Viking Finance

Introducing, Viking Finance ⚔️

Inspiration

Early in 2021 we realized that the Solana network was perfectly structured for a successful DeFi ecosystem -low fees, high throughput, efficient composability. We developed a thesis that the bulk of trading and DeFi could eventually be settled on Solana. However, at this time Solana's nascent DeFi ecosystem was missing some crucial base layer protocols. Without them a proper DeFi ecosystem could simply not function. Our team went on to experiment with developing various DeFi protocol -such as a lending/borrowing protocol, AMM and even privacy solutions. We had an enjoyable time building on Solana and learnt a lot.

4 months ago we eventually decided to go forward with building a yield aggregator protocol that would evolve into a full-feature asset management platform. With our team's background in asset management and experience working with Ethereum yield aggregators and multiple DeFi protocols we felt this was a natural fit and recognized the opportunity to generate significant value for the Solana DeFi ecosystem and for users alike.

Our thesis is that in the future users will not interact with multiple fragmented protocols but instead rely on a simple to use aggregator that provides access to DeFi services and products. This could even be a centralized offering that provides a front-end on top of the on-chain aggregator. We believe that the Viking protocol can be this aggregator protocol and support multiple innovative products that are crucial to Solana's DeFi ecosystem.

What it does

Viking Finance will initially release a yield aggregator protocol that supports vaults and strategies, auto-compounding and liquid staking. We seek to create and foster a community driven protocol that attracts the best strategists on Solana that will develop strategies and deploy them on Viking Finance so that all users can passively invest in the Solana ecosystem. Subsequently, the Viking Finance platform will work towards deploying new protocol features that best supports the ecosystem, such as structured products and permissionless lending.

Our flagship products that will be released at launch:

Viking Vaults 🛡 - Powered by the best strategies in the Solana ecosystem, Viking Vaults offer the benefits of advanced portfolio management with no active maintenance from users. Strategists develop bespoke strategies to maximize yield, which are then deployed and utilize the liquidity from the auto-compounder to generate additional returns for users. ‌User funds are never locked in Viking Vaults and can be withdrawn at any time.
Auto-compounder 🧮 - Maximize your yield by automatically compounding your funds. Users no longer suffer lost gains and can now reap the full benefits of their liquidity while also abstracting away effort and complexity.‌‌
Liquid staking 🥩- An integration that offers a lower risk, stable yield investment opportunity. Instead of having to lock up staked capital, users can stake SOL and receive a derivative token, stSOL, that can then be used in other Viking Vaults strategies. This ultimately allows users to generate additional yield on top of earned staking rewards.

How we built it

The v1 Viking protocol is built by a team of 4 seasoned developers that has previous experience in banking, asset management, building on Bitcoin and building DeFi protocols on Ethereum, Terra, and Solana.

The protocol has been in development for 4 months and has gone through rigorous engineering and testing.

Challenges we ran into

Initially we faced challenges with finding engineers. Partially caused by the limited supply of developers on Solana at the time and how early our project was. We instead focused on building the protocol internally between our small, yet effective, team and we are now focused on scaling our team as we get closer to the launch of the protocol.

There was also a learning curve to getting up to speed with building on Solana but that was quickly overcome by the solid support groups provided by the Solana Labs team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team has been in the Solana DeFi ecosystem since the early stages and as such we have developed strong relationships with top Solana protocols that we are looking forward to working closer with once our protocol is launched.

We're also proud of red-pilling new users to Solana and onboarding new devs to the ecosystem and helping them get up to speed.