Vyper Bytes #1: what’s the deal about Vyper?
Gm Snakes 🐍
As we near mainnet launch, we decided to launch Vyper Bytes to share information and learning resources about Vyper. We plan to cover many different parts from resources about our primitive, to deep dives on financial technicalities and modelling.
In this first article we start by sharing what Vyper is, how it came to be, and our plan for the future. Strap on and let’s get started 😎
First let’s start with a little history…
How did Vyper start?
The “Vyper Idea” started around February 2022 during the Serum x Wormhole Hackathon. At the time we felt that risk-management was something that DeFi desperately needed, as people had essentially no way of insuring against hacks and other protocol failures.
In true web3 fashion, we hacked together a first proof-of-concept in just a couple of weeks. The first deploy was rough on the edges but already hinting at what Vyper would become:
Without going too much into details, the core idea revolved around a tranching primitive — Vyper Core — which would allow users to redistribute risk and returns of any yield-generating asset to create custom risk/reward payoffs. As a showcase of Vyper Core, we built on top of it Vyper Vaults, which used the primitive to redistribute the yield of lending deposits vs. the risk of an hack/protocol becoming under-collateralized. At the same time we also managed to integrate the Serum CLOB, so that users could trade in and out of their vault positions.
It’s important to note that already at the time, we envisioned our tranching primitive to be used for many different use cases, such as insurance against stablecoin depeg 👀 Our submission was successful and we won the 4th prize of the Hackathon:
After the hackathon we entered the Serum Accelerator, which helped us shape and improve our product. We finally got to present our improved product, together with a shining new UI, during the Demo Day of the Solana Bahamas Hacker House, held during the FTX x SALT Conference.
During and after the conference we received extremely positive feedbacks, and while we were almost ready to launch, we felt that something was missing. In particular we were not satisfied with the architecture of our primitive, which we felt limited scaling and usefulness, and had a too strong emphasis on tranching.
Therefore, we decided to go back to the drawing board and during the summer months of 2022 we completely re-engineered our primitive architecture into a full-fledged modular derivative infrastructure.
What is Vyper now?
Today we are proud to announce that Vyper Core is the first ever primitive allowing anyone to create, trade, settle on-chain derivatives. It allows complete flexibility over the choice of collateral, the source of pricing data, and even the payoff!
We’ll leave the technical details for another time, but let’s just say that we are pretty hyped about it and what will be built on top of it. In the coming weeks we plan to release more technical docs to allow people to easily build on top of our primitive, as well as release a no-code interface to allow anyone to easily trade anything 🤑
What about Vyper Vaults?
From its original focus on lending products, Vyper Vaults morphed into a new flexible protocol, focused on providing a nice and simple UI for gathering liquidity and auto-compounding derivatives. Our first product, targeting yield-farming is built in partnership with Orca:
It provides a simple and cost-effective way for people to farm without having to take impermanent loss, or leverage up their farming without risking liquidations. Our devnet release got immense traction, with almost 1,000 unique users and countless useful feedbacks. The Vaults are almost ready for mainnet and will launch soon™. It will initially be available in a closed alpha to only a few people as we fine tune vaults parameters, with a plan to release it in open beta in the coming months
Showing our close partnership with Serum, we also received a whopping 500,000 SRM grant from the Serum DAO to keep integrating and building on the Serum CLOB, read the full story here 🔥
What’s next?
For the exact date of mainnet launch, make sure to follow us on Twitter and join our Discord!
We also plan to release a new no-code interface for people to directly create and trade custom custom derivatives in just a few clicks. This will allow everyone to start feeling the power of Vyper Core, as well as for devs to test out new payoffs before having to actually to build out a full protocol around it.
We hope you are as excited as we are, stay tuned for more 🐍
