GC Ecosystem Overview and A Roadmap for 2022

December 14th, 2021

We’re presenting the GTON Capital roadmap, the first all-encompassing blueprint for the ecosystem development for the next year.

Introduction

This article sheds light on the present structure of the GTON Capital (GC) project and the direction we are heading in the coming months, and provides an estimation of the optimal paths to take for the project in the future. This roadmap is submitted as a DAO proposal by the team of core contributors, which will be voted on by GTON holders. In the case of accepting this proposal, the core team will do their best to follow the roadmap to the letter.

Background

This year, we have tested and launched several products on top of Graviton core infrastructure: treasury farming, staking, LP farming, Relay Swap, as well as bridge & oracle infrastructure on Solana via SuSy. We noticed that those products were lacking traction and we attributed this issue to the fairly limited, as it turns out, concept of wrapped assets and bridges that they were based upon. This insight stems from both communicating with users/investors involved in Graviton and from the analysis of projects with similar narratives.

Our ultimate long-term aim has always been to build a top-10 project capable of shifting paradigms on top of a platform designed for sustainable growth. We envision a project that began in crypto, but can scale onto new “Blue Ocean” markets: metaverses, new digital economies, hybrid markets etc. We see the culmination of GTON Capital in becoming an independent ecosystem foundational to new Digital Capital Markets.

During the time of development, we saw that it is fairly easy to deliver a “low effort” fork of a successful Ethereum project on another EVM or non-EVM chain. However it seems that those kinds of projects are fairly limited in their ability to become an ecosystem for thousands of teams. One current analysis demonstrates that having a set of smart contracts on an independent blockchain is limiting, and it’s close to impossible to build a full-fledged ecosystem without building your own independent blockchain network. We hope to reflect these insights, at least preliminarily, in this new roadmap.

Organizational Structure

At GTON Capital, we established a structure that seeks to achieve an optimal alignment of development, testing, launch and promotion of products in the GTON Capital ecosystem. The Core team is split into four units:

G21 - the head unit that deals with operations, support, finances, legal issues, community and marketing.
GC - a key unit for designing, engineering and developing main ecosystem products.
SUSY - an infrastructure department focused on R&D, DevRel, and the development of infrastructure-level services for GC: Oracles, Bridges, Blockchains.
NFT - a research and product-oriented department focused on finding opportunities and implementing integrations in NFT, GameFi, and Metaverse projects in the GC ecosystem.

Having a legal framework is crucial for listings, as well as community and developer engagement. To organize and maintain effective processes and to deal with payments for infrastructure, servers, IT resources, conference participation and listings, we have incorporated a company named G21 Capital in Dubai, UAE. This company owns IP (intellectual property), domains, creative assets, content and all resources for operational activities of GTON Capital. The funds for maintaining this legal structure currently come from the Ops allocation. Subsequently we aim to shift the funding of the operations towards a foundation that generates revenue by bonding sales, with part of the funds directed towards operational activity.

The current legal framework with G21 Capital Marketing Management Corp. was established with the goal of receiving legal opinions about the tokens, maintaining listings, Integrations and other operations where it is nearly impossible to act as a DAO. The end goal is to establish a foundation or another legal entity which is suitable for long term goals and operations.

High-Level Roadmap

GTON Capital’s vision is to be a sustainable DeFi experiment with Pathway and create GTON Chain as the best DeFi-oriented infrastructure for DeFi products on top: DEXes, farming, NFTs etc. In doing so, our plan is to start with a single chain, scale on Ethereum and finally build the entire ecosystem on our own L2 blockchain.

Despite the fact that GTON Capital has been a multi-chain project from the very beginning, our own experience and the analysis of other projects shows that both the initial launch and the subsequent organic growth of products is possible only when initially the focus remains on a single chosen blockchain network, with a gradual release of thoroughly tested products onto other networks. Due to GC owning most of the infrastructure, as well as a large number of GTON users and holders on the Fantom network, it is reasonable to release all ecosystem products on Fantom first. Other reasons that influence our decision to bootstrap on Fantom are a strong relationship with FTM foundation and several partnerships with leading projects built on Fantom.

The next milestone describes the expansion of ecosystem products on Ethereum.

When it comes to the long-term building of ecosystems, we see two paths:

Build a product with users and migrate it to a new chain: this is the expansion to new blockchains
Build a L2 chain and incentivize app creation on top of it.

