Spartan Protocol’s First Birthday

A Year In Review

12 Months In Dot Points

The idea here is to provide a ‘snapshot’ of the state of the nation before diving into a bit more detail of what has transpired over the last 12 months. Please note that the usual weekly Monday dev article will be pushed to tomorrow as the article-contributor time has been spent on this article as a priority. For now; brew a coffee, grab a beer or whatever is your drink of choice and run through the events of the past 12 months!

Happy Birthday Spartans!

TimeLine

28/08/20 — SpartanProtocol project was first announced
10/09/20 — First SPARTA token minted; Proof-of-Burn commences
27/09/20— First AMM pool was deployed (SPARTA:WBNB)
17/11/20— Bond+Mint program went live
19/01/21 — First successful DAO proposal (Bond allocation)
01/05/21— AMM exploited
12/05/21 — SPARTA V2 token deployed (inc feeBurn)
02/08/21 — CodeArena contest completed
Soon— TestNet
After-soon— Mainnet

Token Metrics (30/08/21)

2000+ — GitHub Commits
$0.30 — Burn Price
85.3 Million — Total Supply
$0.55 — Current Price
$43.5 M — Market Cap
270,328 — SPARTA Burnt Forever (feeBurn)
78.9 Million — SPARTA Circulating
81.5 M — V2 SPARTA Tokens
1,090 — V2 SPARTA Holders (>$100USD)
18,498 — V2 Transactions

SpartaV1

3.5 M — V1 SPARTA Tokens Remaining
586 — V1 SPARTA Holders (>$100USD)
840 248 — V1 Transactions

Fun Fact: If v1 had this deflationary function in place, we could estimate a rough ~2,600,000 SPARTA would have been burnt out of the total supply by now based on the transfer count * avg transfer amount plugged into the calculation of the feeBurn using half of the supply as the totalSupply figure.

Socials

73 — Published Medium Articles
316,760 — Reads&Views of the Medium
18.4K — Twitter followers
300+ — Twitter Posts
6M+ — Twitter Impressions & Engagements
6169 — Telegram members

The Story So Far

It's hard to believe that 12 months have passed since the first battle cries of the Spartan Protocol were heard across the globe.

The purpose of this section is to explore the events and objectives that have led us to where we are today. Thank you to everyone that has and continues to support SpartanProtocol — by the community for the community; always.

The project was released with the goal of being the first major non-UniSwap-clone liquidity project on Binance Smart Chain. Supported by passionate members of the existing Binance Chain community that saw the emerging opportunity that the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem could offer to DeFi and cryptocurrency; especially with the crazy fees that were being observed on other smart-contract-enabled chains.

Some might say that 12 months has shown this inkling to be pretty solid.

Check out the first article posted on Medium below (hello world!)

Team

Spartan Protocol’s vision was formed from a pseudo-anonymous group of developers who believe passionately in self-sovereignty.

Having globally distributed tools without extensive roadblocks such as bad actors, regulatory bodies and rent-seekers mean things can happen faster and cheaper. Anyone with access to a device and the internet has equal ability to be a peer in the ecosystem.

This philosophy has held true over the last 12 months with a strong contributor base that actively engages and helps build, for those without the technical skills that have wanted to assist have been helping with graphics, documentation, education and social media.

Further to that, the community contributed significant funds as can be seen with the recent $90K plus that was raised to fund the recently completed codeArena audit.

Why Binance Smart Chain

12 months ago, the concept of a smart-contract-enabled blockchain, with community adoption & cheap enough fees for the non-rich to afford, was still a pipe dream. Binance Smart Chain was one of the first movers in this space.

Spartan Protocol being comprised of many distributed members mostly from the Binance Chain community recognised the benefits that could be provided by a cheaper, EVM-capable blockchain with lightning-quick block times. Especially with the resources & community drive that would be provided and fueled by Binance.

Seemed like an obvious choice for this community to band together, get in early and bring across their code and experience from projects on other chains to build something brand new from the ground up especially for BSC.

Proof Of Burn — No AirDrops, No Team Tokens, No Private Sales — Ever !!!

Being a community project from the start during the proliferation of many DeFi protocols that prayed on unsuspecting crypto enthusiasts a fair & equitable launch and distribution of tokens was of the highest importance to contributors.

That's how BurnForSPARTA was born.

To acquire SPARTA, members had to burn BNB and bridged-BEP2 assets at a predetermined rate. Programmatically (no KYC or whitelists); their old assets were destroyed and SPARTA was minted and sent to them. Only 100m SPARTA could be acquired this way. The remainder of 200m SPARTA would then be emitted programmatically by the protocol over the lifetime of the network, starting at 35% APY and reducing, for the purposes of incentivising liquidity.

