beyond a niche DeFi project and we're now stepping up to challenge the industry's giants.
The DAO has proven that it can build products that meet essential DeFi user needs and generate meaningful revenue. For example, Hidden Hand has generated >$1 million in fees for the DAO:
Even with our prior success, Dinero signifies a crucial turning point for BTRFLY. It transitions from governing a few niche products to a product with a scope exponentially larger than anything we've built before. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been and most of the space has yet to realize it.
So watch closely. Would be a shame if you missed it.