Jungle Finance

Introduction

As a professional crypto trader, I was excited by the possibilities presented in the DeFi space, but frustrated with the lack of capital availability, margin and collateralization options. In short, I felt the biggest issue holding DeFi back was capital efficiency. I was also excited about the potential to trade decentralized products such as interest rate futures, bonds and packaged synthetic products, but could not find any suitable products available. Eventually I realized that the framework and base-level building blocks for these sorts of products simply did not exist yet in a usable form.

Jungle Finance provides the next evolution in DeFi building blocks, as well as massively increased capital efficiency for users at all levels.

What We Do

By issuing separate derivative products, one representing ownership of an asset that can generate yield and the other representing the yield itself of that asset over a specified time period, we are able to separate the value of an asset from the value of its yield.

This enables a host of new functionality. Representing the productivity of a coin (whether that be through staking, LPing, lending, etc) as a separate, fungible derivative asset paves the way for new DeFi products to be created. Examples might include bonds, interest rate futures, yield rate futures and any number of synthetic derivatives. Simultaneously, this allows users access to their capital without sacrificing its productive ability by locking it into a vault or pool.

When a user deposits a supported asset into the Jungle smart program, that asset is put to work as efficiently as possible. With initial support planned for staking services on SOL, SRM, RAY and our native JNGL, the program stakes on behalf of the user and auto-compounds their yield (where applicable). The user receives a J-TOKEN representing their asset, and an I-TOKEN with an expiry date attached (chosen from pre-set durations), representing the asset's yield over the specified duration.

Users may trade the I-TOKENs representing yield, enabling immediate access to future rewards for sellers and much less capital-intensive farm access for buyers.

They may also trade the J-TOKEN representing the asset (minus its productive value), just as they would the non-derivative asset.

These products retain their value and may be arbitraged by redemption of matched I and J tokens at any time, or these tokens may be redeemed individually for face value once the duration has expired.

The Road So Far

When I decided I wanted to build this product, I reached out for developers and was fortunate to find RunningUniswap through Twitter. With 10 years of experience working as a developer, designer and operations in startups, as well as several years of crypto experience, he has been an excellent choice as co-founder/CTO.

We got started in June and were able to raise our seed funding round for $100k at a valuation of $1m. We offered token sales only and were able to raise entirely through private investment with the primary goal of covering development costs through live launch. Despite having spoken with many VCs and funds, we believe a grassroots method of fundraising is the healthiest way to meet our very minimal requirements and best protect the community we hope to build.

We soon realized that we'd need additional help on the developer end, and were able to attract Will and Rohan, two anonymous developers who have done excellent work on the smart program codebase, while Running designed our frontend interface. Unfortunately for us, Will has moved on to launch his own product and we wish him the best in his endeavors! We are currently actively looking to hire additional developers.

What's Next?

Although testing and development has been difficult so far due to a lack of functional devnet deployments and closed-source endpoint documentation for many of the 3rd-party smart programs with which we interface, we hope to launch our open beta product by the end of October. This will be followed by an auditing process and airdrop distribution of the JNGL token as part of our initial marketing campaign. Our goal is a live launch of the Jungle Finance v1 platform by the end of the year. Post-launch, we will add more product and feature support to include LP and lending token deposits in addition to the staking assets the platform will launch with. Future plans include designing and implementing governance mechanisms aimed at gradually releasing complete control of the platform to the community, as well as building out products and partnerships which utilize and iterate upon the functionality we bring to the market.

We couldn't be more excited to share this with you, thank you for your consideration!