Proposal: Whitelist COT/BNT

OLD GOV (LEGACY)
1

COT/BNT Pool Info

The COTBNT pool is already often #1 in APR fees for any token with significant liquidity, especially for a small cap ($4M today). It’s recently had over 300% APR from fees, with over $10K liquidity. Even with 3% fees, Bancor may still be the best place to trade it if we (the project) concentrate high liquidity there as follows:

The pool’s liquidity (and volume fees for APR) may greatly increase once CoTrader begin its own upcoming COT LM rewards program, on Bancor (instead of e.g. Uniswap). BNT would benefit just as much from CoTrader incentivizing with COT, since its pools are 1/2 BNT. CoTrader may gain large LD as it’s a far more developed project than many quick launches that get $3-6M+ liquidity on various DEXs recently.

If there were LM rewards for COTBNT, miners could earn both LM rewards AND the already great APR fee earnings.

COT/BNT pool, Etherscan link:

COT token, Etherscan link:

CoTrader Summary

CoTrader.com was the first live DeFi investment funds on Ethereum mainnet since 2018.

CoTrader fund managers can manage investor assets without holding them. Investors can withdraw from “smart funds” anytime, with proof of past ROI and performance fees automatically as trades happen via DEX, pools, and other defi dapps.

CoTrader was one the first 2 companies to ever receive a Bancor grant, to build bancor.cotrader.com

Tokenomics

COT utility isn’t tied to some promise to use the token in businesses offchain. Rather, its tied to onchain buy-back mechanisms integrated into its smart contracts - its smart funds platform. The COT token is tied to fund performance. Fund managers can set eg 20% as a performance fee. COT token buy-back is then done with 75% of 20% of that 20%, or 3%. 50% of the buy back is burned by sending to 0x0, 25% goes to a 51% voted platform admin, and 25% goes to a bond staking reserve. There are 20B tokens max, with over 18.886B already in circulation.

Holders

CoTrader has over 50,000 holders, although, admittedly, most of them are from a (very successful) bounty program telegram bot that had over 70,000 people join and follow channels, like, retweet etc. Most of these were real people, and we tried to prevent bots with various measures.

CoTrader’s more significant holders work in blockchain VCs and are seasoned fund managers. Others are not very active traders in crypto, and are holding for the very long run. This latter group liked the idea of someone doing their crypto investing for them. Newers holders are more active traders and DeFi users.

Total Locked Value (TLV) & AUM potential

TLV is a DeFi KPI, and in our case, amounts to Assets Under Management (AUM). A few large AUM funds are considering using CoTrader, as we approach a market-fitting product. At our current market cap and Total Locked Value (TLV), picking up some of these would be very significant news, and may greatly affect our platform and token prospects.

Code

8 version iterations of CoTrader’s smart contracts are open source on GitHub, where you’ll also find Bancor portal work from its grant.

Over $30,000 TLV already sits inside its smart funds as navigable onsite.

Audit status

Due to the frequency of updates, the contract has not yet been formally audited. However, the token is a standard erc20 with a fixed supply. The team is committing to an open bounty program, the code is open source, and available on the Cotrader Github page. There have not been any hacks or exploits on the platform.

Insurance tiers

As a small market cap coin, this proposal concedes certain modifications are necessary to circumvent possible exploits, inflation, and other unwanted behaviour. We propose that the impermanent loss insurance schedule remain unmodified (i.e. 30% coverage after 30 days, and 100% after 100 days); however, the maximum co-investment from the protocol should not exceed 10,000 BNT (a 99% drop compared to large market cap assets and stablecoins). The small minting limit bottlenecks the single-sided liquidity opportunity for COT holders, thereby encouraging dedicated LPs to purchase and deposit their own BNT in the protocol to support the pool. Moreover, the high APR should also attract additional BNT from outside the COT community, from those BNT holders in pursuit of the highest possible yields. Therefore the 10,000 BNT minting cap presents a low inflation risk, without sacrificing too much opportunity.

Product View

image
image1494×1682 312 KB

Bancor/CoTrader business model alignment

CoTrader’s biz model is aligned with Bancor: We are planning to add a flagship fund for Bancor LM for the existing whitelisted tokens, and possibly for new projects’ LM rewards projects.

