Hey everyone! This is Woojin, founder of Pylon Protocol.
After extensive deliberation with all parties involved over the past several weeks, we are enthusiastic to propose a potential acquisition: for Pylon Protocol to take over Glow Yield, including its development team and forthcoming product lines.
Upon passing community due diligence in the Pylon Forum, this proposal will go directly to voting on the Pylon WebApp to ultimately carry out the first token merger in Terra’s history.
At the highest level, this proposal aims to onboard Glow’s entire development team onto Pylon in order to help scale management and operations, launch new yield-based dApps, revamp ux/ui for existing interfaces, and ultimately benefit MINE stakers.
Vision Alignment
1.
The trajectory for Pylon as outlined in the original litepaper “Introducing Pylon Protocol” was to build “a suite of savings and payments products” on top of yield redirection and principal protected deposits, spanning deposit-based subscriptions and payments, lossless lotteries, charitable fundraising, NFT rentals, and artist patronage.
With an outburst of projects launching on Terra over the past year, most of Pylon’s business development focus has been glued to Pylon Gateway, which since its inception has grown to become the leading project launchpad on Terra with over $300M in TVL.
It’s important to note, however, that the platform “Pylon Gateway” was created as the proof of concept for platforms integrating yield: the first of many more products we intended to build. We believe that it’s now time to take up that initial vision beyond the launchpad.
2.
Positioned around a complimentary thesis for bringing about the mainstream adoption of UST through yield-based dapps, Glow Yield emerged as another project in the Terra ecosystem with a focus on commercializing programmable yield with easy-to-use applications.
The Glow development team consists of a venture studio that houses 52 full-time designers and developers with a 7-year track record of incubating various web2 and crypto products, including social media related apps (B2C at >$10MM ARR), multi-chain wallets, a decentralized AI artist, and exchange infrastructure with billions in volume.
There are currently two central applications to Glow Yield. The first application which has already launched, Glow Lotto, provides a stable savings account linked to a no-loss lottery wherein depositors receive lottery tickets proportionally to the size of one’s deposit.
The second platform, Glow Creators (awaiting launch post-acquisition and rebranding under Pylon), aims to create rich creator-to-fan experiences that redefine membership and loyalty rewards through yield-based patronage pools. Innovating at the frontier of Terra’s web3 creator economy, Glow Creators has already signed notable personalities to launch their own NFT collections and no-loss pools, including major TikToker influencers and K-pop artists.
3.
Pylon laid the groundwork for other yield-based projects on Terra to integrate the Anchor Earn rate in other means of value exchange via the novel paradigm of ‘yield redirection,’ enabling products to take advantage of stablecoin deposits for no-loss and perpetual payments.
At the same time, Glow has introduced shiny product wrappers to DeFi, launching socially commercial applications to make DeFi accessible to the everyday retail consumer.
This acquisition is founded on a history of ongoing close collaborations and significant roadmap convergence between Pylon and Glow. The combined effort of both development teams and communities will be stronger together in our supercharged vision to build out Terra’s ecosystem of fintech products leveraging programmable yields and decentralized money.
The ultimate vision forward for Pylon is to fill all the gaps and become a full-ranging suite of platforms and services built around yield redirection, all the way from expansion as a project launchpad to use cases like crowdfunding and patronage, recurring subscription payments, lending and borrowing backed by key money deposits, and many more.
How the Pylon-Glow merger benefits MINE stakers
The objective of this acquisition is to ultimately enhance value for MINE governance stakers by getting access to more opportunities for growth into different segments of the retail market and to deepen yield redirection sources with the potential of cross-chain integrations.
In order for Pylon to live up to its potential beyond its current positioning as a project launchpad, we believe that acquiring Glow will expand development capacity (i.e. for expedited unit testing, auditing, debugging) and product range (i.e. for advancing yield-based products at scale).
The present bottleneck to Pylon’s growth has been the team’s limited development capacity for focusing on new applications beyond the maintenance and growth of Pylon Gateway. This will be addressed through Glow’s ready-made studio of 52 designers and developers. More hands on deck to deal with day-to-day tasks will add to Pylon’s ability to build and innovate upon product features faster than ever.
