We launched Zircon Beta on February 28, a bit more than a month ago. Since then we’ve collected more than 200,000 transactions between all our iterations, so thank you to all testers and dedicated community members!
With Zircon Beta launched successfully and offering incredibly useful data for testing, it’s time to look ahead. We’ve been working hard to make sure the system works correctly, and introduced several new features to our frontend and smart contracts. We’re now close enough to begin making actual plans for launch.
We initially planned to go live only on Moonbeam with our full product. But as we continue testing and iterating on our concepts, we realized that we need an intermediate stage. That’s where Zircon Gamma comes in.
Zircon Gamma is our deployment on Kusama’s Moonriver, Moonbeam’s wilder cousin.
Gamma is the next letter after Beta in the Greek alphabet, and it perfectly encapsulates what the canary deployment is: a highly experimental, maybe not completely polished platform, but one that goes beyond a simple beta. Let’s dive into what this means exactly!
Is it a mainnet?
Like all other Kusama deployments, Zircon Gamma is effectively a mainnet with real funds involved. It will be a fully functional version of the Zircon platform, offering all of the benefits of single sided liquidity provision and cheaper fees on the Zircon DEX.
Like any good canary, Zircon Gamma will get new features first, in addition to being launched earlier. It will be its own protocol with its own community and its own token, called ZRG.
But getting new features first also means having a higher risk of failure, so Zircon Gamma is destined to be the more degen version of Zircon. That’s not just about getting features first though.
ZRG Tokenomics
Inspired by MOVR tokenomics, ZRG will also have no allocations to the team or investors. All of the supply will be distributed to the community or used for the development of the protocol.
A small 5% Bootstrap allocation will be reserved to bolster funding for the development team, with a linear vesting beginning on TGE. Up to 30% of this allocation will be available at the start and used to provide liquidity in Zircon Gamma pools. The remaining 95% of the tokens will be distributed via a fair launch or stored as long-term DAO reserves.
ZRG is also designed to be a clean slate in terms of tokenomics. It’s going to be much simpler than ZRN (which is expected to have a lot of DOT-like utility staking functions). It will be up to the future Gamma DAO to decide specific mechanisms for tokenomics, such as xZRG, veZRG or any other innovative idea.
The initial communities for Zircon main and Gamma will probably be very similar, but over time they will become two distinct entities.
The Gamma Product
Zircon Gamma will include all of the core mechanisms of the main Zircon platform, minus the features tied to the ZRN token (fee discount staking, liquidity crowdloans… more on this soon).
As the more experimental deployment, we expect that Gamma will gradually diversify into more degen features.
For example, the Pylon system is very flexible and can be used to generate new interesting primitives. One of them is a put option, a way to short an asset with little downside risk. You can do this just by making a Pylon vault where Stablecoins are Floats! Another idea might be to create Anchor token markets, which allow brave LPs enter pools that are suffering slashing.
It sounds weird and it is, but there’s nothing that says it can’t work as long as everyone understands their risks. And this is just scratching the surface of what Zircon’s mechanism can enable.
Stay tuned for more news about the Zircon Gamma launch! We are currently targeting a launch in Q2, mostly depending on internal security review and audits.
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