Therefore, we propose, as one of the potential directions to take in Q3 2022, the development of an independent blockchain network (GTON Chain) and the launch of ecosystem products on top of it. In order to determine the details of the technology that this network will be built upon, it will be necessary to conduct extensive research and analyze all the strategic pros and cons. Most likely, GTON Chain will be a L2 blockchain based on Optimistic roll-ups. The most distinguishing feature that will be introduced to L2 is a community-owned collateralized stablecoin as native currency.

The final stage is the activity of stimulating the development of new applications and services on GTON Chain by GTON Capital, and by third-party developers and teams.

Detailed Roadmap

Let us describe in detail what products of the GTON ecosystem are planned to be released. This roadmap that consists of ''steps'' (iterations) will be refined each quarter. Each step is two sprint iterations, that is, approximately two weeks, with six steps in each quarter.

There are two separate areas for GTON Capital: GC and SUSY. Let us reiterate:

GC is a key department for designing, engineering and developing main ecosystem products.
SUSY is an infrastructure unit focused on R&D, DevRel, and the development of infrastructure-level services for GC: Oracles, Bridges, Blockchains.

I. The first step is to release the three key product updates on the Fantom network for GTON:

Pathway v0 (test version)
Bonding
Staking

Pathway is a protocol-operated liquidity management (POL) protocol that ensures that the exchange rate on DEXes and CEXes is linked to the fundamental indicators of project success (liquidity and token price). Pathway v0V1 only has an FloorPWPeg as its target, which is a floor parameter which the price cannot fall below for long time periods, as it will be leveled by resources from the treasury.

Pathway V12, in addition to offset price and liquidity, also takes into account the campaigns to attract new users, i.e. through bonding or releasing new on-chain products.

Bonding is the ability to sell GTON with vesting at discounted rates in order to generate revenue for the Treasury.

Staking is locking a token into governance in order to receive passive income and vote on protocol updates.

At this stage, Chainlink-based DONs (decentralized oracle network) serve as data providers and infrastructure for Pathway and Bonding.

II. At the second step, we expand on Ethereum, release staking, bonding as well as launch Pathway there.

At this step we’re starting the development of GTON Chain, and its releases will go in parallel with the products’ updates.

GTON Chain will be a community-governed Ethereum rollup protocol with a stablecoin as native currency. GTON Dollar will be implemented as a collateralized stablecoin utilizing multi-collateral CDP algorithm to mint stablecoin and maintain the 1$ peg, which total supply will be managed by collateral reserves.

Such a chain design will enable a full and valuable for users life-cycle from minting GTON Dollar through borrowing it and locking collateral assets, using it for different value-generating activities on GTON Chain, e.g. dApp transactions, trading, farming, lending and staking, and, as the final point, closing a collateral position with a profit and receiving the collateral back.

III. At the third step, we’ll release two key ecosystem products on GTON Chain:

OGSwap DEX
Candy

OGSwap is a decentralized exchange with GTON as the only market. $OGS is a reward token of the exchange for trading volumes.

Candy is a single sided liquidity farming product and is the second source of GTON and TVL liquidity growth on OGS DEX. $CANDY is a reward token with a pool to GTON, and is also a governance token of the Candy protocol. The IDO of this token on the OGS launchpad will occur at this step.

As mentioned previously in the Occam’s proposal, the new tokens of the GTON ecosystem (Candy and OGSwap) are to become available in the form of IDO to GTON. For instance, during the IDO, $CANDY will be released into an AMM pool with GTON — $CANDY/$GTON, meaning that the only way to buy it initially will be to exchange $GTON to $CANDY.

Both the OGSwap and Candy products will work jointly to stimulate volume and liquidity generation for GTON. OGSwap starts as a zero-fee AMM, however the parameter for fees can be tweaked at a later stage by the foundation.

III. In this step, we expand the number of pools on OGSwap and Candy, launch an IDO of $OGS, and initiate a program to stimulate activity on OGSwap DEX.

IV. In this step, Pathway V2 is launched. In addition to maintaining offset price and liquidity, it also takes into account the activity in protocol products, which can be measured as volume on OGSwap.

V. The final stage, which connects all products and tokens of the ecosystem ($GTON, $OGSwap, $CANDY), while adding utility to them, is a stablecoin called GTON Dollar stablecoin, which is planned to be based on MakerDAO. GTON Dollar will be a collateralized stablecoin pegged to $1.

The implementation of these steps that uses SUSY as core infrastructure, prepares us for the expansion onto other chains, as well as potentially developing an independent blockchain for GC.

Conclusion

This roadmap presents an overview of product strategies and solidifies a sequence of steps which will be taken by the GTON Capital team and will be submitted as a DAO proposal to be voted on by GTON holders.

*Edited on May 25, 2022, refined roadmap added.