Aave Grants, zkSync 2.0, and more!

Community Newsletter #7: February 2022

February was an eventful month for the Increment protocol, with the announcement of Building on zkSync 2.0 and Receiving an Aave Grant, significant milestones were achieved. This sets the foundation for a new pace of expansion for the protocol and community in the coming months. First, a quick recap on the announcements:

• zkSync 2.0 is one of the first of its kind, an EVM compatible ZK Rollup being built by Matter Labs. zkEVM is a virtual machine that executes smart contracts through the use of zero knowledge proofs. Although not fully launched yet, we expect the release of zkEVM to represent an essential turning point for crypto, as it will empower solidity programmers with first-class access to the unmatched scaling, security, and UX benefits of zero knowledge proofs. We chose zkSync 2.0 because of its top in-class security, cost effectiveness, and strong future outlook. We also hope to be one of the first batches of protocols released on the network. For the full article, click here.

• With an all time high TVL (Total Value Locked) of $33 billion according to DeFi Lama, Aave is one of the leading DeFi protocols in the crypto universe. As Aave continues to create groundbreaking tech and push the boundaries of Web3, a fundamental utility of the protocol does not change - the ability to earn passive income for depositors. Stablecoins like USDC, DAI, and USDT are amongst the most popular because like the name suggests, the coin is pegged to the US dollar and remains relatively stable. Thus, many DeFi players are comfortable holding these stablecoins to secure the yield that they earn. However, a major challenge arises for those who live outside the U.S., as the yields of stablecoins can be negatively affected by currency fluctuations. Changing this is our mission. By using Increment’s global exchange rate perpetual swaps, you can turn your yield on Aave into any currency of your choice. For the full article, click here.

That said, aside from hedging your USD exposure on Aave yield, there are many other use cases for exchange rate perpetuals especially in today’s world events, as described by Charles (also known as Closer on Discord), one of our community members:

Moreover you can use Increment [to hedge] against rising inflation/CPI, which is caused by economic depression or geopolitics conflict. Recently the Russia - Ukraine's situation is severe… So we can use Increment to open a 5x or 10x leveraged long position at market price on Increment's perpetuals with USDC in advance because the value of USD will increase versus EURO definitely. And the reality proved it. So we can see [that] Increment is really useful and incredible where not only we can make profit but participate in crypto without exchange rate risks.

Development Update

From a technical standpoint, our engineers are focused on preparing for the pre-audit with Secureum in about 3 weeks time and our upcoming public testnet release. In terms of community growth and development, we have achieved incredible growth in numbers over the past few weeks.

📟 Operations

• Updated landing page

• Twitter: 600+ new followers

• Discord: 300+ new participants

• 1000+ signups for testnet early access form

💻 Front-end

• Developed custom TradingView data feed to display our contract's market data

• Developing randomized testing strategy to simulate realistic price action

• Building staking interface for multi-collateral liquidity pools

📑 Smart Contracts

• Finalized protocol architecture and design

• Working on documentation and cleaning up code

• Pre-audit with Secureum will start on March 31st

📈 Quant

• Analyzing protocol risk and determining parameters

• Developing liquidation bot and arbitrage bot

Lastly, with the continued growth of the community, we have decided to increase the number of Cred Stars from Top 3 to the Top 4 ranked community members of all time shown here. Thus, we are delighted to welcome flacko300#6590 as a Cred Star! 🎉 ⭐

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Increment is a decentralized, algorithmic perpetual swaps protocol building on zkSync 2.0, featuring automatically concentrated liquidity, dynamic fees and parametrizable pools.

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