# State of Astrolab - 2024

After engaging with our community members, we recognize the need to provide a detailed update on Astrolab's current status and the challenges we've faced.

Despite our best intentions to launch the protocol earlier, we've encountered hurdles in meeting our set milestones, leading to multiple delays in the launch.

We fully understand the frustration these delays have caused, especially for our investors, early supporters, and team members. This is particularly true in the context of what seems to be the onset of a bull market, which would be an ideal playfield for emerging protocols like ours.

*We hope that the following post will address most of your concerns and questions.*

## Some context

For those not yet familiar with me, I am JakeTheSlug, Astrolab co-founder and lead engineer.

We started working on the protocol in May 2022 with my fellow DeFi enthusiast, Yakitori.
Frustrated with excessive bridging and arbitraging between protocols, we envisioned Astrolab as a superior yield aggregation platform.
As such, we chose to address non-trivial aspects of DeFi:
- Design and implement cross-chain vaults, powered by LayerZero or an equivalent relayer network
- Bring 1inch-class liquidity aggregation on-chain for unmatched vault capital efficiency
- Integrate a wide range of protocols to scale returns while diversifying risk

Fast forward to today, we're now a team of five engineers, fuelled by a modest late-2022 pre-seed round, and a common vision: to scale DeFi.

With these constraints, we are able to innovate, and take on major aggregators that we can outscale, and outperform, all while shipping secure code.

Astrolab's cross-chain nature expands our addressable market beyond Ethereum. However, this alone introduces significant R&D overhead, a barrier even for well-funded projects.

### Quick Note - We All Want It Out

We want Astrolab to be out as much if not more than you all do, hence have put a lot of work into it for the past two years. Our vaults require rigorous hypothesis, security testing and on and off-chain.

None of these steps can be compromised under go-to-market assumptions that would (theoretically) help with our project image or valuation. We have throttled launch a handful of times leading to today, as the core team consensually agreed that parts of the application (either on or off-chain) required improvements and/or further testing to be production-ready.

Remember we are operating in a non-upgradeable, highly scrutinized (and attacked) environment that is not forgiving. Not towards individuals, even less towards protocols.

## 2023 Launch Pushbacks

Since deploying our firsts production-ready smart contracts and algorithms, I realize that my enthusiasm led to early announcements of imminent launches, often using phrases like "coming days" or "coming weeks.".
This enthusiasm paired with the team's optimism bias, resulted in very ambitious timelines.

While we faced challenges in meeting these timelines, leading to disappointment among our community and early investors, each step has been a valuable learning experience. It has taught us to calibrate our positive emotions to better cope with the complexities of what we do.

Among other major challenges, we underestimated the complexity and time that would go into:

- Integrating with cross-chain messaging protocols (that includes ensuring safe and asynchronous cross-chain accounting for our ERC4626 vaults), that back then were experimental and light on docs

- Developing our own distributed, low latency automation framework: Astrolab Botnet (neither of Tenderly Web3 Action, Gelato, or else would fit the bill back then)

- HR: besides being highly time-consuming, we struggled to hire (developers, designers..) with compatible skills, and vision, and have had important turnover at the scale of the organization

### Pushbacks & Challenges

Assessing the last 18 months of work and deliverables helped us identify the following elephants in the room:

- Excessive infra/design:
I have always wanted Astrolab to be scalable in every possible aspect - on-chain, by being capable of ingesting and egesting unforeseen liquidity without it affecting APYs or UX - and off-chain, by making sure that both the APIs and Botnet (automation infra) would scale on-demand as our user base grows. This led @scred and I to spend months building our Astrolab Botnet a scalable infra, too soon. Good thing, now it's here!

- Front-end experiments:
In our work on Astrolab's UI, we aimed high, aspiring to build a robust and feature-rich application. Our vision was to surpass Yearn front-end, incorporating comprehensive cross-chain analytics and advanced risk-reward metrics, inspired by the impressive but now retired Friktion front-end. We also spent significant time developing tooling for this UI, such as automated bug reporting and a very innovative slippage visualization and management component.

Late requirements analysis proved that the v1 of this UI, while technologically advanced, was too intricate and resource-intensive for our initial launch needs. Particularly, since our genesis strategies didn't require such sophisticated analytics. As a result, we've decided to put this on hold while making sure these components are modular enough to be compatible with our secondary UI.

- Tokenomics iterations:
Those here from the start remember Astrolab OG tokenomics: the DAO would accumulate $AURA to bribe an Astrolab-vaults dedicated Balancer metapool, hence boosting the yield for users depositing their tokens into this metapool after deposit. This mechanism could be automated, hence be transparent for users who you just see the increased APYs without having to deal with Balancer.

