SECTION 1: APPLICANT INFORMATION
Applicant Name:
Chris Dahmen, Head of Growth
Project Name:
CIAN Protocol
Project Description:
CIAN builds open-source DeFi strategy vaults and advanced decentralized automation tooling enabling users to effortlessly generate multi-protocol onchain strategies. CIAN also builds tailored strategies for large institutional partners such as MatrixPort, Amber and OKX.
Team Members and Qualifications:
- Luffy He: Founder, CEO
- Nami: Project Manager
- Sabo: Finance
- Harudjin: CTO
- Chris Dahmen: Head of Growth/BD
- Clover: Lead Dev
- Mihawk: Senior Dev
- Rayleigh: Senior Dev
- Crocodile: Dev
- Katakuri: Dev
- Chopper: Dev
- Enel: UI Designer
- Sanji: Front End
- Paoch: Front End
- Vivi: Marketing Manager
- Severine: Community Manager
- Barto: DeFi Research & Community
- Frank: DeFi Research
- Robin: Finance
- Hancock: Human Ressources
Project Links:
- https://cian.app
- https://twitter.com/CIAN_protocol
- CIAN
- https://docs.cian.app/
- https://github.com/cian-ai/cian-protocol
- https://dune.com/cian_dapp/cianv2
- https://defillama.com/protocol/cian
- https://twitter.com/Luffy_He
- https://twitter.com/Castick7
Contact Information:
- TG: @ChrisDahmen
- Email: chris@cian.app
Do You Acknowledge That Your Team Will Be Subject to a KYC Requirement?:
Yes
SECTION 2: GRANT INFORMATION
Requested Grant Size:
380,000 ARB, progressively unlocked based on milestones completion.
Grant Matching:
N/A
Grant Breakdown:
- Vault(s) incentivization
- 100% / 380,000 ARB
- Incentives are to be distributed dynamically over a period of 3 months.
Funding Address:
0x2970A6AECADFb0e8F396DaD8c48E566AdE010e5B
Funding Address Characteristics:
2/3 multisig
SECTION 3: GRANT OBJECTIVES AND EXECUTION
Objectives:
- Stimulate Arbitrum’s LST (LSD) ecosystem
- Onboard new on-chain users
- Attract new institutional capital on Arbitrum
- Jumpstart CIAN’s Dex on Arbitrum
- Generate substantial fees for LST holders on external protocols
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
As CIAN’s vaults require users to only interact once with the protocol in order to execute their static “mid/long-term” position, the two predominant metrics relevant to performance are:
- TVL
- Active users
How will receiving a grant enable you to foster growth or innovation within the Arbitrum ecosystem?:
CIAN was launched, alongside its first vault (wstETH), on the Arbitrum network in June 2023. Since then, despite unfavorable market conditions, having no token nor added incentives, having faced multiple wstETH supply cap bottlenecks and limited wETH liquidity on AAVE V3, CIAN was able to capture and generate north of $9M TVL with its wstETH leveraged staking strategy vault.
This amount can be justified by the good reputation that CIAN has built over the years, specifically in the eyes of institutional partners and whales. Although our vaults aren’t generating extravagant APYs, the delta-neutral approach combined with our liquidation protection mechanism makes for a safe and sustainable investment choice.
This grant would allow CIAN to fully unveil the vault capacity due to its leveraged capital efficiency while indirectly stimulating Arbitrum’s LST ecosystem, most precisely by generating swap fees for wstETH/ETH LPs across various markets due to the multiple swaps necessitated in order to leverage & unwind deposited funds. Based on previous experiences, we are confident that a carefully-planned incentive program would yield considerable value for users while offering us an abundant source of quality marketing opportunities as this amount of ARB could easily be spread out over a 3-month period.
Justification for the size of the grant:
As per the actual state of ETH and wstETH on AAVE V3, given the incentive grant approval, CIAN’s team estimates that 380k ARB would enable the wstETH vault alone to increase its supply to a total of $30M wstETH in the first 2 months, eventually scaling and sustaining up to $35M by the end of January 2024.
