Hashstack’s public testnet is live

4 min readMay 2, 2022

In January 2021, with the first version release of Open protocol’s whitepaper, we showcased to the world a novel solution to the over-collateralisation problem in defi lending. Since then, our product Open, went through countless iterations, & feedback cycles. Fast forward to 16 months later, we are thrilled to announce that Hashstack’s novel under-collateralised lending solution — Open, achieves a major milestone as it becomes available for you to try out: https://testnet.hashstack.finance

We launched the Open protocol testnet as an invite-only access in early February this year. We were fortunate enough to capture the interest of over 4,000 unique users; of which over 2,400 were enabled access across different versions, as we iterated upon the feedback at a lightning fast pace. The public testnet v0.2.4 is live on Binance smart chain for a little over a week, with early access enabled to our power users.

Metrics

4,156 unique wallets registered. 2,497 accounts were enabled access across various versions of the private testnet.
Cumulative total value locked: $12Mn USD.
Market utilisation rate: 45–60%
Dominant market[deposits]: BTC
Dominant market[loans]: USDT
swap to loan ratio: 15–20%

Public testnet capabilities

Network: BNB Chain.
Faucet: Receive testnet tokens for BTC, USDT, USDC, BNB.
All deposit functionality: deposit, earn savings apr, withdraw deposits.
All borrow functionality: borrow, add collateral, swap & reverse-swap loan, withdraw partial loan, withdraw collateral, repay loan
Liquidation: Any user with 2,500 USDT as fixed deposit of 3 month mcp is deemed liquidator. Protocol automated liquidation is not enabled in this version.

Trade-offs

As with any early stage product, we have prioritised smooth functionality over fancy design. We are quite aware of the need for a good user experience. With a successful iteration of the testnet across 4 versions, we have now begun to work on simplified and optimised user experience with right blend of deep insights & functionality. The design improvements can be expected over a period of the next few weeks with minor changes reflecting each week.

The second trade-off we have made as a part of the testnet is to handle monitoring liquidation ready loans on-chain. It’s an interesting problem statement to work on. We have done this so as to buy additional time for our offchain team to effectively build, test & deploy dual-liquidation mechanism across dual cloud infrastructures — Gcp & aws.

Where do we go from here?

With the release of public testnet, we are only a step away from main-net. However, there are few critical features such as multi-chain dapp integration module built upon EIP9000 enabling eternal storage scalability of smart contracts needs evaluation as a part of the public testnet. We expect to release an upgrade towards the later part of this month with this feature implemented. It’s necessary to evalute Multi-chain dapp integration module prior to the mainnet, so that we can avoid releasing newer product versions every alternate week.

With this update, we will be rightly positioned to launch a bounty program. We have been working with few industry partners. We hope to announce the bug bounty towards the month end. If you are a smart contract security researcher, stay tuned. We are also revamping the front-end experience with a focus on simplified user flow with integrated protocol & user-level analytics. Along with this, we have been experimenting few incentive programs for our incredible community. Expect few satisfactory incentive program announcements over the next couple of weeks. If you’re not a part of our discord fam, now is the time to hop-in: hashstack.community.

Major break-through | Multi-chain dapp integration module

While Open protocol enables a way to facilitate under-collateralised loans targeted towards personal finances & trading capital requirements; a major problem occurs when we needed to integrate dapps of critical novelty. This is essential because, we need to enable an optimum avenue for our borrower to spend the excess loan that they can not withdraw from the protocol. If we go by the today’s practice, we could launch Open with maybe15–20 dapps on one chain, then release v2 with multi-chain capabilities and with probably another 15–20 dapps integrated. The problem being, we are forced to deploy a new version every time even if we want to integrate a single dapp. Unfortunately, there’s no web3 alternative to web2’s sdk. This is a second-order effect. An unintended problem that if addressed appropriately, can enable layer3 capabilities.

So, we theorised EIP 9000: Layer3 scaling standard. With this approach, we will be able to bring much needed composability to data storage, thus enabling eternal upgradability without the need for redeployment of the proxy.

We will release a technical blog on this soon. The proposed EIP is available for discussion on ethereum-magicians. Link: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-9000-layer3-scaling-standard/9039

About Hashstack

Hashstack builds critical infrastructure necessary to further the utility of decentralised finance. Our first product, Open built atop Open protocol standard brings under-collateralised loans to the crypto retail.

Through Open, one can borrow upto 3 times their collateral. A 4.28x borrow power on your collateral, against every market player such as Compound, MakerDao, Aave.