August & September Indigo Labs Newsletter

6 min readOct 11, 2023

In the evolving sectors of decentralization and finance, Indigo Labs has achieved some substantial milestones in the last two months, continuing our drive to craft an ambitious yet thoughtful path toward a DeFi future. In this newsletter, we delve into recent developments and highlights through August and September 2023 and going forward.

A Refreshed Digital Experience: Web-app v2

In a continued effort to make the best UX possible for Indig Protocol users, the release of web-app v2 unfolded a new web-app, enriched with UI enhancements and deeper insights into protocol metrics and user portfolios, ensuring the community has the tools at their disposal to navigate Indigo Protocol with even greater ease. Though a large part of the Indigo Protocol community was excited to use the new and more vibrant web-app, some users expressed that they liked the palette of the v1 web-app. The Indigo Labs team responded quickly to the community’s feedback and released a 3rd web-app option, Indigo Midnight, a nod to the colors of the v1 web-app that kept the professional and muted tone.

Smart Contracts Evolution: Aiken Metrics

Indigo Labs has been putting effort toward rewriting the Protocol’s smart contracts in Aiken over the last two months, as part of our services to the DAO. This strategic move, explained in our article Optimizing the Throughput of Cardano: The Evolution of Indigo Protocol’s Smart Contracts, is set to deliver better throughput and innovative features in the upcoming V2 upgrade. To summarize the performance enhancements Aiken may bring, take a look at the below charts. Note that a lower percentage indicates an improvement in performance.

Charting the Course: Indigo Protocol V2 Upgrade

Coupled with the smart contract transition to Aiken, the tech team has been diligently shaping the scope and technical requirement specifications for the Protocol V2 upgrade, a process that started with the DAO’s approval in April to ideate on Indigo Protocol v2 and present it to the DAO for approval.

Some of the new features currently to be recommended to the DAO for Protocol v2 are an iAsset Redemption Mechanism, Stability Pool safeguards, Treasury unlock, and restructured withdrawal fees. If the team’s proposals for V2 are adopted by the DAO this month, we anticipate an upgrade towards the end of Q1 2024.

Looking to the Future: Rewards and Emissions Proposal

This current Temp Check, Rewards Restructure and Emissions Extension, and its upcoming proposal hold the potential to sculpt the Protocol’s future roadmap by suggesting an extension of the current rewards emissions, thereby facilitating an additional 3-year runway, aiming to guide the Protocol towards self-sustainability by late-2030. Specifically, this Temp Check makes four suggestions:

Maintain the current per epoch INDY token rewards emission rate of 35,961 INDY tokens per epoch and reverse the current plan, coded into the Protocol smart contracts, to increase reward token emissions to 46,748 INDY tokens per epoch starting in December 2023;
Extend the current emissions schedule approximately 3 additional years, so that instead of exhausting all rewards tokens by December 2027, we extend rewards to October 2030;
Give the DAO Treasury the surplus reward tokens that will be emitted starting in December 2023 until the Protocol smart contracts and the governance smart contracts can be upgraded in the V2 Protocol upgrade in 2024 (that is, the 10,787 per epoch INDY token difference between current reward token emissions and the December reward token emissions should be given to the DAO Treasury until the contracts can be upgraded to again emit only 35,961 INDY per month); and
Adjust the allocation of token rewards between liquidity providers to DEXes and Stability Pool depositors in the Protocol based on the Market Cap TVL of each iAsset.

A Committed Community: INDY Circulation and Staking

With 7.39 Million INDY now in Circulating Supply, the community has remarkably staked over 64% in Governance, an encouraging signal of consistent and strong support for the protocol over the past months. Just 2 weeks ago, the Indigo DAO set a new record for on-chain voting participation. Proposal #25 to elect Nyorok to the Indigo Protocol Working Group passed with ~2.8 million total votes cast. Over two times the amount of the runner-up for participation which was Proposal #23, Liquidity Pool Reward change, which received ~1.3 million total votes cast. Now with Nyorok elected, we’re looking forward to seeing his contributions to the community and to the Protocol as the newest member of the PWG.

iUSD Comes to Lenfi

Following a passed LenFi DAO vote that concluded on August 14th, iUSD was integrated into the platform as a collateral type. With its 1.7 liquidation threshold, iUSD allows users to borrow more tokens against their collateral compared to some of the other collateral options on Lenfi.

TVL Metric Changes

Soon, the Protocol TVL will encompass the value of all INDY locked in the Governance smart contract, providing a more holistic perspective of the total value locked within the protocol. Prepare to see a considerable increase in the TVL shown on both the Protocol web-app and platforms like DefiLlama. This decision has been in response to the community voicing their opinion on what tokens locked in Protocol smart contracts should count toward Indigo TVL. After this X poll took place, the Labs team began creating the new APIs to update the metric for the future.

VESPR Mobile Wallet Integration

The integration of VESPR Mobile Wallet into Indigo, post a successful DAO governance proposal, has been well received by the Indigo Protocol users who utilize VESPR and intertwines convenience with robust functionality for Protocol users.

RareEvo and Cardano Summit Dubai Attendance

Our appearance at RareEvo provided the Labs team with an opportunity to forge and strengthen connections within the Cardano ecosystem. If you haven’t already, catch the insights our Marketing Lead, Daniel Short, shared in an interview with DappCentral on-site at RareEvo this year.

Vote for Indigo for Summit: https://t.co/BSYjPzJunY

Indigo Labs team members are set to attend the Dubai Cardano Summit in November. If you’re planning to attend, we’d love to engage and explore synergies together face-to-face! Indigo has been nominated for the Cardano Summit DeFi Award and voting closes today at 23:59 UTC, October 11th. For those who take a moment to vote, it’s deeply appreciated.

Empowering Community Builders: API Development

With a dedicated new resource on board, we’re in the process of rewriting our API, focusing on optimizing its capabilities and offering a public API specification to catalyze community builders in their endeavors.

Stability Pool Contention: A Constructive Path Forward

We’ve been making strides and will continue to make strides, in developing solutions for the Stability Pool contention. We’ve proposed our solutions to the TWG and had discussions with them, taking constructive feedback and criticism on our proposed solutions.

Conclusion

Navigating through a number of developments, from technology advancements to strengthening our community and ecosystem connections, Indigo Labs remains firmly rooted in its commitment to build the most user-friendly and decentralized synthetics protocol that we can. Join us as we continue to explore, innovate, and shape a future where DeFi is accessible and empowering for all.