This is Part 2a of a 3-Part Blog Series
You’re all familiar with points - but have you heard of $PIU?
Today, we’ll be diving deeper into the Pike PIU Program (PPP), and also clarify a few things from our first blogpost.
TLDR:
- Even Playing Field:Â No referral program, and supply caps will be raised, not removed- influencers and whales will not be able to farm and dump on the community.
- Pike Community Presale and Pike airdrop are independent events - the former has no relation to the latter
- PIU system is an innovative, fair and transparent approach to allocating Pike’s governance token to community members who share our long-term vision
- Primary utility for $PIU is to qualify for Pike’s Community Presale
- Pike’s Community Presale is designed to align with the long-term interests of community members relative to institutional investors
Pike PIU Program (PPP) & $PIU Recap:
- The Pike PIU Program (PPP) is our response to typical points programs used by teams to bootstrap protocol use and liquidity.
- Rather than earning arbitrary points, users will earn the $PIU token instead - tradable like any other asset.
- Holding $PIU increases chances of gaining a guaranteed allocation for Pike’s Community Sale, greater contribution size, and discounts on valuation.
- Whitelist Tiers will be determined by relative $PIU holdings (vs other people), not by how much $PIU you hold specifically (Example:Tier 1 will be the top 25% of holders, Tier 2 will be the second 25% of holders, and so on)
- Users will earn $PIU from both in-app activity, as well as Discord roles earned by being a member of the Pike community
- $PIU can be claimed on both Solana and Base, and is powered by Wormhole’s Native Token Transfer Framework (NTT) and will serve as a test for Pike’s governance token to become multi-ecosystem compatible
Flattening the curve:
In order to ensure a fair and even playing field, we’ve instituted two key elements within the PPP in the interest of putting the community first.
- No Referral Program
There is NO referral program. These are used as a way to incentivize KOLs and influencers to talk about the protocol in question without having to pay them, since they benefit directly from being able to refer their followers and earn points, leading to a fatter airdrop. While these work extremely well and we love influencers, we’ve found that they actually dilute the user base of individuals earning points “normally” and can also be quite disheartening if you don’t have much capital.
We’ve noticed that users have felt quite demotivated by having the leaderboard populated by individuals with a huge amount of referral points, and very little participation otherwise. While additional coverage and shilling of Pike is valuable, ensuring everyone in our community has a fair chance is far more important.
- Capping Deposits
As you well know, Pike launched on Mainnet as a Beta, with extremely conservative deposit caps (0.1 ETH, 100 USDC, 10 ARB, 10 OP) that totalled around $500 at current prices. We will not be removing these caps, but instead raising them to around $15,000 (3 ETH, 4000 USDC, 500 ARB, 250 OP).
We of course want to grow our asset deposits (so borrowers have a meaningful pool of liquidity) and TVL to increase the utility of Pike, but we also want to maintain a level playing field. While removing caps entirely would lead to the fastest TVL growth, however, it is not compatible with the current design of PPP, nor the community.
In the interest of fairness, we want to avoid well capitalized individuals depositing say, $1M, farming $PIU then immediately dumping on the rest of the community, only to eventually withdraw their liquidity. While $15,000 is still quite a large amount of money, especially depending on where in the world you reside, we believe this strikes the balance of promoting usage of Pike, while maintaining the viability of the PPP for users with less capital (or those who are strictly community-focused).
Role Allocations:
If you’ve spent any time within the Pike community, you’ve probably realized we have a lot of roles, and they’re extremely diverse in how you get them and where they originate from.
At Pike, we’re building a melting pot of liquidity from all across DeFi. EVM or non-EVM. It doesn’t matter - Pike will allow you to borrow and lend from across the entirety of the ecosystem and serve as an aggregator of a huge amount of liquidity of all sorts of assets. But before we succeed on this mission, we need to first create a melting pot of people from all across DeFi.
We’re defining what “natively multichain” represents, and it extends from someone who has joined the Discord for the very first time, all the way up to the protocol level when we deploy on a new chain or ecosystem. Not to mention, because NFTs all have their own culture and flavor, especially depending on which ecosystem they live in, their communities contain a level of knowledge and perspective that is extremely valuable to us as we design the product and roadmap.
