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Welcome to xBank
The Non-custodial Liquidity Market Protocol on zkSync & soon on StarkNet
xBank is a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market protocol. xBank manages deposits for lenders and facilitates lending of the deposited asset for borrowers while conducting appropriate risk management to protect the lenders from risks of illiquidity and insolvency. The lenders earn passive interest income from the algorithmically derived interest rate while the borrowers take out a loan of the supplied assets in an overcollateralized & perpetual manner by paying a floating interest rate as determined by the supply and demand for the asset.
As a decentralized protocol, xBank’s ledger is publicly-verifiable, ensuring transparency for all key stakeholders.
xBank Money Market will features the following functionalities:
- Lend: passively earn interest with ability to use deposited asset as collateral for borrowing
- Borrow: borrow asset in an over-collateralized manner
- Cross-margin: share margin balances between deposited assets under the same account
- Toggling Collateral On/Off: specify whether a user wanted the deposited assets to be counted as collateral. While off, assets would still continue to earn yields, but will not be counted towards your borrowing power.
Advanced users can also participate as liquidators to earn bounty rewards when they successfully liquidate accounts with high risk positions as determined by the parameters set forth by the protocol.
The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) sector has grown exponentially in the last several years, especially on Ethereum, the primary chain for DeFi, whose TVL has grown to ~US$121Bn, making up roughly 60% of all value within in the DeFi industry (as of 02/2022).
However, albeit its strong growth, one of the key issues that many DeFi users face today is accessibility. As more users join the world of DeFi, the network has become congested, increasing the gas fees and transaction time in the process, making it inaccessible to the general population.
One of DeFi's key ethos is that it should provide access to financial opportunities to those who are unbanked. However, with such an expensive financial barrier from gas fees, it seems as if only those who are financially strong are able to afford to participate in financial opportunities on Ethereum. In other words, Ethereum is for the whales, not the financially weak like the underbanked or unbanked.
At xBank, we want to provide a liquidity platform that provides accessible financial opportunities to all, a platform where anyone, regardless of their financial strength, can participate in. This has led us to the decision to launch xBank, a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market that will be accessible to all regardless of their financial strength.
As mentioned in the section above, we believe expensive gas fee is one of the biggest barrier towards achieving accessibility to financial opportunities in DeFi. Many alternate L1s are able to offer lower gas price to users, but many times, that come at the expense of security and decentralization.
As a firm believer in the ZK-Rollup Technology, we believe that StarkNet & zkSync are best-positioned to tackle this accessibility problem given its ability to optimize for both low transaction fee and high degree of security. Below, we highlight the four primary reasons for choosing StarkNet & zkSync to be the home base for xBank:
- 1.Usability: StarkNet and zkSync use the zkRollup technology which compresses transactions and send the them back to Ethereum (L1) for validation, allowing for fast interoperability between L1<>L2 interaction and thereby significantly shortening the confirmation time.
- 2.Performance: StarkNet & zkSync are up to 20x cheaper than other L1 blockchains, making it one of the most, if not the most, gas efficient L2 solutions due to its efficient use of L1 call data space. With that said, both blockchains are also massively scalable.
- 3.Decentralization: Although StarkNet and zkSync are much faster and cheaper than other L1’s, it does not sacrifice security and still possesses the same degree of decentralization as Ethereum.
- 4.Support System: StarkWare, the team behind StarkNet, and Matter Labs, the team behind zkSync, both are backed by multiple prominent VCs and crypto-heavyweights like the Ethereum Foundation, Sequoia Capital, and Dragonfly.
We want to dedicate this section to our supporters who made the development of xBank possible. We would like to especially express our gratitude towards StarkWare who has provided us with invaluable guidance and a grant to support xBank’s early development efforts.
Last modified 4d ago