Moving Forward with the ReFi Community
Hello ReFi community! We’re excited to update you all on what we’ve been working on the past few weeks and shed some light on everything we have coming.
TLDR; We’re more aligned than ever, with an ambitious roadmap and suite of products planned. As you all know by now, we’re not going anywhere and think this bear market is the perfect opportunity to double down on building the next generation of DeFi products. We split this post into three sections:
- Update on ReFi Treasury and LP funds
- What we’ve been working on since our last update
- Next steps for our team and community
Let’s get to it!
1. State of the Treasury and LP
On October 14th, ReFi suffered a hack that rendered our token untradeable. You can read more about the specifics of what happened here. The underlying token smart contract is still held hostage by the hacker, and they’ve set an 100% tax on every buy/sell transaction. Over the past few weeks, the hacker has continued to extract value from the project through whatever means possible. We’re disappointed to see this, but have a plan to remedy the situation as best we can for existing holders.
The current value of the ReFi Treasury is $1,051,169, with ~$850k of that being in liquid assets (USDC and ETH). You can see details below:
Our asset values are down due to several factors. Firstly, as eluded to above, the hacker has been selling all the $REFI tokens that they illicitly acquired into the locked portion of the Uniswap ETH LP. Although we have managed to secure the unlocked portion (190 ETH), it remains the case that the majority of the remaining 133 ETH has been sold into and is not recoverable. You can see one example of this here.
We had previously considered these $REFI tokens as assets and as such have to mark this as a drawdown. In addition to this there have been several bearish market developments, including depreciation of Friktion vaults which had exposure to $SOL, and a combined loss of almost $100k on Rari/Fuse and Mango Markets. Whilst we had no exposure to FTX and it’s affiliated entities, we did crystallise a loss on any remaining long perpetual positioning we were running in early November. The priority over the past few weeks has been to move back as many risk-on assets to the Fireblocks Vault and convert them to USDC and ETH.
Given the hacker’s continued efforts to sell into and drain the $REFI LP, we’ve also written off any expectation to salvage capital from the pool when it unlocks on December 11th. While we do expect this to be a non-zero amount, it’ll likely be less than the 40 $ETH that currently remains paired in the LP.
We’ll touch more on how we’re moving forward with the current accessible capital later in the article.
2. Update on the team’s recent efforts
The team has been heads down exploring a new product alternative & working on the ReFi Pro rebrand. This week, we made the decision to prioritize the new protocol ahead of the ReFi Pro rebrand, given its more significant impact on current token holders. The RP rebrand will be sequentially released after the new token/protocol launch.
This period has allowed the team to forge a new path away from the FaaS narrative. Our goal is to build a suite of DeFi investment tools, starting with our new protocol centered around an innovative approach to on-chain trading and ReFi Pro rebrand focused on institutional-grade asset management. As we expand, we’re also talking with lawyers to formally incorporate our business(es). Additionally, we’ve reduced headcount materially and reduced salaries for several team members during this time.
3. What’s coming
Let’s start with discussing the new protocol and token. While we can’t give many details today (keeping it internal until closer to launch), we can say we’re not proceeding with the FaaS model.
The idea of our new token & product comes from Huf’s trading experience and what he believes is a crucial tool missing in the market. It’s the first in a suite of DeFi trading tools we wish to develop.
Our goal is to create a trading-based protocol that solves a very manual, expensive & time-consuming aspect of the current trading experience. It’s applicable for both institutional & retail investors and will be a tremendous value add to the industry. Additionally, the token will have a value accrual model (#RealYield) & play a pivotal role in the protocol.
Before diving into the product roadmap, we’d like to discuss plans for when the $REFI token LP unlocks on December 11th. Once liquidity is unlocked, we’re presenting two options for current token holders.
- Swap your existing $REFI tokens for $ETH based on our post-hack MC ($478k). We’re allocating a majority of Treasury funds to give the community this option. While we’d like it to be more, we’re doing all we can with the capital we were able to recover.
- Hold onto your $REFI tokens and be eligible for the token airdrop of our protocol launching Q1 2023.
We plan to release another article closer to the unlock that will go into detail explaining how the tokenswap will work (tutorial / steps to swap) with updated numbers.
We understand if users would like to exit the project at this time. If you plan to stick with us, you’ll be rewarded through a vested airdrop (likely 3–6 month vesting schedule). We’re still fleshing out the tokenomics and will release more information in a future update closer to launch.
We plan to begin the token swap option on December 11th and have it open for a month to those choosing to exit.
For those sticking around, we want to present our roadmap for the next few months to give you a sense of what we’re building & our timeline. We’re hoping this also helps inform your decision (and pushes you to join us into our next venture!).
Moving forward, we’ll be posting bi-weekly updates on Telegram and Discord with progress updates on our roadmap items. Our goal is to be transparent, communicative, and demonstrate our continued dedication to the community.
We appreciate the continued patience and belief from you all. We look forward to a very successful 2023 and a new chapter for the team & community.
