Forging Ahead
Planet community members: We’ll be the first to admit that there is a lot to unpack here. The Planet team and admins have a slight advantage of time — at this point we’ve had around 48 hours or so now to process and recalibrate based on the changes that are outlined below. On the other side of those 48 hours we can confidently say that we are, to a person — every single one of us — more excited about the future of Planet than we have been in a very long time. We have also spoken at length with original and large AQUA holders. Every single one has voiced their support for both the new leadership and the renewed vision.
Planet has always been a resilient community — we’ve seen it time and time again. The last few months have been absolutely brutal. Everyone here agrees on that point. But we all also agree that the coming months could be some of our best yet. Our hope is that in the coming days, each of you will begin to believe that, too. The commitment of this team is as strong as ever and we guarantee you that for the past few days we have already been throwing everything we have at turning things around.
We’ve tried to outline everything quickly, but thoroughly, in this article. However, we do realize that everyone will have a lot of questions, so one day following the release of this article we will be conducting an AMA on the main telegram chat.
Thank you for being such an incredible community. Talk to you “soon”.
Signed,
Admins: A, Joe, Sea Trader, Tsum, Kev, Stephen, Cato, Jo3Dang3r, CK
Planet: Byzantine (Lead Developer) and Dev Team
Arthur’s departure
On Sunday, February 19th, Arthur Curry and Planet officially parted ways. After much consideration, he has decided to pursue other interests and that it’s time to move on. We want to thank Arthur for his invaluable contributions to Planet’s growth and development, and we wish him all the best in his future endeavours.
What does Planet’s leadership structure look like now?
The core development team and admins will assume project leadership while maintaining regular communication with the original Aqua holders and users of the protocol who played a vital role in Planet’s initial success. It is worth noting that Arthur did not hold a developer position, and all developers, including the lead developer Byzantine, will remain working on Planet.
Key metrics at handover of the project:
AQUA price: $24.9
GAMMA price: $0.01744
TVL: ~ 9 million
AQUA burned: 5488
The success of the team running the project after Arthur’s departure should be measured on these metrics and we ask you to judge us on this.
Refocusing for Success
The current state of Planet has provided everyone here the opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate. It’s obvious that we need to grow — and that doing so is going to require a fresh approach. To that end, we have re-examined the entire roadmap and developed a short-term action plan to aggressively target the key metrics listed above.
One major focus for the next 3–6 months will be Aggregating. We’re going from top protocol to top protocol, running an internal audit of them, tapping into major pools, and creating a seamless process for users to supply into them directly from Planet. We are also pushing the Compensation plan to a top priority — it’s high time Planet honors its commitments to this community. We have also shared an updated full Executive Summary of the Roadmap below for those who are interested.
Our commitment is to return to the fundamentals that made Planet successful in the first place: high yields with low risk and building the best community in DeFi. In the short term, we believe this focus is paramount, with a timeframe of 3–6 months.
The updated roadmap reflects both our sober acknowledgement of the current state of Planet and our commitment to near-term, sustainable growth. A simple logic now applies to every project: “Over the next 3–6 months, does this raise TVL, attract users, improve trust, and generate high fees/buy pressure on GAMMA and AQUA?”
If the answer is no, it gets paused. If the answer is yes, we will speed up the development process. By this logic we will ruthlessly pursue our commitments to Planet and the Planet community at large.
Summary:
Arthur has departed and Planet is going to be laser focused over the next 3–6 months on regaining your trust and finding the highest yields for users on BSC. All other longer-term projects are on pause until we start to get some sustainable traction again. By no means are we reducing our development or abandoning our plans, it’s quite the opposite — we are bringing an insane level of intensity to the most important parts of Planet that will help us win immediately and sustainably.
One final note on communication: Gone are the days of over-promising and under-delivering. If a community member asks for a timeline of a new feature and we are not 100% certain on the date — you will not be given one. However, we will be in constant communication with the community to let them know what we are working on and offering progress reports. Don’t believe us? We don’t blame you. We realize we have to earn that right and that consistency is key.
To the long-term users of Planet: we appreciate you and know that you are responsible for the previous success Planet had. We will regain your trust. Our only ask is that, moving forward, you judge us on the key metrics we were given at the handover the project (listed above).
AMA to follow on the Planet telegram channel. We look forward to your questions and we are very excited about the challenge ahead of us!
Planet Team
Admins: A, Sea trader, Joe, Cato, Kev, Stephen, Tsum, Jo3Dang3r, CK
Planet: Byzantine (Lead Developer) and Dev Team
Executive Audit Summary of the Roadmap and Development of Mini Projects.
