From 0 to 1: Kickstarting adoption with the dawn of Mars Hub

Delphi Labs’ team of ~50 builders has a core conviction: DeFi will render CeFi obsolete. To get there, the industry must have a full-stack DeFi product experience that looks and feels like CeFi while preserving the benefits of decentralization: non-custodial, transparent, trustless, resilient.

Enter Mars: a novel interchain credit protocol primitive facilitating non-custodial borrowing and lending for the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond. No longer tethered to a single chain, Mars’ new hub and outpost architecture will allow it to operate on any chain in the Cosmoverse. It will also enable a new primitive: the Rover.

Rovers will give their pilots DeFi superpowers to engage in virtually every activity they might encounter on a centralized exchange: spot trading, margin trading, lending and borrowing — all in a single decentralized credit account represented by a transferable NFT.

Originally launched on Terra, Mars successfully processed more than 1.5 million transactions before winding down after UST depegged. Now, after eight months of new engineering, audits and testing, Mars Hub is set to forge the genesis block on its own appchain.

In the coming weeks, Delphi Labs will propose a series of protocol upgrades, which are designed to enable adoption of the revamped Mars Protocol by the key stakeholders who actually run it–: i.e., end users on Mars outposts and Mars Hub stakers and validators. Specifically, Delphi Labs will propose the following to the wider Mars community:

• Mars Hub Staking Rewards: Allocate 9 million MARS from the community pool funds to reward Mars Hub stakers for providing security to Mars Hub for a period of 12 months.
• Enable the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) on Mars Hub: IBC will ensure: (1) MARS tokens can move freely throughout the Cosmos ecosystem (i.e., cross-chain); and (2) Mars Hub can receive protocol revenues from its outposts, as detailed in the Mars v2 Whitepaper.
• Osmosis LP Rewards: Allocate 750,000 MARS from the community pool funds to reward MARS-OSMO liquidity providers on the Osmosis Dex for a period of 1 month.
• Red Bank Deposit Rewards: Allocate MARS from the community pool funds to reward ATOM, OSMO and axlUSDC depositors in the Red Bank for 1 month.

As Mars Hub is an open network governed exclusively by MARS stakers, formal proposals will go live in the Mars Forums on or around January 24, 2023. Labs will outline the unique risks and potential rewards of each proposal, and we invite vigorous debate in the public forums. Pending any modifications after a public comment period, the proposals will then go to a formal on-chain vote.

Labs encourages all Martians to get involved in the process. A successful Mars Hub launch is critical to the success of the network, and the upcoming launch of Mars’ first outpost on Osmosis. There, users will be able to lend and borrow crypto assets via the Red Bank. Once the Red Bank is established on Osmosis, leveraged yield farming strategies (and later cross-collateralized rover credit accounts) are expected to be deployed.

The launch of Mars Hub represents a major milestone — not just for the Delphi Labs contributors who have been involved — but for the broader DeFi ecosystem. Explore Mars Hub’s launch plan here. Then, subscribe to Delphi Labs’ Twitter feed to get notified when the proposals go live, and join Labs in its quest to render CeFi obsolete.

This article is subject to and qualified by the Mars Disclaimers.