In 23 days and 4h the Interlay parachain will lose its lease slot and because it’s dead, because the developers quit it’ll go offline forever. There’s still money locked in the lending, iBTC, LPs and staking. Could someone maybe get a root proposal going to save these funds? To like get all the money and return it to their rightful owners? It would leave another stain on DOTs name if the money wasn’t returned and to be honest… After all the fiasco this community has gone through we can’t really afford more drama. I would make the proposal myself if I had the technical knowledge of how to do it, but I don’t. I’m hoping someone with the technical skills to execute said thing reads this and cares enough in order to help out?
Well… To be honest, it’s a stain of BoB/Interlay first and foremost AND if the DOT community does literally NOTHING while having the power to act then we’re in a sense no better. Since not acting is literally an action in itself. It’s called avoidance and avoidance is literally an action. We should act as quickly as possible, there’s still 23 days left. I think the funds can be recovered in that time. If not then I’m guessing 10 DOT could be spent to buy a core for 1 month? Not sure if you can buy a core for someone else just to keep the chain alive?
Another thing. Maybe, since Parity said they’re going to build products on top of DOT, they could get root access of the chain through root tract and simply take over the development. Having a tokenized BTC (iBTC) that is community owned might be a great thing? I think that the ecosystem would benefit from it and if the chain is “dead” then it might be the best action to take. The protocol itself isn’t flawed, the development team is. So if we just take the protocol and put some decent developers on it then it might work out. It’s just a suggestion…
EDIT:
Maybe the treasury could then buy iBTC, since we did vote to buy BTC as a reserve. So, Parity takes over the chain, it makes iBTC a community driven asset and then buys iBTC and uses it as a reserve and also collects lending fees in order to get some passive income. This could be an opportunity to be honest. We wouldn’t even need to recover the funds if we did it like this. Maybe make a “Wish for change” vote if people would like to take over the protocol and salvage it? Maybe even just ask the main dev if he would be so kind as to give the community the control.
This would also inject a lot of liquidity into the ecosystem, while providing the treasury with more revenue? Sounds like an idea IMO
Another thing. If it’s community driven we could also upgrade the protocol. Like get snowbridge and hyperbridge integrations and more HRMP channels to other chains. We could rename iBTC to something more in line with polkadot, like pBTC (we should probably get a more catchy name for it but you probably get the jist of it).
Another issue that I see with Interlay going down is that it has integrations with Hydration (and probably other protocol that I don’t remember). Hydration - An Ocean of Liquidity The 2-Pool, iBTC, WBTC… Sure, there is barely any TVL in that, but that’s probably partially due to there being so much uncertainty around Interlay and iBTC. If we actually made it a community owned asset then I would bet we could pull millions if not tens or hundreds of millions of $ of liquidity from the BTC ecosystem and onboard it into the DOT ecosystem. It’s like… Why develop our own things if we can just take over a dead project and get it for free in a sense. The fundamentals have already been built and to my knowledge there’s nothing wrong with them + reviving the project would inject a sense of trust that the community actually feels responsible for the projects inside the ecosystem, that we’re nurturing them in order for them to succeed. Also, all the people that invested into Interlay or are still staking (you can literally stake INTR for YEARS and some people have assets locked up in INTR that can’t be retrieved for another few years), those people would probably appreciate it and this would probably result, again, in more TVL for the ecosystem as a whole.
Having a tokenized governance owned, community owned BTC would IMHO be a really good choice! What do you guys say? Am I onto something or is it a nothingburger?
Thanks for bringing this to attention! I think demonstrating “clean” phasing out of projects would definitively be a win for us.
However I’m unsure about the added value of a dedicated parachain. It seems easier and cheaper to issue a token directly on Asset Hub instead - such a protocol can be implemented as smart contracts on Asset Hub after all.
Just something to consider; I remember the interlay protocol design was heavily criticized by some for its lack of capital efficiency (due to the over-collateralization). I think this can and should be addressed in a newer iteration.
On another note, we already see many over-collateralized things being created. One could argue against that in the sense of building up too much of a house of cards. Especially with bitcoin, which is already a crypto currency after all, a solution built on cryptographic primitives seems like an obvious thing to do (e.g. threshold BTC). In terms of diversification, innovation and recent DeFi ambitions on Polkadot, this would also be a nice win for polkadot.
True. I was just thinking. Maybe we could make a community/governance owned chain with tokenized coins. We could have a tokenized BTC, USD, ETH, EUR, … Imagine a superchain of all kinds of assets. Once we get a lot of them we could also make some sort of index funds based on those community owned assets. And that chain would have LPs, lending market, staking based on those community owned assets.
This went off topic quickly haha. But yes, I see your point of just hosting it on AH. I’m still wondering though, what do we do with the funds of the people who have INTR locked for literal years? I guess just sell them at market price and give them like USDT or something on another chain? The thing is, INTR can be locked for 192 weeks in order to increase the APY. That’s 3.68219 years…
Nice, this just gave me another idea. What if we make a recovery task force? This kind of stuff is bound to happen over and over again. People abandoning their projects and therefore funds getting stuck due to cores having a limited lease. So, make a task force that would be responsible for a project that is deemed to be dead in order to recover funds. Like this people would be reassured that even if a project dies and loses it’s lease, they’d still get their funds back. I think this would put a lot of trust and stability into the ecosystem. So that, as you’ve pointed out, we’d have a “clean” phasing out of projects. This could also be voted on the Wish for Change tract in order to put together a team that would have some kind of authority and oversight…