No one, not even the Spartan contributors; will be paid from an initial or time-locked allocation of tokens. No one will have ‘free’ or ‘airdropped’ access to any SPARTA tokens on mainnet launch (nor afterwards at any point).

Assisting Projects to join Binance Smart Chain

One of the quiet achievements of SpartanProtocol is that in the early days of BSC, many Binance Chain projects reached out for assistance in establishing their BSC presence and migrating their ecosystems across to function on both chains.

Spartan Protocol, as one of the pioneers of this process, was always happy to help!

This is something that continues to bring great joy to the contributors as we continue to work towards building a successful and flourishing Binance Smart Chain community, now and into the future.

Bond+Mint

Bond+Mint; another novel distribution idea from the Spartan Protocol community — After continued discussions about how best to press on with SPARTA token distribution after BurnForSPARTA, the community contributors built and tried out the new Bond+Mint feature.

The Bond+Mint was an extremely effective way of bootstrapping liquidity into the pools, by pairing assets with SPARTA and having a 12-month release of assets meant that funds could be locked into the protocol, whilst allowing people to remove some as desired. The linear release rate of 12 months let individuals choose the time that suited them the most without creating the potential for lots of lockups to end all at the same time, stabilising outflows in the future.

Once people saw the effect of locking up liquidity over a long period they tended to choose to keep their liquidity locked up whilst learning more about the inner workings of the protocol and DeFi in general. This developed the community into a crowd of low time preference individuals.

Positions Page

One thing that stood out to contributors really early on was that many projects did not have a way to show a user their position in pools. This seems like an oversight in the beginning until the treads of technical complexity are unravelled in how difficult it is to accomplish, without bloat and excess contracts fees. It becomes an ongoing challenge.

A couple of contributors took the challenge on and developed the positions page, giving Spartans the ability to see their positions within the pools based on the below key metrics:

Tokens added and their price movements
Tokens vested and their price movements
True global ‘Profits’ and ‘Losses’ based on both Realised and unrealised gains and losses

DAO Activated

DAOs are unlike traditional organisations that have a hierarchical control structure, generally private and inaccessible to a community. Centralised exchanges are an example of this; you might want a token listed, but besides a Twitter barrage, you have very little influence on that decision coming to fruition.

DAOs place the community participants in control of the platform transparently and programmatically. The power of contracts enforced by mathematics means that a large number of automated actions within a contract can be set up and voted on, the results of which will be automatically actioned.

BonDAO was enabled as the first step towards a fully working DAO allowing community members to decide which asset pools would receive Bond+Mint allocations. It was seen as a good way to test out functionality and stress the importance of long term thinking for the protocol.

May Exploit

Unfortunately, along with the highs came the lows, and May 1 was most certainly the most difficult day in the short history of Spartan Procotol for both the contributors and also for the community.

We remain disappointed that the individual(s) who exploited the Liquidity Pools did not contact the community via social media to report the issue and request a bounty/compensation, and discuss the return of the stolen funds. As Spartan Protocol was launched with the concept of a fair distribution (no team tokens, no seed or angel investors collecting cheap tokens, and no funds paid to the team during the Token Generation Event), all funds taken were the property of the Spartan Protocol community.

Should the individual(s) wish to contact us to discuss a return of a portion of these tokens, we would welcome the opportunity, and these tokens would be returned to the original liquidity providers based on their percentage of holdings at the time of exploit (we already have this snapshot)

Claiming Fallen Sparten Funds

To support the community in the wake of the exploit, a decision was made to allocate a small portion of the remaining SPARTA tokens (from the distribution phase) to the LP holders that were impacted.

There is still SPARTA that has not been claimed by V1 Pools holders, so if you are yet to claim, now is the time to navigate to the DApp upgrade to the V2 of SPARTA and claim any SPARTA from the pools (be careful to follow the official links; do not trust any PMs or links until you have confirmed their legitimacy multiple times)

Road To Sparta V2

During a Spartan’s Childhood, they undergo the Agoge, a period of development where they are taken from their family and put through a gruelling training regime. The results were one of the strongest and in our opinion one of the most badass ancient warrior societies. Only through great adversity can you come out the other side stronger, the Spartan community has dusted itself off and set about becoming a stronger and more resilient platform to do battle into the future.

Code Arena Audit

During the Agoge, Spartans are tested and learn from experienced warriors and members of society. Spartan Protocol thanks to the generosity of a crowdfunding campaign have enlisted the assistance of CodeArena to hold a contest to perform an in-depth and broad audit of the entire ecosystem.