As Bancor’s unique BNT token model benefits equally (in 50/50 balance) by others projects’ liquidity via e.g. their own LM programs, this Bancor voting DAO can be a natural symbiotic partner and important hub that may vet projects via Whitelisting

We believe this may kickstart a trend for projects to do their LM rewards launches on Bancor, where there are more benefits.

Social

Social channels have many 10,000s of followers, but again, mostly from the old bounty programs.

Twitter has over 35k+ followers
twitter.com/cotrader_com

FB has over 38k+ followers
facebook.com/ cotrader

Telegram has over 8k

News channel over 4k

Market info

CMC: CoTrader price today, COT to USD live, marketcap and chart | CoinMarketCap
Messari: Crypto Research, Data, and Tools | Messari
CG: CoTrader Price: COT Live Price Chart & News | CoinGecko
1inch: 1inch - DeFi / DEX aggregator on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum

CMC key info

COT ROI at 229%
(Nov 25 2020, 8:32pm PST)

image
image676×1182 75.3 KB

Product Videos:

Gary Bernstein (Founder) explains at major blockchain event in LA, Crypto Invest Summit 2018

Harvard Campus Speaker
“The Current State of Cryptocurrency Hedge Funds Part 2”:

Custom product video:
(2018. Note that it mentions some future visions, like privacy preserving smart funds using ZK proofs)

Custom Whiteboard video:
(2018, before Bancor integration. Note that it predicts DEX aggregation, calling it “super DEX”)

In The News:

Venture Beat:

Forbes mention:

CoTrader discussion board post on its upcoming LM rewards program:

(The discussion board is blockchain-powered, by deWeb.io):

https://discuss.cotrader.com/DEFI/posts/TowyxyrTnNL2zqEy7q5O

Roadmap

CoTrader updates its roadmap in this Medium article:

1 Like
2

Will 2nd this, and should the proposal go to vote u have my vote. I think it’s important Bancor harbors the relationships with projects like cotrader who have a very strong commitment to the platform and are a strong asset to the community. Also cotrader’s platform and DeFi is one that has actual good and proven use case and I would hate to lose them to uniswap. The only thing that would concern me is the lack of an audit but with the project being live for so long I would think any flaws would be found by now.

4 Likes
4

I 100% agree with this ^

3 Likes
5

Thank you! Yes, we do complete unit testing of our code, and it’s been time tested. The token itself is standard, so it’s highly unlikely to be an issue. We’ll be offering significant bounties to find any security issues. As for the platform, we plan to do an audit soon for our version 7 line of code (fully onchain). We often update the DeFi portal, such as add support for e.g. Yearn Vaults and Compound, but this code is a smaller portion of the platform and can further be re-audited upon major updates. We also plan to update the core logic soon make some small but nice additions to it in version 9+ (version 8 relies on offchain oracles and we decides to not continue this direction to maintain the best security). For example, we’ll be adding the ability to assign other wallet addresses to manage various aspects of the funds such as whitelisting or trading.

Additional Bancor alignment: V9 will also allow any token, such as BNT, to be the denomination token of the fund, meaning that investors deposit BNT, and the fund manager can e.g. lend it to get USDB (without selling BNT), and deposit that into a pool and earn fees + LM rewards + imp loss insurance. This would appear to be helpful to Bancor, as token funds can have a low risk way to earn APR over their BNT holding, if they’d like to split some with USD anyhow, and have e.g. their LM rewards managed.

3 Likes
6

More CoTrader-Bancor biz alignment:

We’re adding BNT denominated fund capability (coming in v9: any token denomination)

This BNT fund can do single-sided investment into any Bancor LM Rewards (LMR) pool

This is very useful for Bancor holders seeking the best gains in BNT terms

We can already create this kind of fund, denominated in ETH, DAI or COT, where users deposit those, and funds buy BNT and choose LM rewards pool to enter.

In fact, we already have such funds now, which currently hold two-sided big caps with 300%+ APR.

Bancor LM Fund on CoTrader:

We’ll be adding LMR + ILI to funds’ value calculation, so they can properly show their full profit.

The Trello task for this work is outlined here:

image
image1048×1008 99.4 KB

7
1 Like