In order to bootstrap the metapool incentivization, we acquired $AURA OTC through the Aura Foundation. It could have played well on paper but was a risky move: we had borrowed USDC from a trusting VC to acquire this aura, used as loan collateral. The bear market and aura tokenomics led to a strong decrease in $AURA's token price, which not only reduced the bribing profitability but lost us the position to our creditor as margin requirements could not be met any longer.

This event helped us realize that no short-term liquidity incentivization model would be as strong of a tokenomics basis than the yield brought home by well-crafted strategies.

- A tad bit of drama:
Following the above debt settlement and for personal reasons, our co-founder Yakitori part ways with the team after we all attended EthCC 2023.

While Yakitori's departure, stemming from divergent visions, initially posed a challenge, it paradoxically unified us more than ever before. The transition necessitated changes, particularly with me taking over smart contracts (supported by @chart), while trusting Scred with the infra.

The addition of Seytu and Flow as full-stack developers not only ensured seamless project continuity but also cemented a sense of brotherhood within our team, making us stronger and more cohesive than before.

## Strategic Shift

Our recent restructuring prompted a review and testing of Yakitori's code. During our cross-chain vaults final mainnet testing in September 2023, external feedback highlighted two key areas:

- The complexity of our end-to-end strategy testing process would get in the way of productivity and mass deployment
- Our top-down focus, primarily on the cross-chain vault and infrastructure, had taken us far but overshadowed the essence of a successful yield aggregator: well-executed, high-yield strategies

After a long introspective pizza/beer night, we acknowledged these facts and initiated a strategic shift towards developing a much more robust smart-contract base for any strategy.

This would help us centralize all strategy accounting logic, serving as a singular, efficient vault that simplifies deployment of strategies at scale.

It's a cool take on ERC4626 genericization, check it out here 👉
[github.com/AstrolabDAO/strats](https://github.com/AstrolabDAO/strats/blob/main/src/abstract/StrategyV5.sol).

Concurrently, we aimed to design a new user-friendly UI, that all team members could build upon, including our recent recruits, @Seytu and @Flow.

We openly discussed this strategic shift with our peer protocols at Devcon Istanbul in November 2023, feeding on their feedbacks, and got to work there.

*Two months later, here we stand. This iteration has led us to significantly modify our codebase, necessitating a second audit. This time, the focus is not on cross-chain contracts, but on our yield primitives: StrategyV5 and peripherals.*

## Wen Launch Ser?

Since unveiling [Astrolab Swapper](https://github.com/AstrolabDAO/swapper) two months ago, we've taken a more reserved approach in communicating our progress. This decision, to keep the strategic shift and work under wraps, was made with the intention of focusing on impactful developments.

While we acknowledge that a more open line of communication might have been beneficial, our primary goal has been to boast delivery of meaningful milestones.

**What we're doing:**

- Strategies R&D:
- Automated Market Making: delta-neutral AMM on concentrated liquidity DEXs
- Hyperstaking: leveraged staking with automated margin maintenance
- Statistical Arbitrage: automated directionnal trading

This R&D is crutial to our yield scalability and diversification #RealYield.

- Cross-chain vaults genericization:
Our cross-chain vaults (Crates) will now dynamically use not only LayerZero, but Axellar and others depending on arbitrary factors (eg. cost, speed and availability)

- v1 Audit campaign preparation:
The team is reviewing and testing parts of v1 codebase, ahead of next week's audit campaign start

**What we're releasing:**

- Genesis Strategies - Money Markets MetaStables:
Multi-asset lending Strategies (targetting AAVE, Compound and forks stablecoin pools) will be the firsts available to our users. These strategies scale extremely well and currently help us test multi-pool and multi-protocol rebalancing.

- Lean UI:
We're excited to introduce a more streamlined and intuitive user interface.
It does not compromise on UX and features one-click, cross-chain strategy Zapping.

- AMOs (Algorithmic Market Operations):
AMOs deployed as Botnet keepers managing vault liquidity 24/7.
These routines ensure efficient upkeep and constant Strategy liquidity, even in the event of a bank run.

## Looking Ahead

This year is shaping up to be quite significant for our team, marked by a wave of opportunities, new ideas and partnerships. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported us so far, providing both encouragement and constructive feedback.

Special mention for our investors and advisors: your insights and support have been key to guiding our journey so far.

For any questions or enquiry, feel free to reach out on Discord, we’re there most of the time (CEST).

Let's steer that boat to the stars.

(📦,💫)

JakeTheSlug