On the afternoon of March 31st,Polkadot's new project Stone (STN)Launch Huobi. From the initial starting price of about US$0.25, it reached a maximum of US$20, with a maximum increase of 7900%.

After some research on Stone, Odaily believes that products with this positioning are quite scarce for both Polkadot and Web 3.0.

DeFi has opened the door to asset efficiency, allowing the coins in people's hands to obtain double benefits by providing liquidity, lending, and staking.

But only the secondary derivative, the utilization rate is not enough. At present, there are still many derivatives of collateral that cannot be circulated.

What Stone has to do is to provide sufficient liquidity and more usage scenarios for various mortgage assets, including larger PoS mortgage assets.

Although the current on-chain performance is limited, we believe that the future-oriented decentralized asset management platform will surely be able to achieve frictionless circulation across the constraints of the underlying chain like the centralized platform.

Stone, which is positioned to provide liquidity and asset aggregation across chains, may be stepping on the rigid needs of the future.

01 With the advent of the Web3 era, a new type of asset management platform is coming

Web3 has not really arrived, but when everyone has a Web3 that they are looking forward to, someone will create such a world, no matter which technology path they take.

Everyone has different understandings of the future of Web3. In our opinion, Web 3.0 should include these two features:

First of all, the underlying platform is automated and intelligent, and the rights and responsibilities are programmable and clear, thus fully protecting the rights of users.

Furthermore, smooth user experience.

In the Web 2.0 environment, calls between products and interactions between users and products cannot be trusted, which brings huge operating costs.

When we call a plug-in, a dialog box pops up to ask, which is essentially caused by the user's inability to trust the product; personal information disappears after switching web pages or just refreshing the web page, so users are often required to enter repeatedly.

In Web3, the underlying system is intelligent, recording our information but not misusing it; products can be interconnected, packaged, and disassembled at will, thereby realizing a non-inductive and unbounded user experience in calling and switching products.

In the blockchain-based cryptocurrency world, the new generation of public chain Polkadot also has the same long-cherished wish: to create a Web3 that is interconnected by thousands of chains, decentralized, and has independent rights and interests.

By providing an out-of-the-box blockchain constructor like Substrate, Polkadot realizes the underlying automation, intelligence, and high programmability, coupled with the interoperability brought by the cross-chain bridge, and runs towards the vision of the interconnection of 10,000 chains.

Based on this, we may be able to achieve a senseless user experience on Polkadot in the future. Therefore, Polkadot's vision, technology and ecology have attracted many developers, investors and users.

Polkaproject information shows that the number of applications in the Polkadot ecosystem has reached 285, and the types include oracles, NFT, DAO, transfer bridges, DeFi, data, privacy, games, smart contracts, infrastructure, expansion, forums, wallets, tools and more.

It can be seen from the figure that the Polkadot ecology is quite complete, but for the most common income aggregator projects on Ethereum, it seems that there is no representative product yet.

Stone, which has become popular recently, can just make up this piece of the puzzle.

According to public information, Stone is a platform that provides cross-chain liquidity and income aggregation around PoS assets. Based on Substrate, it focuses on giving liquidity to mortgage assets and providing easy-to-use stable income products.

Seeing this, some people may say that since Polkadot is not yet online, and many assets are still issued based on Ethereum, it is too early to talk about income aggregation.

In our view, such a view still stays in the shackles of Web 2.0. The revenue aggregator in the real Web 3.0 era should be oriented to all assets. With the technical convenience of Wanchain Interconnection, it should break through the barriers at the bottom layer, provide users with access to various assets and even provide highly structured products, so as to achieve a highly intelligent experience.

Therefore, there is no need to be confined to the ETH ecology. Among the current cross-chain aggregators, there are many projects based on Ethereum, and then migrated to the Ethereum-compatible chain to achieve a more complicated connection. This is a way of thinking. Stone, however, chose a different solution.

Next, let's take a look at how Stone does it.

02 How does Stone aggregate the liquidity of PoS assets?

The first pain point that Stone wants to solve is the cross-chain circulation of assets. It is difficult for assets to cross-chain directly, which will discourage the enthusiasm of holders and does not conform to the trend of Web 3.0. In the future, the interconnection of various ecology, large and small assets must be the trend.

To this end, Stone chose to build a flexible, efficient, and high-performance asset management protocol based on Substrate and the Polkadot ecosystem.

After providing unbounded flow of assets, what Stone wants to solve is to further release its liquidity.