During this timeline, CIAN plans to dynamically adjust the incentives following the TVL growth curve in order to output a stable APY ranging from 20% to 12%. With a sustainable APY exceeding 12%, CIAN’s ARB wstETH vault would broadly outperform any other recursive looping strategies available on Ethereum Mainnet and L2s, hence making Arbitrum the most attractive network for our current/future users and institutional partners.
Execution Strategy:
All ARB tokens (380k) allocated to CIAN for incentivization would be distributed as is (ARB) to wstETH vault’s LP holders.
The ARB rewards would be dynamically adjusted over a period of 3 months to maintain a stable yield percentage, progressively decreasing as the vault’s TVL increases. The vault would originally offer a peak APY of 20-30% for a period of 2 weeks, during which we would conjointly launch a large marketing campaign with LIDO. Following the initial event, a multitude of smaller events would take place, promoting a sustainable APY averaging 15%.
To further guarantee a large-scale adoption, the current ecosystem would require minor changes to improve its scalability. For this, we already started to convey an action plan with LIDO that would help cement wstETH/ETH’s liquidity onchain.
As for the distribution mechanism, a Merkel tree contract would be deployed to record users’ reward data and receive their reward tokens (ARB). Users’ reward data will be regularly updated onchain upon deposit events, thus allowing them to claim their rewards at the desired frequency.
The ARB tokens would be stored and distributed from the following mutlisig address:
0x2970A6AECADFb0e8F396DaD8c48E566AdE010e5B
Grant Timeline:
As this is CIAN’s first public request to the Arbitrum DAO, proper milestone-based targets shall apply to set expectations.
Milestone #1: Total vault TVL: $15M by the end of October, 2023
Milestone #2: Total vault TVL: $22M by the end of November, 2023
Milestone #3: Total vault TVL: $29M by the end of December, 2024
Milestone #4: Total vault TVL: $35M by the end of January, 2024
The ARB grant will start being distributed within 7 days of the receipt of the first payment. This grant will be streamed bi-weekly to the above-mentioned Multisig throughout the duration of the STIP. The grant will expire when either all 380,000 ARB have been distributed to users, or the 01/31/24 deadline is hit, upon which the remainder shall be returned to the Arbitrum DAO Treasury.
Do you accept the funding of your grant streamed linearly for the duration of your grant proposal, and that the multisig holds the power to halt your stream?:
Yes. The funding may be halted at any time by the DAO based on milestone progress and/or general satisfaction.
SECTION 4: PROTOCOL DETAILS
Is the Protocol Native to Arbitrum?:
No, CIAN first deployed on Avalanche in April 2022.
On what other networks is the protocol deployed?:
- Ethereum
- Polygon
- Avalanche
- Optimism
What date did you deploy on Arbitrum?:
May 31, 2023
Protocol Performance:
- Stable TVL growth; currently sitting at $68,000,000
- CIAN’s entire growth was achieved without Token incentives
- Over 20,000 users since inception
- No smart contract breach since inception
- No liquidation since inception
More data can be found on DeFiLlama:
Protocol Roadmap:
Q4 2023
- 2 upcoming audits (by Paladin Blockchain Security & Omniscia)
- Deploy CIAN’s DEX (no public documentation available)
- Deploy 1 institutional delta-neutral strategy vault (wBTC)
Q1 2024
- Deploy 2 institutional delta-neutral strategy vaults (ETH, Stablecoin)
- Deploy new leveraged staking vault(s) utilizing other Arbitrum lending platform(s)
Audit History:
CIAN currently has 5 audits under its belt.
SECTION 5: Data and Reporting
Is your team prepared to create Dune Spells and/or Dashboards for your incentive program?:
Absolutely, we can provide a dashboard specifically tracking all metrics relevant to the progress and performance of the Arbitrum incentive program.
Does your team agree to provide bi-weekly program updates on the Arbitrum Forum thread?:
Yes.
Does your team acknowledge that failure to comply with any of the above requests can result in the halting of the program’s funding stream?:
Yes, acknowledged.