Bao Finance Community Round-up! May 2021 Edition
It’s been such an exciting month in the Bao universe! We’ve taken big steps by launching our first ever franchise on Binance Smart Chain, announcing NFTs with functionality, releasing new staking mechanics, onboarding new team members, and much more! It’s a lot to take in but worry not- I’ll do my best to review some key highlights and sneak in a little surprise or two. Grab a seat and a pair of chopsticks as we dig into this month’s issue of the Bao Finance community round-up!
PandaSwap and Farms open shop on Binance Smart Chain
Bao Finance’s first franchise branch is now open! PandaSwap and its Farms are live on the Binance Smart Chain, allowing Bao to capture more liquidity from this highly active network. With over $90M volume and $80M total locked value since launch, Panda’s debut proves that it’s off to a strong start. Although PandaSwap will operate on a different governance token than Bao, it will integrate into the greater Bao ecosystem as 15% of their total token supply will be locked in the Bao community vault. This allows Bao to capture value from the Panda ecosystem while also giving all Bao holders significant voting power in Panda governance.
As Panda develops further, it will be used as a proving ground for testing and finetuning new features before they’re ready to be ported to Bao Finance. For example, soft synthetics will first premier on the Panda platform, dubbed as “Ponds”. By deploying first on Panda, features can be refined and prepped in an environment that doesn’t directly affect Bao. This will ensure new features are polished before being ported over to Bao Finance. With so many additional features down the pipeline, Panda will be an active live play environment these next few months. Keep an eye out for Panda related announcements even if you don’t decide to use the franchise!
Looking to get started on PandaSwap? Check out this great video by Jimmy Russles for an easy beginner guide that doubles as an easily digestible overview of the farms and what the franchise has to offer.
PandaSwap’s launch introduces two new important concepts to the Bao ecosystem; Items and Creatures. Items will be subproducts meant to be held in your wallets, providing minor feature enhancements or functionality. Creatures will be complicated features or enhancements with mechanics that offer drastic changes to how users interact with Bao Finance and its franchises. Let’s go over some examples of new sub-products that fall into these categories to understand them better, starting with…
Badges — NFTs with utility!
Have you ever wanted to own Bao’s cute little mascot as an official NFT? Get ready for our first introduction to Items with official Bao NFTs called Badges! Not only will Badges make great collector’s tokens, but some will even bring various utilities to Bao Finance and its related platforms. Certain Badges may provide discounts, others may enhance functionality of various products, and some may even unlock early access to testing new features- all you have to do is hold them in your wallet!
Badges will be awarded for various achievements and milestones. The snapshots for the first two Badges have already been taken, and if you’ve interacted with Bao prior to this month there’s a good chance you’re eligible for them! The criteria for earning these are intended to be as inclusive as possible to those who have actively participated in the Bao ecosystem.
To start things off, I’m pleased to premier the first ever preview for the proposed design for the Bao Swapper Badge! If you interacted with BaoSwap on xDai at any point before the snapshot, you qualify for owning these little guys. We appreciate everyone who participated in our first ever cross-chain expansion, the first step of many into a bright multi-chain future for Bao. We’ve solidified our role as a prominent player on the xDai network, and we couldn’t have done it without our huge community. Here’s to you brave nomads crossing the borders of uncharted territory to plant seeds in new settlements. May our future continue to deliver us bountiful yields!
Next, I’m excited to reveal the tentative design for the Bao Founder’s Badge! This old Bao has been patiently tending to his farms right from the start, and he has quite the yield to show for it. This Badge is reserved for users with wallets containing $BAO, $BAO.cx, or locked $BAO rewards. To all the early adopters of the project and members of this community, please accept this gift proving your support in its first alpha stages of development. Thank you to all you dumplings out there who believed in the project before its main product has even been released.
Badge designs and names are not final, only proposed and subject to change before their official release. If you haven’t qualified for either of these, worry not, for there will be plenty more opportunities to earn future Badges as awards for certain milestones. The best way to track any upcoming Badges is to join our community on Discord for the latest announcements. Badges are still early concepts so if you have any ideas for achievements that should be awarded, or utilities that Badges could provide, we’d love for you to share your thoughts!
$BAMBOO — fast growing, flexible, and forgiving
Have you just claimed an adorable bundle of PNDA from your farms? Are you looking for a way to safely compound your rewards? You’re in luck, because the next Item I’d like to introduce you to is $BAMBOO. By using the Bamboo Bar you can stake your $PNDA tokens for an easy and reliable way to earn more rewards. $BAMBOO collects a portion of the trading fees from PandaSwap to appreciate in value while being held in your wallet. When you’re done staking, you can convert your $BAMBOO back into $PNDA at any time. Because $BAMBOO’s value raises against $PNDA, you should receive more $PNDA than you originally staked given enough time. Picture the $BAMBOO item as a relaxing sanctuary to drop your $PNDA off so they can munch away day to day. Keep them in there for a while and your $PNDA may make some friends they’ll want to bring back home when you come to pick them up!