A unique benefit of codeArena is that the work is performed by a diverse and specialised team of security experts to conduct both logical and unique exploit approaches. Spartan Protocol received record engagement and feedback from wardens which will strengthen the protocol going forward.

Confirmation that wardens have finished submitting findings & comments. ✅@SpartanProtocol is tremendously grateful for the contributions of time and knowledge - they have been deeply thoughtful and considered 👨‍🔬👨‍💻

Thankyou for your patience while feedback is collated pic.twitter.com/MlCgk2FFyj
— Spartan Protocol (@SpartanProtocol) July 23, 2021

Deflationary Sparta — We missed Burning too Much

As you know, Spartan Protocol likes to burn tokens, so a ‘feeBurn” mechanism was implemented.

This feeBurn adds deflationary pressure to counteract the emissions curve and also to assist in offsetting any inflationary results of the FallenSpartans allocation. What we will likely see is a push/pull at some point in the supply where the feeBurn is having a tug-of-war with the daily emissions and holding the supply in a fairly consistent band.

As the supply increases, the feeBurn gets more aggressive and the daily emissions get less aggressive. This will mean that SPARTA gets more deflationary and less inflationary as the supply increases and time goes on.

The Twitter contributors will endeavour to provide weekly updates on feeBurn status — things will get exciting with the launch of the upgraded DApp.

For a detailed breakdown of the mechanism — see the Medium Article Below

Contributor’s Focus

CodeArena Contest

COMPLETED ✅ — triage and prioritise the feedback submitted from the CodeArena wardens during the contest to prepare for the judges
IN PROGRESS — work through the post-contest tasks with the C4 judges & team for the eventual allocation of awards to security wardens
IN PROGRESS — communicate with security wardens to clarify/expand on feedback

Once these tasks above are completed, the CodeArena report will be published, and Spartans will be able to review the final list of findings to understand how the changes that have already been implemented into Spartan Protocol (in the PostC5 repository) fit into this greater picture.

As discussed previously, we continue to build and refine code in parallel with the CodeArena post-contest actions.

SPARTA V2 (Token)

COMPLETED (& ONGOING) — Work with DEXs & aggregators to ensure up-to-date information on the new SPARTA token (retiring the previous contract address) (1inch, PancakeSwap etc.)
COMPLETED (& ONGOING) — Work with token-tracking informational websites to ensure new token info is up-to-date (BSCscan, CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap etc.)

SpartanContracts

COMPLETED ✅ — Sort and prioritise all CodeArena submissions into contract scopes along with tags based on ‘actionable’ or ‘discussion points’
COMPLETED ✅ (only minor changes as required from now on) — Implementing refinements to contracts to address C4 & contributor feedback since the C4 contest code-freeze
IN PROGRESS —Rebuild automated testing

Deploy updated V2 contracts to BSC testnet for at least 1 week of community stress testing
Deploy completed V2 contracts to BSC mainnet

DAppV2

COMPLETED (& ONGOING) — Set up a reliable index of history scoped to contracts (use this for positions page etc)
IN PROGRESS — Update the DApp to suit the contract changes
IN PROGRESS — Use the new testnet subgraph to build a more lightweight positions page for V2

After Mainnet

Enable Bond allocations to replenish TVL into the V2 pools
March onwards with our original goals of building the decentralised, yield-generating synthetics protocol on Binance Smart Chain

Thank you

If you have made it this far through our articles, we know that you are one of the true SpartanProtocol warriors that takes the time to genuinely assess what the contributors are spending countless hours on and the work that they are doing.

Thank you for your endless support and willingness to help those that might not spend the same amount of time digging as deep. That effort is not wasted and is massively appreciated by all.

You are the true Spartan Warriors; AROO, AROO, AROO

Project Information

Official Links

Website: https://spartanprotocol.org/
DApp: https://dapp.spartanprotocol.org/
GitBook (Docs): https://docs.spartanprotocol.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/spartan-protocol

Engage with the community and contributors

Where to find out about all the latest updates or suggest improvements — get involved.

Medium: https://medium.com/spartanprotocol
Twitter: https://twitter.com/spartanprotocol
Telegram Community: https://t.me/spartanprotocolorg
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/spartanprotocolann
Community-Built Discord: https://discord.gg/wQggvntnGk

Community Bounty Wallet

Whilst there is no treasury nor contributor allocations, there was a public community bounty wallet set up a while ago to help handle donations from the community and other incentive programs (BNB from the Binance BUIDl program was sent here) which can be viewed here:

If you would like to contribute to this wallet you can do so with this DApp interface:

Here is the community wallet:

0x588f82a66eE31E59B88114836D11e3d00b3A7916