Tenderize

The Tender protocol does liquid staking and yield aggregation for web3 projects like Livepeer, The Graph Network, NuCypher, Polygon, ... . It provides a missing link between the booming world of DeFi and the nascent but still overlooked web3 space.

DeFi became popular with the rise of Yield farming, the act of supplying liquidity to receive token incentives. These strategies quickly became more complex and due to rising gas fees it quickly became a whale game. Until the advent of yield aggregators, automated on-chain strategies that would aggregate user deposits and yield farm on them.

An analogy can be drawn to the web3 space, where you can stake to receive yield. This process was very simple in the early bootstrapping days of networks as profitability and performance between node operators wasn't distinguishable until these decentralised web3 protocols actually started seeing usage. Now the complexity of staking and optimally allocating funds is quickly increasing as performance and earnings differences are quickly becoming visible. When you add the complexity of navigating the delegation markets on top of rising gas prices, funds management (some protocols pay out rewards in tokens other than the native token such as Livepeer and Keep network) and risk management (staked funds are locked) one can quickly see the benefit of a liquid staking yield aggregator.

As a result of the aforementioned complexities of staking (as well as other potential causes), capital has a hard time finding its way to the well performing nodes on the network. We believe that Tenderize as a community governed project allows to optimise this and strengthen the symbiotic relationship between capital providers (token holders) and node operators (hardware providers) for web3 networks.

'- First we built a custom ERC20 implementation for our "TenderTokens" the staking derivatives. It's a 1:1 representation of staked assets and has an elastic supply (the supply increases when staking rewards are earned by the tender protocol and decreases when slashing should occur). This tokenized derivative for stake allows users to collaterlize, trade or swap their staked assets without waiting periods.

• Then for each protocol we support we have built a contract that interacts directly on-chain with their staking contracts.

• To enable swapping between our "TenderTokens" derivatives and the underlying staked tokens we created a special BALANCER smart pool that allows anyone to swap or add liquidity but has an authorized contract that can resync the weights when staking rewards are earned so that the price remains the same and impermanent loss is avoided.

• To Incentivise providing liquidity to our BALANCER pool we created our own yield farming contract that takes the BALANCER pool tokens as stake and pays out TenderTokens to liquidity providers that are collected as a free from staking rewards.

• We built our front-end using usedapp from ethworks and react

• We built our own custom subgraph keeping track of performance and user data