Greetings from Fluxus Finance team!
This proposal aims at introducing Fluxus Finance and Near Floripa (comunidade.near), and expressing our belief that the presence of Fluxus’ team at NearCon Lisbon 2022 is beneficial for the ecosystem and strongly fruitful for the existing and upcoming projects on Near. That said, we submit a proposal in order to raise a one-time funding for our team to make it to Lisbon.
What is Fluxus Finance?
The first draft for Fluxus Finance was born in November 2021 during the last Nearcon. Three members of our founding team, then builders from EVM-based ecosystems and Solana, were invited to attend the event and get to know more about the space.
After further studying Near, its technical differences, market positioning and vision, Fluxus was conceived as a Near-native yield aggregator, auto-compounder and yield optimizer. After onboarding onto Near and further diving into the ecosystem, development was kicked off with the help of an initial Foundation grant, and the project started to come out way stronger than initially thought.
Since then, we’ve been bootstrapping the protocol development while also submitting the project to a few hackathons (Encode x NEAR Hackathon Finale Prizewinners and Summary | by Neven Brlek | Encode Club), with no investments so far. After a lot of work and evolution, we’ve finally completed development of our yield aggregator and decentralized auto investment strategies.
As the Near ecosystem is still very early and full of opportunities, our team built crucial underlying infrastructure for the project itself, and afterwards opening this for many other projects on the ecosystem is a community good that Fluxus brings.
After structuring partnerships with other protocols, we also developed Vision, a DeFi portfolio visualization/management solution. We also intend on providing free Web2.5 APIs for underlying infrastructure we had to develop, such as zaps (turning tokens into seeds/LPs with a single signature), aggregate protocol data & high-level insights on DeFi primitives.
Why NearCon?
NearCon is the moment where the entire ecosystem gathers personally and we have the opportunity to meet the majority of partners, investors, users and developers. That said, we aim at launching our product there, exposing it to the community and using the advantage of having great momentum, since we will be in direct contact with everyone.
The event also gives us the opportunity to connect to other communities and expand our “Vision” tool to also serve the NFT community, as well as real-world-applications, carbon credit protocols and other types of creative blockchain applications on Near. Furthermore, we also want to connect closely with DAOs in order to provide automated investment products specifically for optimized treasury management.
Nevertheless, we can also meet and reinforce connections with VCs, angels and investors of the ecosystem. Since we are thinking about Fundraising, considering market conditions, it is imperative for us to stay closely connected with every one of them. With this, we state that attending the event is really important for our goal of being connected to all the protocols on Near, and maintaining healthy relationships with our partners, as well as serving the protocols we’re connected to with good data, insights and value add.
We currently see a lack of composability among Near protocols, which is natural in early ecosystems. With that in mind, we also intend on kicking off this conversation by connecting to other builders in the space and further understanding their thoughts on structuring a more united landscape, especially among high-TVL protocols that end up leading the way for other developers to join Near.
Part of our team has been accepted to the hackathon, so we plan on attending Nearcon to further flash out “Vision”, further connecting it to protocols outside DeFi, such as NFTs and oracle data, which will be fully open-sourced and free to use.
Partnerships and integrations
Through yield aggregation, users can be exposed directly to all the investment opportunities in the space. As previously mentioned, we built underlying infrastructure to facilitate or enhance usability and user-friendliness of all the operations, such as processes reducing human needed interaction and automating decisions in the most efficient way. This gave us a more product/project and protocol oriented perspective, and we are structuring partnerships with people from the ecosystem to get exactly that onboarded. Considering the fact that Near didn’t have portfolio visualization/management applications, we built it ourselves and people can now manage their wallets, protocol deposits and essentially all their DeFi investments (and futurely NFTs) directly from our UI.
There is a lot of room for collaboration with many other protocols in the ecosystem. Some of the protocols we’re talking to are not necessarily instant partnerships we can form, but instead an ongoing collaboration/communication that tailor-made automatization and instant retail adoption can add a lot of value to.
We also already participated on Near-focused discussions on Twitter spaces, such as the Near Community Chat, hosted by Hack-a-Chain (Near focused Software Company) alongside partners from Trove Labs (founders of the Jump DeFi), discussing topics related to DeFi, projects, community, NFTs, among others. Our positioning as an aggregator is also to concentrate useful insights and updates of the Near DeFi ecosystem on an ongoing basis, and kicking this off during Nearcon is a golden opportunity.