The emergence of DeFi and liquidity mining has greatly improved the flow efficiency of assets. Now almost every asset can have a place to obtain value-added income, whether it is lock-up to provide liquidity or pledge mining.

So the next step, is it possible for these pledged tokens to gain more value?

There are many derivative assets of pledged assets in the market. For example, after the launch of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, it began to support pledged mining (PoS mining). There are also many liquidity providers that provide convenience for retail investors, such as aETH issued by Ankr, vETH issued by Bifrost and rETH issued by Stafi, etc.

However, these derivative assets are often limited by the platform, and are prone to problems such as poor liquidity and high transaction slippage.

At this time, a special aggregator is needed to provide liquidity or usage scenarios for it.

According to Vincent, the founder of Stone, Stone will provide a specialized trading platform and structured investment products for mortgage tokens and derivatives of PoS public chains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana and Oasis.

The trading module will start liquidity mining to increase liquidity; structured products will rely on the professionalism of the team, based on Polkadot's cross-chain solution to access assets such as mainstream coins and stable coins, and according to the Sharpe Ratio ) launched various types of structured products, allowing PoS holders to obtain a second income while enjoying the pledge income.

Some friends may be curious about what the structured investment products mentioned here are. Let's take an example. For example, Stone will issue a synthetic asset package sETH of Ethereum in the future, which is an asset synthesized by aETH, vETH and rETH (just for example, not representative of the final product).

Its characteristic is that by synthesizing other assets, sETH can diversify the risk of holding a single currency, the asset fluctuation is relatively small, and the income is relatively stable. Similarly, Stone will also provide users with products with various risk exposures by matching assets with different risk-return attributes.

From the experience of various public chains such as Ethereum, the lock-up scale of a large revenue aggregator can often reach hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. After Stone has opened up the liquidity and usage scenarios of PoS pledged assets, Vincent believes that the market size may grow exponentially.

According to statistics, as of January 2021, the TVL of pure DeFi products is 25 billion US dollars, the total market value of PoS projects in the same period is 238 billion US dollars, and the pledged assets have reached 44 billion US dollars. The 2.0 lock-up is counted.

In addition, after opening up the cross-chain, Stone will be able to realize the aggregation of structured products from mainstream currencies to major altcoins, which can be said to provide income products for the entire cryptocurrency market. This is a vast world, and Stone is one of the few pioneers.

03 In addition to listing on the exchange and opening pools, what other moves does Stone have recently?

Since the project was established last year, Stone has completed the testing of the stablecoin liquidity pool and the launch of some mortgage asset derivatives (such as rETH, rDOT), as well as the launch of stablecoin pool products.

In terms of team, according to Vincent, Stone has 7 full-time development and operation personnel. Technically, Stone's development is also supported by RockX.

It is understood that Stone's development team has extensive experience in blockchain technology and is also a node operator for public chains such as Polkadot, Terra, Solana and Oasis.

In terms of financing, in February this year, Stone completed a financing of US$1.5 million. Major investors include Signum Capital, Arrington Capital, Longhash Ventures, TRGC, Dealean Capital, Nabais Capital, Hillrise Capital, YBB, PAKA, Stafi, Ankr, RAMP, etc. Many projects are not only investors of Stone, but also strategic partners of the platform.

In terms of the secondary market, Stone (STN) was officially listed on Huobi yesterday and achieved the highest increase of 7900%. The distribution of its tokens is as follows: the total supply of STN is 100 million pieces, of which 55% will be used as liquidity mining rewards, 15% will be used as development funds, private equity and project foundations will each account for 12%, market & partner and community contribution rewards 3% each. There is no direct large reward for the founding team.

In terms of initial liquidity, after the tokens are locked, investors can unlock 15%-25% (the specific amount depends on the round), which will be released in one year and distributed quarterly; the development fund is similar.

From the perspective of the roadmap, in Q1, Stone has implemented the Alpha version online, the stable currency pool test, the token online and the liquidity mining plan.

In the upcoming Q2, Stone will release the Alpha version of ETH2.0 Staking token derivatives, launch sDOT, release the liquidity of DOT, and release the Alpha version of the platform for aggregate income in the lending market.

By Q2, the structural income products mentioned above will be launched, and the built-in Swap will be launched to make the user experience more seamless and smooth.

We believe that the era of Wanchain Interconnection and Web 3.0 will eventually come, and future-oriented products must be unbounded and highly structurable. Stone, which is born based on Substrate development, positioned for cross-border flow of assets, and earning stable returns, will usher in even greater Development Opportunities.