Furthermore, because there’s so many people who are either new to DeFi, or simply don’t have the capital to contribute as much as they’d like to in terms of money, they often gravitate towards participating heavily within the community. But unfortunately, this activity and passion is rarely rewarded, and almost never in terms of financial benefit - despite how much value it provides the protocol in question. Our Discord roles are meant to serve as a way that if you’re unable to provide much as far as on-chain liquidity/volume is concerned, your efforts within the community are still rewarded and appreciated all the same.
But now for the fun stuff, the actual allocations:
Why have we decided these allocations?
In the interest of brevity, we’ll speak on just a handful of the roles, starting with the “S Tier” who receive 1,000,000 $PIU, and the A Tier who receive 500,000 $PIU.
Beta Maxis: While a recent role, this holds great weight. To acquire this role, not only did you have to max out the caps, you also had to pay considerable gas fees for depositing $ETH since it’s only available on Ethereum Mainnet. When you can only deposit 0.1 ETH, this showcases a lot more conviction than it seems on paper and for that we’re extremely grateful.
Mad Lads: This was the first NFT community to truly embrace Pike and bootstrapped the early community dramatically with in-depth and meaningful conversations, and offered a great deal of insight from experienced, high value users.
Day 1s: While a small group, these were the users who learned about Pike extremely early, and stuck around. These were the people liking our tweets about being in Wormole’s hacker house back during ETHcc in 2023, when no one else was, and being the handful of people messaging within the Discord during the early days. We’re loyal to anyone who supports Pike, and this is merely a small way we can somewhat pay it back.
Nads: Similar to the Mad Lads, these were the people who called Monad their home, but decided to come over to Pike and served as a huge boon as we bootstrapped our community during the early days. While Pike won’t be live on Monad for quite some time (wen mainnet?), we want to showcase our love and appreciation for the individuals who also now call themselves members of the Pike community (and Monfriends of course get an allocation of $PIU too!).
Pikenians: Now who could forget the Pikenians. These are a group of individuals who cannot wait for Pike to grow and dominate the lending space, but want to be an even deeper member of the community, but also showcase their involvement in the project's growth. We are so lucky to have a dedicated NFT collection created by the community, but also something for both the team, and individuals to tie their identity to something easily recognizable (much like other pervasive NFTs), and we want to reward them accordingly.
Also remember, we will be rolling out more roles in the future as we collaborate with other protocols, chains, and NFT collections so if you’re not eligible for any of the roles yet, worry not!
Protocol Activity $PIU Allocation
Being a lending market, our bread and butter is just that - lending and borrowing. It’s how users gain utility from Pike, and how the protocol generates fees and revenue.
However, for lenders to even deposit their assets within a lending market, they need to see meaningful yield/APRs on those assets. While token emissions for the sake of increasing APRs work, they of course have a cascade of negative consequences (as described earlier within this blog post), and hence we need to focus on REAL yield.
On the flip side however, borrowers are only going to come to Pike if there’s, one; deep liquidity, and two; low or reasonable APRs (interest that has to be paid) on borrowing. As a result, if we start with incentivizing borrowing, the resulting increase in utilization and APRs will draw users to supply liquidity (which they can of course use to borrow) and hence we can tackle both sides of the equation.
As a result, we are indeed incentivizing depositing of liquidity, but we’re incentivizing borrowing more, since more borrowing breeds more deposits and so on. Furthermore, we don’t want to reward a one off deposit, but instead reward conviction of keeping your assets within Pike, as well as keeping your debt (borrows) - so $PIU is awarded daily, per $ of value.
Extremely simply, for every $1 you supply, you’ll earn 10 $PIU per day.
For every $1 you borrow, you’ll earn 20 $PIU per day. Conviction pays off!
The above sections are meant to give you an idea of how the $PIU will be distributed, but we will elaborate on $PIU’s tokenomics and how claiming will work in the next post about the PPP. Stay tuned!
PIKE IT UP!
About Pike:
Pike is a Universal Liquidity Protocol; it is designed to unleash utility for native assets by aggregating liquidity across blockchain networks.
Pike’s vision is to become a universal liquidity layer that enables frictionless movement and accessibility of native assets across ecosystems. Pike is built on top of Wormhole’s Cross-Chain Data Messaging and Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), and utilizes Pyth Network’s Price Feeds.
One fundamental primitive of Pike is to enable users to supply native assets on source chains and borrow native assets destination chains without interacting with cross-chain bridges and handling wrapped assets.
Learn more at:Â https://www.pike.finance/
Join the Discord at:Â https://discord.gg/pikefinance