Our twitter page (@FluxusFi) has been growing organically through interactions with other protocols and community members, having over 12k impressions over the last month. We also have a Medium page (Fluxus Team) where we have weekly posts regarding DeFi, Near and Web 3.0 topics.
Near in Brazil
Fluxus has joined forces with Hack-a-Chain to build “Near Floripa”. We work together among other companies at the same Web 3 Hub in Florianópolis, a technological and crypto city known in Brazil as the Crypto Island. Alongside Hack-a-Chain, we’re connected to the largest and most influential Web3 communities in Brazil, and we intend on leveraging this to boost Near’s presence here as Near Floripa representatives and content creators.
MarketingDAO members can already check out Near Floripa’s initial posts on Twitter and Medium, as well as our Discord community. (Links in thread)
We’re bringing DeFi to the masses
We are initially focused on converting people that are already exposed to DeFi on NEAR, as well as people from the NFT space. We also aim at getting the DAOs treasury management also being done with us, as doing any sorts of DAO investments right now (and treasury management as a whole) is very inefficient and slow. In this case, having an automated protocol where treasuries can invest in proven, safe and well-known strategies, is in fact a big value for Near treasuries. This is currently our go-to-market strategy for the short term. For the mid/long term, the plan is to also get an On and Off ramp integrated directly to the platform, and have the whole DeFi UX integrated into Fluxus. With that, we can also bring in people who are currently out of the NEAR space and out of DeFi as a whole, thus achieving more massive adoption.
That said, as for our marketing strategy and growth, we focus mostly on partnerships in the beginning, hosting Twitter spaces with partners, and even protocols that are not necessarily already connected and usable with us, but are on our roadmap and have a clear perspective. We add integration value and easier usability to their users.
Grant proposal
Considering the fact that our team has grown considerably (around 10 people at the moment) and the traveling costs, we intend to attend NearCon in a strategically selected group of 5 people, composed by the Near and Web3 Smart Contracts Leads, the Blockchain Lead, the Business Developer (assuring connections and relationships with partners and investors) and the Head of Marketing (assuring quality content and complete event coverage on social media). That said, we hereby apply for a grant considering following costs:
| Item | Quantity | Price | Total Value | Total $NEAR ($ 4,38 on Aug 4th) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flight tickets | 5 | $1,800 | $9,000 | 2,054.80 NEAR |
| Airbnb | 1 | $2,000 | $2,000 | 456.60 NEAR |
| Hackathon Stipend | 5 | -$1,000 | -$5,000 | -1,141.50 NEAR |
| TOTAL Grant | $6,000 | 1,369.90 NEAR |
The transportation inside Lisbon, foods, drinks, and further additional costs will be supported by Fluxus Finance.
Near Wallet ID: comunidade.near
Wallet Owner: Kaue Cano (project lead for Fluxus Finance)
Delivered content
Being at the event, we also plan on delivering quality content through different social media platforms, such as:
Type: Event Coverage in Portuguese
Media: Instagram, Twitter & Discord
Description: Daily Portuguese content mainly targeted at Brazilian and other Portuguese- speaking audiences (hence Instagram, a big social media here) covering the event and side-events in Lisbon.
Type: Medium Article
Theme: The State of DeFi on NEAR: What to expect in 2022
Description: Article in English and Portuguese.
Type: Medium Article
Theme: Nearcon Recap
Description: Article written in Portuguese.
Type: Medium Article
Theme: Near Ecosystem Interviews
Description: 1-on-1 interviews with influential protocol leads on Near, presenting their perspective on their growth and vision. Articles written in English and Portuguese.
All delivered content will be linked here in this thread so MarketingDAO community members can have transparency and quality control over the deliverables. Portuguese content will be published as Near Floripa, further adding onto Near’s presence locally, while English content will be posted as Fluxus.
Success metrics and expected outcome
We expect to increase our impressions on twitter posts, reach more accounts through instagram stories (event coverage), and increase our twitter, instagram and discord community; both as Near Floripa and Fluxus. We also understand that reinforcing our contacts with partners and VCs is a success indicator as well and the produced media while being there is a successful outcome for the project and the ecosystem itself.
We hope to meet you there! The future is $NEAR.
