White Whale

Keep the Peg. Be the Whale.

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Inspiration

What makes White Whale different is that it is truly a missional project. From the very beginning, this project was created with the intention of serving the Terra ecosystem and ultimately making it more secure, robust, and efficient. Our mission is to empower the Terra community to fortify the UST peg. As a community, we are all invested in this mission to some degree because we believe UST is one of the most novel approaches to stablecoins and we all want to see it succeed. By offering the community the opportunity to participate in L1 arbitrage, we are effectively democratizing the enforcement of the peg. Together we can ensure the stability of the Terra ecosystem and make some returns along the way.

What it does

To use White Whale and contribute to the enforcing of the peg, a user simply needs to deposit UST via our frontend. White Whale will launch with 3 initial vaults: The UST Arb Vault, The Governance Vault, and The War Chest. Users will deposit UST only into the Arb Vault, which arbs UST back to peg via the level 1 seigniorage method. 90% of the profits are distributed to depositors as rewards while the other 10% and platform fees are sent to the other vaults. All 3 vaults leverage Anchor Protocol and include value-capture mechanisms that buy WHALE tokens on the open market, providing consistent buy pressure on our native token from multiple angles. Through governance, the community will be able to introduce new arbitrage vaults to the platform. To provide some examples, proposals could be introduced to create new vaults for arbing each of Terra’s 19 other stablecoins back to their respective pegs, bLUNA back to LUNA, LUNA off chain between centralized exchanges, or perhaps more interesting, mAssets back to their underlying stock or collateral. As every asset under the sun will eventually be Mirrored, the potential for expansion is quite extensive. These strategies all serve the purpose of enhancing Terra’s ecosystem as they are stabilizing the price of Terra assets across different exchanges and liquid markets. In addition to the Arb and Governance Vaults, White Whale will have another vault known as the War Chest. Eventually, the War Chest will become the primary feature of White Whale. A portion of the White Whale IDO bounty will be used to bootstrap the War Chest as the initial deposit. Operationally, all of the platform fees will be deposited into the War Chest. Users will stake WHALE tokens into the War Chest, which will arb the entire Terra ecosystem simultaneously and distribute the rewards to stakers. This provides an essential economic utility for the WHALE token on the platform as well as significant value capture.

What we learned

We learned that this not only has a large addressable market but is also something people wanted as a form of public good. It was and still is surprising to see how enthusiastic and hungry the retail community is for an opportunity to take part in helping to maintain the peg. We built our project first by defining our initial core team; Jeremy, Lars, and Ryan. Then we set out a plan for our deliverables. We each tackled different areas of focus but flexed across areas where needed and over time started to see a product emerge from the marble.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges we faced along the way include getting ourselves to that initial POC state and finding enough testnet UST to do large scale arbitrage tests. Every team has big dreams on what their project will do but the path to the first working use case is often fraught with a lot of integration issues, initial setup and debugging sessions. Finally seeing the use case emerge through the work often is all a team needs to drive the project to launch and success.

Accomplishments we are proud of

We started working on this project toward the end of June. In just a few short weeks, we came together as a team and started to work diligently together towards our vision. Our team has had an incredible chemistry from the beginning and I think we are all proud of the amount of development and progress we have made on our project as a whole in such a short period of time. A specific accomplishment we are very proud of is successfully bringing a proof of concept to this hackathon.

What's next for White Whale

Working towards our initial public launch and unleashing the power of arbitrage to the masses.

How we built it

Frontend is built with React using the Ionic Framework. This gives us a mobile friendly web app which can be compiled as a native app as needed. Backend is a Rust smart contract leveraging the cosmwasm framework. Additionally we have developed and maintain a number of arbitrage algorithms which can be used to perform an arb operation in a similar manner to the project.

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