Introducing AIM: Dev Update.10

It may be April Fools, but this is no joke. AIM Gateway contract is on the Mainnet, and we can begin the Pilot. Let me walk you through how it works and what’s to come.

First, let me emphasise that AIM Pilot is a risky investment. Do not invest more than you can safely afford to entirely lose.

Deposit

Using the deposit() function you can specify the amount of DAI you want to invest into AIM. To complete the deposit, you should have the equal amount of xTRND. Both assets will be locked inside the AIM contract upon deposit for a minimum of 14 days before you can withdraw them again. In return, you will be minted an equal amount of aimDAI.

You also need to hold at least 130 TRND tokens, or 170 DAI-TRND UniV2-LP tokens, or 3.44 ETH-TRND UniV2-LP tokens, to access the deposit() function, but it is only a check of your address balance, they are not used or moved. The required amount of the LP tokens can be held in your address or staked with the AIM contract.

So for example, if you want to invest 1,000 DAI, you also need 1,000 xTRND. Upon deposit, you will receive 1,000 aimDAI in return.

Your aimDAI divided by the total supply of aimDAI represents your share in AIM capital denominated in DAI. For example, if on epoch 1, AIM starts with 10,000 DAI, the total supply of aimDAI is 10,000 as well, and you are entitled to 10% of that amount.

If at the end of epoch 1, AIM returned a total of 20,000 DAI, you would still be entitled to 10% of that amount – but now it is 2,000 DAI. If you do not burn any aimDAI in exchange for DAI at this point, and epoch 2 begins, you now have 2,000 DAI invested in AIM but you did not need to provide an additional 1,000 xTRND. Profits have compounded without leaving AIM.

If you want to extract profits regularly, you can burn a portion of your aimDAI to withdraw DAI+xTRND and keep the rest compounding through the next epochs. Of course, we assume AIM will be working well enough to generate continuous profits. Otherwise, the underlaying DAI capital behind your aimDAI can decrease, so keep that possibility in mind.

Withdraw

Using the withdraw() function you can burn aimDAI to obtain DAI+xTRND in return. The amount of DAI you get depends on the performance of AIM investments. For example, if you provide 1,000 DAI and 1,000 xTRND to mint 1,000 aimDAI before the start of the epoch, and once the epoch ends AIM has doubled its DAI capital, you can now burn 1,000 aimDAI to obtain 2,000 DAI and 980 xTRND.

The amount of DAI is larger, because of the AIM investment profits. The amount of xTRND is smaller, because each withdrawal has a 2% fee on xTRND: 1% goes to the ETH-TRND Uniswap liquidity providers; another 1% goes to the dev.

If you wanted to put your 2,000 DAI back into AIM, you would now need to deposit that along with 2,000 xTRND. However, if you do not burn your aimDAI between epochs, or for example you burn half of it, you do not have to provide any additional xTRND to support your remaining DAI capital within AIM.

Gongi

The gongi() function does two important things. First, it starts an epoch. When an epoch is active, both deposit() and withdraw() functions are disabled. However, staking/unstaking Uniswap LPs will always be open. The AIM Pilot epochs can last 2-4 weeks, depending on the market conditions. Once more operations are handled inside the contract instead of outside, epochs will be shorter and regular, defined by the contract itself.

Second, the gongi() function withdraws all the DAI from the AIM Gateway contract to the Trendering: Deployer address to be used by AIM.

Bongi

Together with the previous function, they represent the “gongi bongi”. If all goes well, the bongi() function will deposit all the DAI starting capital and epoch profits from AIM. Unless AIM generates a loss, the starting capital is available in whole. The profits are subject to a 3% fee: 1% for DAI-TRND Uniswap liquidity providers, 1% DAI-xTRND Uniswap liquidity providers and 1% for the dev.

Trendering DAO

The AIM contract also includes functions to operate the DAO votes. Anyone can trigger startVote() function as long as they have 10,000 xTRND to deposit. This begins the vote that is open for 7 days.

During that period anyone can vote as many times they want using voteFor() or voteAgainst(), using as much xTRND as they want to deposit. Each vote is square-rooted, meaning depositing 100 xTRND equals to 10 votes, and depositing 10,000 xTRND equals to 100 votes.

Once the 7 day vote deadline passes, the endVote() function can be triggered by anyone. The address successfully triggering that function will receive a 500 xTRND reward. All the remaining xTRND collected during the vote goes to the incentive for the staking of ETH-TRND Uniswap LPs.

The Dapp will have a Drafts section available soon, where Proposals can be prepared and discussed freely, and then pushed for the official vote.

Staking

There are 3 incentivised Uniswap pairs: ETH-TRND, DAI-TRND and DAI-xTRND.

The ETH-TRND stakers are rewarded with xTRND collected from AIM withdrawals and DAO votes.

The DAI-TRND and DAI-xTRND stakers are each rewarded with 1% of DAI profits from AIM capital, accumulated at the end of each epoch.

Because staking rewards are appearing at specific moments (when an epoch or DAO vote ends), you should take note of your accrued rewards before you claim them. There is also a system in place to prevent simple abuse of large LPs going in-and-out.

Your reward share is compiled from the amount of LPs you deposit, and the amount of time you have been staking for: the time modifier starts at a very small number close to 0 and reaches 1 after staking continuously for 31 days. Whenever you stake/unstake, you claim rewards but the time modifier is reset back to that very small number.

Overview

AIM Pilot and Staking will be easy to use through the Dapp interface coming online sometime next week. There will also be a timer estimating the start of the epoch. You can expect the first epoch to begin within 7 days from now.

If AIM Pilot proves successful, its contract will be upgraded with new features, mainly with most effective strategies executed directly from the contract and on its DAI, with no need for any “gongi bongi” capital movements, improving trust and security.

At this stage there is also a recoverERC20() function that can rescue any ERC20 token stuck or incorrectly sent to the contract. This ensures no contract error can render assets stuck, and in case of mistakes we can recover assets safely. All other Trendering Protocol tokens already implement this, so if you ever send something to the Trendering contracts by mistake, DM me on Telegram. In the future upgrades of AIM this function will be removed.

The Big Short

As AIM develops, the Dapp will develop as well. Several metrics and indicators used by AIM will be included in the Dapp to create sort of a market pulse dashboard. It will be highly subjective and not very customisable. It will primarily help me and AIM, but I think it will help you too.

Together, the Dapp, the AIM, the DAO and the Private Telegram Group create a unique Protocol we call Trendering. I could keep AIM to myself. You could keep your calls from the Private. We all could go our separate ways, go win or lose money. But what is the point? Money is not everything.

Money is useless if it is not used. Money is capital, but what you do with it is what matters. Who knows how AIM goes. But if it goes well, and if some of us have a will, we could do interesting things through the Private and the DAO. We all are in it for the money, but truth be told we all want out of it to do greater things. Well, let’s do it then.

EDIT: This post has been edited to update that the DAI+xTRND deposit is locked for 14 days; that the TRND requirement to use AIM is the same as to use the Dapp (supports LPs); and that the AIM web interface will be released next week instead of the next day.