Over the last few weeks the team has been working on the next phase of Mugen to ensure that our community is able to come along side us as we develop. There have been a few changes including the fact that staking is not set up to be liquid. This is a topic that we plan to revisit at a later date. Also there is the change to disregard governance for the time being as the protocol is not yet mature enough to need this and it would slow down things significantly.

However, there are quite a few things that have been developed. The cross chain swaps is nearing testnet. Following launch and initial testing we will open it up to a select group of individuals within the community to allow them to test the product and provide feedback. Work has also began on strategies for Ribbon Earn vaults and for Sandclock. Both of which reside on Ethereum mainnet. As for Arbitrum strategies we are continuing to work on vaults for Jones Dao, and are waiting for Umami V2 and the launch of Rysk Finance in order to begin development on those as well.

Lastly on the backend aspect of the project, we will be reorganizing the github in order to separate the core contracts from products and strategies. This will just make our workflow much cleaner and allow for it to become much more readable.

Frontend

The frontend is still under development with staking coming soon. A community member also graciously put us in touch with an outside agency which is helping build out the frontend for the cross chain swaps. Allowing us to bring the full product to market faster.

A quick word on cross chain swaps, initially it will span across 7 chains. Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, Polygon, BSC, and Avalanche. Including 5 different exchanges that users will be able to choose from. Uniswap, Sushiswap, Spookyswap, Pancakeswap, and Trader Joe decentralized exchange. This product will also look to expand to other exchanges and chains, such as bera chain, in the future. There will be a .25% fee which will go to bolstering the treasury, building out an insurance fund, and expanding the team.

With this nearing completion for the initial testing we have begun brainstorming and initial development of our next product. All products are built out with the intention of bolstering Mugen and continuing to expand the options available to users.

The second product is aimed at allowing Mugen to utilize under collateralized loans in order to increase its capital efficiency significantly. While also rewarding creditors with a fixed income that is dependable. It would be structured in a similar manner to fixed rate corporate bonds.

Corporate bonds are a proven fundraising method in tradition finance, and bonds in general have a market value of over 115 trillion USD globally. But it still remains an under utilized tool in decentralized finance.

In order to deploy this product we would need to:

1. Continue to build our reputation as a trustworthy protocol in this space

2. Provide with reasonable confidence to creditors that Mugen would not default.

The first can only be gained through time and continuous actions, and the second can be done through a sort of insurance fund that can be split between the main protocol (yield aggregation strategies) and the secondary aspect of corporate bonds.

While this secondary product is still quite far off into the future, internal ideas are already floating around as to how this can expand outside of Mugen and potentially help other protocols. As well and create a fixed rate marketplace that lives entirely on-chain.

But that is really it at the moment. The team is continuing to build out behind the scenes with the primary focus on the swaps contracts and frontend.

If you are a community member and interested in testing out the cross chain swaps early, please reach out on discord so that once the time has come we can begin to onboard people in an efficient manner.