As part of acquisition, the Glow team will be focusing on rebranding all existing and planned Glow products and shipping new dapps under the umbrella of Pylon’s ecosystem.
All of the current Glow dapps will be rebranded under Pylon, for instance, Glow Lotto to become Pylon Savings (or Pylon Harbor) with added features of dollar-cost averaging, and Glow Creators to become Pylon Creators (or the like), providing diversified sources for treasury accrual and buybacks for MINE while also covering a wider range of other platform-specific benefits for MINE stakers; these benefits may include, for instance, automatic entry into savings lotteries and/or exclusive tiers of membership on the influencer patronage platform.
All around, increased TVL growth will contribute to greater treasury accrual, resulting in more capital for MINE buybacks and community-building efforts, provided that every platform integrated under Pylon will have a portion of its yields stack up in the Pylon Treasury. This all translates to additional benefits for MINE stakers.
New upcoming dapps with Pylon branding will aim to foster mainstream adoption of UST with attractive “no-loss” products across various sectors, fast-track integrations with Pylon’s yield redirection SDK, potentially look to cross-chain solutions for yield source diversification, and amplify Pylon’s value proposition of capital preservation via deposits.
Other token mechanism features developed by the Glow team, including the vote-escrowed token implementation of the CW900-lv Cosmwasm standard which would calculate and add ve-boost multipliers, could be implemented to strengthen MINE tokenomics.
Incentive Alignment
With the fixed token swap structure employed in the FEI-RARI merger as precedent, we propose to absorb the circulating GLOW token supply with a GLOW-to-MINE fixed swap, in order to structure long-term incentive arrangements amid Pylon and Glow communities.
This one-way fixed rate swap proposes for users to be able to swap GLOW tokens in exchange for MINE at the fixed rate of <1 GLOW = 1.65 MINE>, roughly based on time-weighted average price calculations for both tokens.
282M MINE tokens are requested for this fixed swap. Currently circulating GLOW tokens, LP/staking reward emissions, and GLOW tokens that have yet to be vested and claimed from the Pylon Pools for GLOW fall under this category. The Glow team will work to curb further GLOW token emissions as much as possible.
GLOW token holders can decide either to swap their tokens back to UST at variable market prices or swap GLOW to MINE at the fixed rate above. The GLOW-to-MINE swap will open as soon as the smart contracts for the swap are carefully audited.
In exchange for burning all outstanding GLOW tokens allocated to the team, ecosystem fund, and warchest in the GLOW tokenomics, we plan to align incentives by providing the Glow development team and its line of products with 650M MINE tokens vested over 3 years.
MINE tokens for this acquisition swap and Glow team reserve will be drawn from the ”Depositor Incentives” allocation, which is set aside in the Pylon tokenomics for “rewarding ecosystem participation,” all-encompassing of project partnerships and SDK integrations. There are 4000M MINE tokens in total allocated for “Depositor Incentives.”
In sum, this proposal requests to draw 932M MINE tokens from “Depositor Incentives” to accommodate smooth integration between the respective communities and development teams of Pylon and Glow.
Integration Roadmap
Provided initial reception and feedback on this Pylon Forum post and extended updates, we will post a governance proposal on the Pylon WebApp on whether to proceed with the acquisition of Glow’s products and development team, open to voting by MINE stakers.
Upon the passing of this proposal, both teams will work expeditiously to ensure a smooth transition and onboarding process, including the rebranding of all Glow product lines under the Pylon brand, documentation updates regarding tokenomics and team composition, and the release of the GLOW-to-MINE fixed token swap upon code audits.
This acquisition, if passed, may lead to slight delays on the launches of DP-based funds on Pylon Gateway (incl. “Gateway Fund I”) as well as Glow Creators (to be rebranded and launched as “Pylon Creators”), although we believe that it is essential to set up solid footing for restructuring and priming the development team for Pylon’s success over the long-run.
Next Steps
We’d like to open up this proposal for discussion and hear everyone’s thoughts below. After some initial discussion, we’ll follow up with a governance poll on the Pylon WebApp.
Let’s make Pylon glow again by constructing additional pylons!
ers,
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16.04.2022, 2pm