$RHINO charges forward with a new way to stake!
$BAMBOO isn’t the only staking mechanic to be introduced with the launch of Panda! Meet $RHINO, the new experimental and aggressive way to stake your $PNDA tokens. $RHINO will be our first look at just how complicated “Creatures” can become. All $RHINO transactions incur a tax, which is redistributed to all $RHINO holders and liquidity providers. A portion of the taxes are burned; meaning the more active $RHINO markets are, the scarcer they become. $RHINO converts to $PNDA, however there is a limited supply of $RHINO in the conversion contract. This means that eventually there will be no way to convert $PNDA into $RHINO, leaving their prices to freely decouple from one another.
The taxes slowly decay over time, so it’s possible to enter while the fees are still high to accumulate tons of $RHINO, and then hold until fees lower to convert your $RHINO herd into a $PNDA army.
Oh, what’s that? Still not dangerous enough for you? Spoken like a true $RHINO aficionado in the making — if you wanna live a little closer to the edge you’ll probably be interested in the RHINO-BNB farming pool; which has the highest base rewards on the farm.
By utilizing this pool, you can earn rewards from three different sources! You’ll collect fees on all RHINO-BNB trades on PandaSwap, all $RHINO transactions, and farm $PNDA all at the same time! But be careful, even creating an LP pair with $RHINO will carry a transaction fee as well. Because of its complexity, I highly recommend reading over our documentation to fully understand all the paths $RHINO takes along each transaction. $RHINO requires a heavy commitment, so if you plan on joining the stampede make sure you’re strapped in for a wild ride.
1 BAO = 1 BAOcx with the new exchange contract
Many have been awaiting the completion of the 1:1 BAOcx to BAO exchange contract. I’m excited to share that it’s nearing its final stage of testing and will be officially available for use soon! You’ll be able to easily redeem BAOcx earned from farming on the xDai network into the standard BAO token from the Ethereum Mainnet. With this contract, the price difference between BAOcx and BAO should properly peg against one another. Thank you everyone for your patience while due diligence was taken to thoroughly test and review this contract. Because this is new and unaudited code created by an outside developer, it was one of our highest priorities to first ensure its safety before anything else.
New members of the Bao team!
The Bao universe is expanding as more active and talented members help play a more active role in the community! Please welcome our new Bao Friend, SalveJobs. He’s offered to help Bao with Portuguese translations and lend a hand in moderating our new #Portugese Discord channel. We want Bao’s userbase to reach people across the globe, and we’re recruiting for similar language positions as well. If you’re interested in applying, reach out to a Community Manager, BaoFriend, or our friendly Community Leader Chickn over at our Discord.
But SalveJobs isn’t the only new member to join the BaoFriends. We’ve also enlisted jon.almostfree aboard as well! Aside from being overall helpful and respectful to other members of the community, jon’s xDai Farm and PNDA Farm tools have been extremely useful as a huge upgrade over Bao and PandaSwap’s respective interfaces. So much so that proposal #QmZMhN successfully passed in favor of officially integrating the tools, and provided jon a one-time grant for his astonishing work. He will be aiding our newly appointed Front-end Galaxy lead Vital in developing new web pages and user experience enhancements for Bao and its franchised platforms!
Don’t know what I mean by the Front-end Galaxy? Well, it’s part of our new expansion of decentralization…
Bao Galaxies!
To shift into more decentralized management and contributions, BaoMan detailed the concept of “Galaxies” to describe what he envisions as the future structure of the protocol. He describes most other projects as “Solar Systems” in which a bulk of the work, ideas, and management are done by one core team with the community orbiting around it. We will begin to operate more as collections of different teams with separate leadership structures all contributing to the larger Galaxy they are a part of. Some Galaxies may receive funding, others may be volunteer positions, and even external teams who wish to contribute to Bao are welcome to join our universe either permanently or temporarily.
Inspired by how non-profit organizations structure regional offices, the goal is to support self-organized groups that contribute to the community. With the Galaxy structure, anyone who can provide valuable skills for the greater Bao universe is encouraged to help out and potentially be granted compensation for their efforts. This can lead to faster development and improvements to Bao on multiple fronts with increased emphasis on decentralized workflows. We have so many talented and dedicated members in our community, so I’m confident in our potential to become one of the largest and most successful projects in crypto if we combine all our strengths!
