Foundation thesis

The last 20 years have shown a profound change in people’s experience of saving and investing. Instead of going to their local bank, it is easy to have a digital-only and intuitive experience.

The financial interface has changed, but not the backbone of financial operations. The financial infrastructure remains siloed into IT systems with different standards and limited interoperability. Even new financial applications like Robinhood are built on those old infrastructures.

As a result, the investment experience remains:

• fragmented: entities and individuals have accounts on different platforms to invest in various assets

• opaque: it is hard to understand how your savings or investment account are invested

• cumbersome: KYC process to go through each time, hard to transfer savings and investments accounts from one bank/platform to another

The DeFi promise is not yet a reality

Decentralized finance offers a new paradigm with direct and transparent access to investment for any investor.

To interact with DeFi protocols today, you have to browse and connect to protocols’ websites one by one in order to invest in DeFi pools, and connect again to different services to track these positions.

Due to the profusion of protocols and underlying pools, the experience is far from what was hoped for. The promised composability gives way to fragmentation.

This problem persists at every level:

• For wallets or investment platforms, it takes a huge amount of time to integrate with smart contracts and test them with dozens of DeFi protocols and thousands of pools.

• For protocols themselves, the integration work with these distribution platforms or with other protocols is colossal too (i.e. curve / convex integrations).

DeFi is great but too fragmented for a coherent UX that reaps the most benefits to users.

Enters Valha.

Valha: DeFi made easy

We are building a DeFi abstraction layer to facilitate interaction with protocols and pools. Our goal is to help distribute the yield to the masses.

Valha implementation

Valha is composed of two main elements: a github repository and an API built on top of it.

Github repository

As a DeFi protocol builder, to integrate into Valha and maximise distribution, you only have to to follow the steps precised in our Github:

1. List your pools

2. Code your analytics connector

3. Code your interaction connector

4. Test and merge

API

We built an API on top of the github repository. This API allows to agnostically interact with DeFi pools in the exact same way. The API ignores differences in function names, arguments and requirements by creating a rigorous standardization process.

Protocols supported

Today, we support 9 protocols with more than 30 pools on 5 different chains (Mainnet, Polygon, BSC, Arbitrum, Optimism).

Use cases

For wallets and investment platforms: support DeFi opportunities natively.

POV: You have built a wallet which is the main gateway into the DeFi ecosystem. You are certain that you will be the vector of a massive adoption for non savvy-users.

The problem? You have a shiny user interface but your users need to click on external links in order to access investment pools. Setting up an external link to investment pools is not the most exciting user experience.

You and your developer team have created a few direct plug-ins within your app but they are time-consuming to build and maintain and it is not your priority.

Only DeFi-savvy people have the expertise to explore the ecosystem by hand, we want to help everyone to do it as well. The majority of users will mainly interact only with a single interface.

With Valha, we propose a method to do this shadow work agnostically.

For protocols: reduce integration time and maximise visibility

POV: You have designed a protocol that has just launched on Mainnet. You’re certain that your protocol is offering innovative financial products that will undoubtedly be useful for a lot of users.

The problem? Word of mouth and 1-to-1 partnerships are time-consuming and expensive because relationships are not built overnight.

Once you have connected with your partners, it is time for technical integration, and every developer on both sides is overloaded with 187 integrations on the board.

In short, it is no easy task.

Otherwise, you can integrate Valha and its connectors seamlessly.

Valha offers a new DeFi integration paradigm

1. A protocol deploys its vaults.

2. It lists the vault by creating its own Valha connectors: interaction and position adapters.

3. We automatically test all the integrations to ensure they work as expected for end-users.

4. The integration is now instantly accessible across chains with standardized access through an API. End-users are only a single transaction away from depositing and staking funds.

And, what about the ERC-4626 standard?

Valha is looking to continue the revolution initiated by the ERC-4626.

The ERC-4626 standard consists in providing a standard API for tokenized yield-bearing vaults (Maple, Yearn or Morpho use the standard). It is a great step forward DeFi composability. We are big fans of the standard and eager to use it extensively.

But.

Standards are immovable and always lag behind implementation. It takes time to spread accross the whole ecosystem and the effort to adapt to the standard is quite significant for developers as it requires a custom wrapper as well as implementation checks and audits.

There is also no guarantee that a standard will keep up-to-date with the evolution of the ecosystem.

Valha wants to complement ERC-4626:

• First, by enabling the construction of ad-hoc connectors to protocols instead of time-consuming ERC wrappers.

• Second, by abstracting away the complexity to other on-chain interactions: stake, unstake, claim rewards, boost.

Join the Movement 🦫

• Join our community on Discord

• Follow us on Twitter @ValhaHQ

• To dive deeper into our connectors, you can look at our Github

Our goal is to help structure and distribute financial assets in a more efficient, transparent and secure way than TradFi will ever be capable of.

DeFi won’t be built in a day or alone. So, let’s connect!

If you want to partner with Valha to give feedback on the abstraction layer and to work for your protocol discovery, please reach out to us on Twitter or in the #partnerships channel in Discord.
This is still a work in progress so any feedback or constructive critics are welcome.