DeFi primitive for fixed yield
Saffron splits the fees earned by a Uniswap position into an upfront premium payment and a variable yield token. The upfront premium can be expressed as an annualized fixed rate. The yield token holder earns all yield from the deposited Uniswap position. Saffron vaults facilitiate this fee splitting mechanism.
Saffron vaults are permissionless, immutable, and non-upgradable. They are a DeFi primitive built on the core principal of building composable fixed yield for DeFi. Uniswap fees are the first underlying yield source.
All deposits into Saffron (fixed or variable) are standard ERC20 tokens. Like any ERC20 token, they have properties that allow them to be traded, used as composable DeFi legos, or borrowed against.
Therefore, Saffron can be used for many practical applications:
to earn an upfront payment for a productive asset
to incentivize onchain liquidity for token issuers
to buy a hedge before the price moves against your assets
to facilitate a bespoke options contract that earns swap fees from deposited collateral
to loop liquidity and earn more yield by accepting higher path dependency
to borrow against yield from the future
...and many more
Saffron is currently in pre-beta phase, but is being tested with production smart contracts deployed on Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum one, and Robinhood chain.
These smart contracts have 9 audits. You can view them here.
The Saffron web3 app is live on https://beta.saffron.finance/ but limited to permissioned deposits only.
Okay so the format here isn't saving so everything is a single block of text I'm sorry Our main focus during the London Open House was threefold: - to get feedback on our protocol and go to market strategy. - to enable other projects to discover onchain liquidity. - to expand our ecosystem and research tools to the Arbitrum ecosystem. - to meet with a group of likeminded builders in real life and understand their needs and how we can work with them effectively. Outside of the Open House, we also used our existing network to further our expansion: - met with Robinhood partnerships director to help guide Saffron's launch on Robinhood chain to bring DeFi users to Robinhood. - met with Wintermute (Robinhood primary MM) to facilitate OTC trading and options writing for ETH / USDG to fill liquidity gaps that exist onchain using Saffron. - met with Greek.fi founder and committed to building a proof-of-concept covered calls protocol that uses Saffron to accumulate ETH at a faster rate than would be possible with options alone. - got introduction to Uniswap labs (from RH) to work on our smart contract system and plan the next version with features that they suggest, and from their perspective, would be successful using their protocol. - connected with Blockscout to ensure correct and transparent data for all of our smart contracts onchain. - met with Orderly Network - discussed further collaboration on perps dex integration with aggregators (one of their team was here!). - Xerberus to integrate their analysis tools on Saffron Dune/onchain data (via @snj_peters, founder). Concretely, we've accomplished the following on the tech side: - built a system to check bytecode on the frontend to block suspicious tokens or Uniswap pools which may be malicious (just permissionless smart contract things). - expanded our research system (what we call the "Saffron Yield Analysis Engine") to support Robinhood chain (already supported eth mainnet and arbitrum). - implemented a "money match" tinder-style matching system for fixed/variable buyers for vaults (an alternate UX layer that makes the vault interface more fun and less like a spreadsheet). On a human level, as veterans in the space, we gave feedback and advice to other founders who are more early stage. For example, we're introducing Henrik from Sapio to the MetaDao team, because their governance mechanism is close to (but not competitive with) futarchy. We also gave feedback to the Bond Credit team about protocol risk assessment and agentic workflows, using a good example of the LayerZero hack and how the agent could have assessed the risk more accurately using security spending and budget analysis.
Self-funded from 2020. Raised $2m from from Dragonfly, Multicoin, Coinbase, and angel investors in 2021.
