Composable Finance 2021: A year of nonstop shipping
Disclaimer: Information as of Dec 31, 2022. For the most recent updates, dive into our comprehensive documentation here
Sometime in the future, 2021 will be remembered as the birth year for the face of DeFi with all the shipping that our team has been busy with. This year — our first year — was marked by numerous remarkable accomplishments, groundbreaking collaborations, notable announcements, and revolutionary leaps in development.
None of this would have been possible without our fantastic team and the unwavering support of our community. Before we jump into disrupting the new year, we want to take stock of everything that has been happening to reflect on just how much we were able to accomplish.
Let’s decompose this year of non-stop shipping.
Our major milestones
🪙 Composable Finance closes $7M funding round 🪙
In early June of 2021, Composable Finance closed a funding round that saw $7 million raised from investors. The goal of this funding round was to onboard strategic investors and fuel the growth of Composable Finance.
🔬 Composable joins the Polkadot ecosystem 🔬
In mid-June, Composable Finance officially announced its plans to build in the Dotsama ecosystem to facilitate cross-chain interoperability at all levels. This decision set us on our path to resolve the disparity between different blockchains. By leveraging Composable’s technology on Polkadot’s infrastructure, we set our aim to alleviate liquidity fragmentation, inefficiencies, and inflexibility throughout the industry.
🔒 The Composable Vault Strategy 🔒
At the end of June, Composable kicked off our novel vault strategy with a bug bounty through Immunifi. From this origin, we have revamped our strategy so that the Composable Vault now serves as a liquidity launchpad for projects built on the Composable ecosystem via Composable Labs. Stablecoin stakers can earn yield and gain access to future ecosystem tokens such as Instrumental Finance’s STRM. At the time of writing, our vault strategy has more than $44 million in total value locked (TVL).
🧱 Composable’s pallets 🧱
August brought with it the introduction of Composable’s first two pallets: Apollo and Cubic. Apollo is an MEV-resistant oracle pallet providing an important primitive, and Cubic is positioned to set the standard for vault infrastructure in Dotsama.
For those unfamiliar, pallets are stackable building blocks built into the base runtime of a parachain. Both Cubic and Apollo will serve as core pieces of infrastructure that developers can leverage when building interoperable dApps with our tech stack.
🎨 Introducing Picasso 🎨
Picasso made its public debut when we introduced our crowdloan strategy in late August. With Picasso being a cornerstone of our infrastructure, this moment was a catalyst for things to come. Not only did we lay out the tokenomics behind our native parachain token (PICA), but we also put our community on notice for how they will be rewarded for their continued support.
🚀 Launching Mosaic, our cross-layer asset transferal system 🚀
In early September, Mosaic was introduced to the world as a Polygon-Arbitrum proof of concept (PoC). From conception, we envisioned our asset transferral solution as a bridge to help facilitate cross-chain and cross-layer interactions. Its purpose is to ensure liquidity moves to the locations where it is needed allowing the propagation of whatever instructions are required to satisfy the user’s desired outcome. In the grand scheme, Mosaic is our liquidity layer.
Today, our Mosaic bridge has successfully integrated with the Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrium, Evmos, and the Avalanche C-Chain in addition to several layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions such as Fantom and Moonriver, a Kusama project.
💰 The Composable Grants Program: supporting DeFi’s Developers 💰
In mid-September 2021, Composable Labs announced the launch of the Composable grants program. We understand that the face of DeFi’s future is built through strong collaboration, and the goal of our grants program is to support developers building projects utilizing the Composable technology stack, including Mosaic and our software development kit (SDK). We are seeking teams and individuals looking to develop pallets for Picasso and interoperable dApps.
🤝 Angular Finance: a joint venture between Picasso and Basilisk 🤝
Around the same time as our grants program, Composable announced a joint venture with Basilisk to develop Angular Finance. Angular Finance is an isolated lending pair protocol built on Picasso that leverages HydraDX’s prominent automated market maker (AMM) in the Kusama ecosystem.
👷♀️Composable opens its cross-layer SDK for developers 👷♀️
In mid-October, our cross-layer SDK went live. This significant milestone announced that developers could access our technology to seamlessly integrate cross-chain interoperability into their projects.
📚 Liquidity forecasting research 📚
Starting in October, we began to research liquidity forecasting through our Liquidity Simulation Environment (LSE) and data gathered through Mosaic’s PoC. Currently, this ongoing series has three parts exploring different models and algorithms for forecasting liquidity. The most recent research showcases classical models before exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based models in upcoming publications.
🎉Picasso wins Kusama parachain auction slot 🎉
On November 1, Composable won a Kusama parachain slot at auction for Picasso.
Winning the 13th Kusama parachain auction slot was a pivotal step as Picasso is at the epicentre of Composable’s vision for a truly flexible and interoperable DeFi ecosystem. As a parachain, Picasso is poised to serve as an innovation hub for our DeFi pallets and primitives and will be a cornerstone working as a finality layer for chain agnostic communication.
🎻Composable Labs successfully incubates Instrumental Finance 🎻
Instrumental Finance is a protocol for optimizing liquidity provider (LP) yield earning opportunities in DeFi, serving as a strategy hub for alpha and arbitrage opportunities. Composable’s founder and head of product, 0xbrainjar, joined the Instrumental Finance team as lead advisor in early November.