Things we are pausing for now
Pink Planet
It is difficult to predict whether NFTs will continue as a long-term trend or are simply a passing fad. However, based on current market conditions, it appears unlikely that Planet will succeed in this category within the next 3–6 months. Additionally, the work completed by the third-party development team falls short of our development standards, and the resources required to launch Pink Planet are not currently justified.
Therefore, we should pause work on Pink Planet.
Purple Planet — Insurance
After reviewing the performance of current insurance projects, it appears that this area may not be suitable for us to pursue in the short term. While we recognise the potential for insurance, there are no quick wins here.
Therefore, we should pause work on Purple Planet.
Planet App
Regarding the development of the Planet App, dedicating time and resources to building the app at this moment will not aid in achieving success within the next 3–6 months. It is more prudent to focus on gaining traction before committing resources to building the Planet App.
Therefore, a decision on this endeavour will be made based on the success of aggregating and overall growth of Planet in the next three months.
Limit Orders
Given the current lack of liquidity, we have determined that pursuing limit orders at this time will not help us succeed in the next 3–6 months. Moreover, we would have limit orders on perpetual markets (described below) anyway, making this initiative less pressing.
As such, we have decided to pause this initiative for now.
Affiliates
While we see some potential value in this area, we are still in the discussion stages and do not have a clear plan on how to proceed. We will continue to monitor the success of our aggregation efforts and overall Planet metric growth to determine when this initiative should be presumed.
As such, we have decided to pause this initiative for the time being.
Expanding Governance and automating all the functions of Planet.
We recognise the potential long-term benefits of expanding governance and automating functions. We believe that governance, and consequently, a rationale for holding AQUA, will become a fundamental pillar of Planet in the forthcoming future.
Once we get back on track, we want Planet to be driven by the community, so we will double down on this once we reach our short term goals
Stablecoin
Due to the high level of uncertainty surrounding stablecoins, including the retirement of BUSD and the unknown success of various other stablecoin strategies, we have decided to pause the development of a stablecoin. Additionally, building a stablecoin of high quality within this timeframe is not feasible. However, stable coins remain an important aspect of DeFi and if Planet achieves success, this endeavour can be revisited.
Avalanche Subnet
While cross-chain functionality remains intriguing, it is currently on hold until we can achieve success in the next 3–6 months. When we reach a point of success, we will re-evaluate which chain is best suited for our needs.
Things we are pursuing aggressively
Aggregation Strategies
One of the key drivers of Planet’s initial growth was its ability to aggregate other platforms’ LPs. This involves buying GAMMA with reward tokens from external protocols while offering higher yields to Planet users. This brings huge buy pressure on GAMMA. We believe that this strategy has a high probability of success, as it has been proven to work in the past. Moreover, a significant amount of work on the smart contracts has already been completed.
Therefore, we should speed up and launch this initiative.
AMM
Our AMM (outside of BNB-AQUA, BNB-GAMMA, and 3G) has a very low fee-to-reward ratio. It is also unlikely that we can beat/compete with the biggest BSC DEXs in the next 3–6 months. So, we are pausing the expansion of new LPs.
Rather, we will integrate our AMM with 1inch to have the best swaps on the market. We will also be making depositing into aggregated pools easy by rewriting transform and convert LP functions so that users can directly deposit in Planet with few clicks with low slippage and highly efficient swaps. Anyone can easily deposit any token into an aggregated pools directly from Planet and earn best yields in BSC.
Compensation Page
One of our top priorities should be the release of the compensation page since regaining the trust of our users is paramount to Planet’s success.
Therefore, we should expedite the launch of this initiative.
Perpetual Markets
We are excited to announce that this initiative is nearly complete and just awaiting final design updates and testing. We believe that this update holds great potential and are looking forward to launching it soon.
Boost Calculator
We recognise the Boost Calculator would be huge to bring awareness of utility of GAMMA and how much one can benefit from the entire protocol from staking GAMMA. We will continue to work on this.
Leveraged Yield Farming
This would efficiently use both blue plane and green planet. We believe, a user friendly, automated leveraged yield farming is a logical next step once we reached our short-term goals.
In summary, you can expect to see more and more aggregated pools with high yields (with huge buy pressure on GAMMA), improved swap experience, perpetual DEX, and compensation page in the short-term.
We look forward to answering your questions during tomorrow’s AMA, and are excited to be undergoing this essential course correction towards creating the best DeFi Protocol on the BSC.
