Hello everyone. This is Neo.

The journey of the past year has been a very difficult period for me and my team. This is probably the problem that most crypto teams face right now. I have witnessed many teams close to us that have given up on development due to financial difficulties. Thanks to all of your support, our team has managed to survive in such a market environment. Much appreciated.

I aim to bring you all into the fold about the current landscape of Starlay and where we envision Starlay steering towards.

No revenue and at a loss

First, I want you all to know that we have no means of generating revenue right now. We pay our members salaries from money earned from other businesses. The reason why it is difficult to make money with Starlay is, first of all, that all protocol revenue is allocated entirely to veLAY’s Locker. Before we released veLAY, we had about $300K in revenue, which was also all given back to the users. Besides, all the rewards from dApp Staking are still here, except for the ones used for Buyback.

Why do we continue to develop Starlay despite these losses? It is for the users who support Starlay. We managed to continue our activities to return profits to investors with the LAY token. However, it is clear that the DeFi market is heavily influenced by the macro economy, and history has proven that a surge in a project's activity doesn't guarantee a boost in token prices. This means that the most plausible strategy now seems to be downsizing the team, reducing expenses, and surviving as long as possible to wait for the next bull market. But even this will be tough for today's crypto.

So, what can we do?

The first is multi-VM/multi-chain deployment: Starlay, deployed on Astar's EVM, has also been moving toward WASM conversion since January of this year, completing a testnet release in April, and has now been accepted into the the ink!ubator program sponsored by the Web3 Foundation, and we will receive our first Grant as Polkadot WASM DeFi. We are also planning to expand to several other chains, which we will announce in the future, and negotiations are progressing well under the radar. In order to broaden our user spectrum, we plan to expand to chains that are expected to be very active in the future.

The second is we will open Starlay Forum to start discussing the future operation. One of the several questions we have received is why Starlay does not list the token and why it is not exclusive to other projects. However, there is a clear reason for not listing it. We understand that there are people who are not very comfortable with us making these decisions on our own, and we wanted to provide a place for open discussion. Personally, I would like to list nASTR on Starlay and would be happy to discuss the precautions to be taken in doing so. We would also like to discuss dApp Staking rewards that are not currently being used. We have been buying back LAY on a regular basis for the past year, but frankly, I feel that it has not contributed to improving the price of LAY at all, and the buyback operation only makes Botters to be richer. This is clearly a poor strategy. Instead, we would like to use the funds to do something with the community. All addresses are public so that no one can misuse them, and we would like to discuss again how to use them for Starlay through Forum.

Finally, we declare that we will continue to research and develop protocols and collaborations. Our strength is development, and we have released three protocols to the mainnet so far. We started out with a copy, but the original Tokenomics, which combines ve equipped Lending and the three protocols, has become a unique ecosystem that cannot be seen in other protocols.

However, in this market environment, it does not make sense to simply develop additional functions. I personally expect that elements for the next mass adoption will need to mature; specifically, privacy, cross-chain communication, and data will become more important. If you have any interesting projects, please DM me and let me know the details. We will possibly be able to help if we can. Even if the project seems to be temporarily independent, we will gladly help develop it if we can expect to achieve a collaboration that will ultimately give back to Starlay.

Gratitude

One day I happened to see a Tweet where I found a comment to the Starlay team saying that I was cheering them on behind their backs for their hard work in spite of some criticism. I remember those messages of support and would like to use my time to confront such people. Thanks for reading.