The theme for Act III is “Decentralisation” and this past month, we’ve taken our first big strides towards our goal of transforming KeeperDAO into a self-sustaining, decentralised protocol. The most visible sign of this was, of course, the release of the first major software update driven by community contributors. But there have also been big developments for our upcoming decentralised governance and KeeperDAO Labs, which will be the keys for continuing our transition into a community-driven, decentralised organisation.

July will be filled with product releases and transformational organisational change. Below, we’ll touch on the status of Hiding Vaults and our Compound wrapper, share the governance transition roadmap, a recap of our application UI updates, as well as new developments for partner rewards and KeeperDAO documentation.

Let’s get right into it!

Community in June

• KeeperDAO’s Joey Zacherl on the panel of MEV re-distribution game regarding application-level MEV solutions. https://youtu.be/s3nACF7uVZw?t=24254
• KeeperDAO mentioned during How to re-design your defi protocol around MEV? by Tom Schmidt (Dragonfly Capital) https://youtu.be/s3nACF7uVZw?t=20880
• Congratulations to the two winners of our first developer challenge, ramenforbreakfast#5211 and exeggcute ♜#9809, for being the first to complete a prototype kAave smart contract. Both winners received a reward in ROOK and an interview for a chance to join the core team. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Smart Contract Upgrades

Hiding Vault revision

We took some more time with the kCompound product in June, redesigning the smart contract framework, improving gas efficiency and allowing additional modules to be added seamlessly to support future lending protocols. Re-dubbed a “Hiding Vault,” with kCompound being now just the contract providing the Compound wrapper, we launched a developer challenge to get started on a kAave, and deployed the “Hiding Vault” framework to mainnet.

Liquidity Pool upgrade

We redesigned the Liquidity Pool smart contract to be more modular and extensible in the future. LiquidityPoolV4 was deployed to mainnet and an automatic migration of existing LiquidityPool funds was performed without issue.

Hiding Vaults

KeeperDAO’s borrowing product is at the finish line, with only a few last issues remaining to be closed. The day before our planned launch, internal tests discovered a key issue with the front-end application’s implementation of the smart contract’s migration of loan data in the Hiding Vault. This, along with some minor bug fixes to the UI that still need to be completed, led us to delay the release, a decision we immediately shared via Discord.

We know we have missed a few deadlines here, and it’s time to learn from our mistakes. We’re using our resources to solidify the expansion of our team and add the horsepower needed to drive KeeperDAO forward. We’re designing better processes that will let our work become more transparent, and will always continue communicating developments as soon as we learn about them.

We’re working hard on the few remaining details, and as soon as they are ironed out, we will be going live. As soon as we do, new borrowers can open Hiding Vaults, and existing Compound borrowers can migrate their positions here. Any active loan will earn ROOK, while also continuing to earn Compound’s APY and COMP distribution from both the collateral and loan, with the ability to claim it right in our app.

Updated Application UI

We received a ton of community feedback that you wanted a more aesthetic, responsive, modern, and insightful UI. As you’ve probably seen by now, some of our newest contributors, Pai-Sho, Rama, and Watts, have delivered!

With the main pages of the app update complete, we can move to add much-requested features including more metrics and better order visibility in the coming weeks. We’ll also be continuously rolling out minor bug fixes, UI improvements, and patches to address other user feedback throughout July.

If you haven’t seen it yet, have a look!

Partner Rewards

The Partner Rewards system for the Hiding Game is now live for protocols that integrate with the KeeperDAO Hiding Game!

Registered partners receive 5% of the filled order’s ROOK reward based on the amount of arbitrage captured by a keeper. The remaining 95% goes to the user. This incentivizes partners to route orders through the Hiding Book by allowing them to generate revenue from the integration, while also helping onboard more users and more liquidity to the KeeperDAO ecosystem.

Current users of the native Hiding Game app at https://app.keeperdao.com/trade will continue to receive 100% of rewards, and partners may opt-out by not providing a partner address, in which case their users will continue to receive 100% of the reward for their trades. Partners may use a private key based Ethereum address or a smart contract as their partner address. If using a smart contract, make sure you can withdraw/transfer the ROOK tokens from the contract.

For more, see the Partner rewards integration guide for details on how to get partner rewards for your Hiding Book integration.

Partner and Developer Relations Manager

As part of our increasing focus on partners and integrations, we’re also looking to hire a part-time Partner and Developer Relations role. The role will be focused on onboarding partners into the KeeperDAO ecosystem, and include a number of responsibilities and opportunities, plus the chance to work closely with KeeperDAO as well as many other exciting protocols in the DeFi space. Please reach out to lapras ♜♜♜#8792 on Discord if you are interested!

Updated FAQ

We have finished up a comprehensive FAQ (https://bit.ly/KeeperDAOfaqs) overhaul, which is now live on Discord. It provides much additional documentation for users, Keepers, and other stakeholders in advance of more comprehensive technical documentation which is now being prepared.

Decentralised Governance

During June, we finalized work on the KeeperDAO decentralised governance framework, and mapped out a process for the governance rollout. This is an important moment for the DAO, which marks the beginning of an exciting new era full of milestones and collaboration. This is something we’ve been excited about for a long time.

We think governance can do more than just give stakeholders a voice in how their ecosystem is being developed. KeeperDAO is a revenue-generating protocol building products on the cutting edge of DeFi. Like everything else we do, we want governance to be something that leaves the DAO more competitive than it was before.

Our proposed framework takes what works best about existing, battle-tested approaches to DAO governance and adds new ideas that we think will turbocharge growth and concentrate expertise to ensure that the best ideas and people continually accrue to KeeperDAO.

In the coming days, we are going to begin introducing this system to you, and open a DAO-wide dialogue that will culminate in the publication of a final version of the framework, along with the first proposals and votes.

Coordination Game

We have reached Milestone 1 of our Coordinator’s MVP, where the Coordinator can communicate with Keepers and various markets and manage their interactions. We are in the process of onboarding a few select Keepers to participate in the first wave of beta testing. More will be revealed as we move closer to launch.

Looking to July and beyond

We have a lot in the docket for July. You can expect advancements in core technology (see: The Coordination Game), our products (see: Improved web interfaces and more borrowing protocols with out Hiding Vault NFTs), our team (see: KeeperDAO Labs), and the DAO itself (decentralised governance), as well as other projects and developments that will continue to support and grow the KeeperDAO ecosystem. We look forward to rolling these out and sharing them with you!