Stone: Rock Solid Yield

Stone is the only yield management framework focused on creating Rock Solid Yield for all the users in the DeFi space, so we can all sleep better at night. Our focus is developing innovative asset pools that maximizes return while keeping the LP capital as safe and secure as possible. In doing so, we aim to create the most antifragile platform to meet the needs of the DeFi industry.

Yield farming sucks for regular people — high gas fee, only economically viable with large capital, one simple mistake could wipe off days of hardwork (rug pulls, scams, bad smart contract, security concerns, you name it). And to make the life of regular farmers harder, it is almost impossible to keep up with the number of projects coming up, with new projects coming up daily.

We believe that DEFI and yield farming should be fun and be based on a fantastic collaborative culture within the community. We are actively looking for community contributors to build up our culture, debate on farming strategies, scout for upcoming farms, and come up with new strategies.

In this post, we will share the core principles of this project. Stone is not a tool but a movement, to build a smarter and safer yield farming practice. We call for folks who share these beliefs to join the Stone community to build a long-term DeFi project collaboratively.

Why Does DeFi Need Rock Solid Yield?

We believe that DeFi will stay and become a large use case in the crypto space. We will see more financial instruments and various yield farming opportunities in the future, way beyond current imagination. As any industry progresses and matures, DeFi will bring about the next wave of investment and talent.

There are protocols chasing after high yield with constantly changing strategies or with aggressive strategies, however only a rock solid yield protocol can provide the sustainability and stability conducive to large capitals. For example, insurance protocols can provide insurance confidently to Stone and also generate yield for their premiums by Stone. Fund of Funds and DAO will also be confident to deploy capital into yield farming.

Current Problems With DeFi Yield Generation

There are a number of amazing projects out there, exploring innovations in different directions. However, we believe the whole industry is missing critical elements:

• Centralized operation with limited community involvement
• Code not open-sourced and there is no TRANSPARENT GOVERNANCE. System changes and fund deployment are done anonymously, which poses a big security risk.
• Insecure and risky strategies
• Weak dev team

That’s why we started Stone — to build the yield management protocol we want to see, with the community we want to build.

Stone: Built on SOLID Design Principles

We propose the following SOLID principles for Stone:

Stable returns

Manage risks and rewards to achieve stable returns. DeFi is complex and looking at only indicative APY creates more tears than happiness. A paradigm shift in yield philosophy is to consider both risk, return (and the sustainability of such return), a principle widely used in the traditional financial industry.

Open collaboration

Work with as many community members as possible to source best ideas. Ensure the right incentive model in place to reward contributors starting from day one. Stone is flexible so any projects can be connected with it as well. Stone protocol (including strategies) will be open-sourced for transparency. This also allows communities and partners to contribute to the protocol development easily.

Long term development

Establish commitment and an inclusive culture to get more contributors along the way with the right incentive system. To bootstrap the technical development, RockX team and a few individuals are working to launch the alpha and public version of Stone protocol for the community and committed to lead the technical development for the next two years before the community decides the next steps. RockX is a development house with deep experience in blockchain development and runs various blockchain validators, such as Polkadot, Terra, Solana, Oasis.

Incremental deployment

Make incremental improvements with extensive testing and constantly learning from other projects. DeFi is a nascent industry requiring a large number of trial and error. Test-in-prod won’t be adopted by Stone. Stone shall launch step by step with alpha testing (with limited participants) and then gradually opening up for all users.

DAO driven

Provide a clear roadmap towards a DAO governed protocol. We acknowledge that at the beginning a committed small committee is more practical during bootstrap and a fully decentralized organization takes time. Stone shall engage the community to discuss a plan from day 1 and ensure sufficient fundings (tokens) are reserved for the DAO to manage in the future.

STN As Cornerstone

STN token is the governance token that will play a crucial role in the Stone ecosystem. STN’s primary function is for protocol governance and it is further empowered to reward liquidity provision during the bootstrapping (each pool would have its dedicated STN rewarding scheme to build up sufficient size) and more interestingly, STN will be used to incentivize portfolio rebalancing (for example, STN reward may be higher for certain pool to attract more funds there in order to maximize yield farm).

A considerable portion of STN will be reserved for community contributors and future development which will be decided by the committee and gradually the whole community.

Stone protocol sees yield farming as a general concept to create value for token holders. That expands yield farming into not only Ethereum but also can be on other blockchains in the future. One low-hanging fruit is to provide pools for staking on other blockchains (experiments are being run to enable the staking from non-erc20 assets to unlock staking liquidity say allow taking Dot on stone platform and issue STN rewards for those stakers)

Call to Action

We are proposing stone as the rock solid yield protocol to build an antifragile technical platform, an inclusive and incentivized community to ensure stable long-term development, and collaborative community culture.

Stone is not a tool, but a movement, to build a smarter and safer yield farming practice. We call for folks with the same mindset to join the Stone community to together build a long-term DEFI project. DEFI game is a long-haul, why don’t you become a humble farmer like us, plant the seeds for the next harvest!

We have opened up the Stone Fortress for community members to hang out. Follow us on Medium and Twitter for the latest updates.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DefiStone

Telegram: https://t.me/stonefortress

Website: https://www.stonedefi.io/