The large success seen in the recent GitCoin Baonties reveals just how beneficial it is to leverage the talents of the community and external developers for rapid improvements to our platform. The 1:1 exchange contract to convert $BAOcx and $BAO came from the trial run of the Baonty program. Furthermore, the initiative our community members have taken to develop powerful tools worthy of being officially integrated into Bao let BaoMan and rocky-baoboa focus on developing key project features. We know how valuable our community-made developments are, thus proposal #QmdxM3d was initiated and approved, which commits $1M worth of $BAO from the dev fund to pay Baonties over the next 3–6 months. We hope to continue nurturing and connecting different teams to expand the Bao universe further. If you have any skills or ideas you’d like to share the hop into Discord and look into joining a Galaxy or possible starting one of your own!
BaoMan teases swag for the #BaoGang~
BaoMan teased a sneak peek at some potential Bao swag! Last month he posted a flood of images showing designs for shirts, caps, cellphone cases, and even Bao bikinis! Because his tweet was made shortly after April. 1ˢᵗ, many assumed it was just an April Fool’s joke. But he recently confirmed that at least some of these products are real and coming soon! He’s waiting on proofs to be sent from a new vendor that specializes in crypto clothing. Only the highest of quality garments will be used to represent the #BaoGang. Which designs will he go with? Imagine the clout you’d pull doing reps in the gym with those Bao trunks! You’d better believe this little bun is starting to raise some brows and gain more attention…
Everybody wants a bite of Bao…
Bao is building something huge, and people are taking notice. Reviews for Panda began surfacing on Twitter shortly after its launch. Check out this thoroughly informative deep dive of the Panda franchise by Professor Adam Cochran. He shows specific interest in how quickly Bao has been able to capture liquidity from other chains with our franchising model. He notes how it enables us to fuel Bao with more value while minimizing the risks of exposing the project to new networks. We appreciate the very well written and insightful review, Adam!
Venture Capitalist Crypto_Gambit_ weighed in with his bullish overview of $BAO. He loves the multichain empire we’re building up and thinks the ownership and fee collection dynamic between Bao and its various franchises is a brilliant move. We plan to continue opening up shop on the most popular EVM compatible networks, with Bao holders owning 15% stake in every new franchise along with having a staking model that collects trading fees cross chain from their respective exchanges! The pieces are all coming together, and privy analysts are taking note of the giant we’re striving to become. Many regards for sharing our potential to your followers, Crypto_Gambit_!
Daibase, a new multichain algorithmic stablecoin, conducted a poll to decide which xDai Automated Market Maker they should use as their main pair for their Oracles. BaoSwap demolished the rankings and garnered 79.8% of the vote! Even though BaoSwap is a relatively new addition to the chain, it’s proven itself to be the champion of xDai’s exchanges. Please note we have not reviewed Daibase’s code and this is not an official endorsement, but we’re excited that Daibase, as well as other protocols, have reached out to us. Thank you for the recognition, Daibase! We wish you the best of luck on your project and are honored to have more platforms traded on BaoSwap.
What lies in the future for Bao?
This past week alone we’ve seen 10 core proposals open on our Snapshot. As a community run project, your $BAO gives you the power to vote on the direction you’d like to see Bao take. Despite how much I’ve covered in this article, there truly is still a plethora of exciting features coming our way!
Robo is just one of many features coming soon. Robo can automatically compound farmed yields, rebalance LPs, and move assets to different farms to best fit your preferred strategies. As if that wasn’t amazing enough of a feature on its own, BaoMan intends to develop Robo into a cross-chain automated butler capable of managing all Bao related farms on any chain from one single wallet. Now it’s becoming more apparent just how much potential lies in deploying franchises to every EVM chain we can. That growing network list in your Metamask? Get ready to interact with all of them simultaneously by using Robo.
Then we have the highly anticipated launch of Soft Synthetics in the form of Ponds — coming first to the Panda franchise for testing purposes before porting to Bao in the form of Bao Baskets. I look forward to covering these updates more in depth as more details arise!
Connect more with Bao
Bao’s gaining more attention, and we’d love to reach even more people to just how much we have to offer. To gain more media exposure and more easily announce the latest Bao Finance news, members of the Community and Frontend development galaxy teams have created Twitter accounts. Please feel free to follow us for the most up to date coverage of Bao Finance!
- Chickn (@BaoChickn) — Community Lead
- Baowolf (@TheBaoWolf) — Community Manager
- Vital(@CryptoDadGang) — Frontend Developer
- Madotsuki (@BaoMadotsuki)— BaoFriend
Finally, I wanted to give a shoutout to how encouraging and supportive everyone in the community is. Here are just a few of the many touching stories detailing how much of a positive influence Bao has had on many of us on a personal level. I’m grateful that we can help people get through these tough times, and truly wish the best for every single one of you. Our community is amazing, and I’m honored to be a part of this empowering movement to take control of personal finance in ways never possible before. Let’s help each other make every new day greater than the last! Cheers, everyone.