Instrumental Finance is a project incubated by Composable Labs — the research and incubation arm for projects leveraging the Composable tech stack. In early December, the Instrumental team successfully conducted a fair distribution of Instrumental’s $STRM tokens. The 72-hour LBP event hosted on CopperLaunch saw the team raise a total of $3.22 million, a feat that reiterates the community’s faith in the vision of the protocol.
📣 Composable Ambassador Program: getting the community involved 📣
In mid-November, Composable Finance announced the launch of our Ambassador program — the Composers program. Community is integral to our vision, and we hope to use our community member’s expertise through content creation, business development, community building, or other helpful input. Composers will be vetted and rewarded for their contributions.
🌉 Centauri: bridging to the Cosmos ecosystem 🌉
Composable introduced the Centauri Bridge a few days later. This Substrate bridge built by our team will power interoperability between Picasso and Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). This introduction will ultimately connect the Dotsama and Cosmos ecosystems marking a critical step towards blockchain agnosticism.
🌪️ Introducing Whirlpool Cash 🌪️
A week before December, we introduced Whirlpool Cash — a blockchain privacy protocol built on Picasso. Whirlpool Cash combines the powers of anonymity for transactors with an added yield earning opportunity on a single protocol. Whirlpool Cash is similar in nature to Tornado Cash but eliminates some very pressing limitations.
📢 Composable announces first grant recipient — Arturo 📢
Right after the year’s final month began, Composable Labs announced Arturo as the first recipient of the Composable grants program. Arturo is an algorithmic trading pallet designed to help investors manage their portfolios by facilitating the implementation of any series of trading activities in a workflow for automatic execution. Activities Arturo can automate once inside a workflow include portfolio rebalancing, liquidity mining and staking rewards, and stop-loss trades for liquidity provisioning LP positions.
🖼️ Adding Mural to Mosaic for cross-layer NFT transfers 🖼️
Leading up to the holiday season, we introduced Mural — our cross-layer NFT transferral protocol built on Mosaic. Mural sets out to alleviate the pains felt by artists, developers, and enthusiasts of the NFT space. Before allowing this interoperability, these non-fungible assets were siloed across DeFi’s multi-chain framework and held to sit in one spot, severely limiting the potential of their utility. Mural leverages the Mosaic’s chain and layer agnostic bridging technology enabling cross-layer and cross-chain movement of NFTs within the broad and constantly expanding ecosystem currently integrated within Mosaic.
🏃♀️ Composable Finance joins the race for a Polkadot parachain 🏃♀️
The latest efforts of the Composable team are focused on securing a Polkadot parachain. People who support our vision of a fully interoperable future for DeFi can help us secure this critical piece of infrastructure by contributing to our crowdloan here.
Polkadot will be the home of the Composable Parachain, which will house both the Composable Cross-Chain Virtual Machine (XCVM) and our Routing Layer. These integral pieces of infrastructure will help make DeFi more efficient and accessible while helping to break down the siloed nature of our industry. The Composable Parachain is essential for enabling our vision of becoming the hub for a blockchain-agnostic future.
Where is this work leading us?
We searched within and asked: how do we showcase the possibilities of the Composable Ecosystem? The short-term answer is clear — develop the necessary interoperable infrastructure to help break down the siloed nature of DeFi.
This year, we are putting in the groundwork to procure our Dotsama parachains while simultaneously building bridges to other ecosystems and scaling solutions. Next year, we harvest the fruit of our labor as we build upon our foundational infrastructure.
In less abstract terms, our future holds implementing pallets such as Angular, Apollo and Cubic into the runtime of Picasso. We will launch our parachains’ native tokens to initiate governance within our ecosystem. We will develop more strategic partnerships and work closely with our community to support projects that fit our ecosystem. And, we will see Composable Labs help develop the next wave of technology for DeFi’s interoperable future.
Our founder and head of product, 0xbrainjar, stated our vision best when describing the continuum of interoperability. Ultimately, Composable is working to reach 100% interoperability — absolute ecosystem agnosticism. Along this journey, we will work to support each stage of the continuum. The promise of Composable Finance is no longer just a promise, but an actualised reality that is unravelling in front of the community’s eyes. We believe that with our intensive shipping schedule in the coming year, we will be able to continue with our commitment to knowledge sharing and produce the cutting edge research that will pioneer the birth of other innovations to power the ecosystem and vision forward.
But for now, it is “Ship or Die” season at Composable Finance. While we are in the spirit of the holiday season, we remain charged towards our end goal of a DeFi future unburdened by lack of interoperability.
We would like to extend our gratitude to those who continue to believe in our cutting-edge solutions and are delighted to announce our incoming roster of partnerships in 2022 soon. Here are some of the exciting collaborations that are enabling Composable’s technologies across the board:
- KYVE
- KILT
- Evmos
- Starknet
- zkSync
- t3rn
- Aleph.im
- TreasureDAO
- and many more.
Composable Finance is building the face of DeFi’s future, and we appreciate you taking a moment to see the year through our eyes.
For more information about Composable and how it is architecting the unified DeFi landscape of the future, check out our socials:
