Bright light in the bear market in Ithil
“DeFi is dying” — Every crypto influencer turned doom prophet’s favourite phrase du jour.
But is this true? Well, no more so than the price of one bitcoin reaching $100,000 during the previous bull cycle.
What we will concede, however, is that there are some very real issues with DeFi. In our previous article, we discussed some of these common problems, hurdles and frustrations with the space. We also teased our solution: Ithil, The Web3Wizard.
Today, we explore on a high level the fundamentals of Ithil. Let’s dive in.
What is Ithil, The Web3 Wizard?
Ithil is the first financial primitive protocol that allows you to get exposure to any new trend in Web3, be it metaverse, NFTs or DeFi.
We work our magic to provide boosted exposure to selected strategies through a simplified user interface.
(1) Boosted exposure
One of the core features of Ithil is providing undercollateralised leverage and loans. This effectively allows users to boost their exposure to our curated investment strategies, and amplify their returns.
We believe that capital efficiency is key to to any healthy financial ecosystem. Capital that is not being put to work is capital that is slowly (or rapidly, at current inflation levels) withering away.
(2) Curated strategies
While many different protocols and strategies exist, reliable, sustainable yields are hard to find.
We have seen an enormous proliferation of forks, yields farms and “experimental” protocols launching during the most recent bull cycle, often offering huge APYs in order to attract capital. The majority of these, however, ended up causing dramatic losses to all but a fraction of their users.
What’s more, the DeFi ecosystem is increasingly spreading out across a growing number of alternative layers (L1, L2). Some of these layers are home to fantastic (new) DeFi projects (Dopex on Arbitrum for example), but many of these projects do not reach a broader audience as a result of relative obscurity.
The same holds true for projects that pursue building long term quality products, rather than creating marketing hype (often through questionable influencers) and pumping up the token price or creating exit liquidity for extremely inflationary reward curves.
(3) Simplified User Interface
Right now, DeFi users wanting to compose (and regularly manage) a diversified portfolio must interact with different protocols across multiple blockchains and/or layers. This is a lot of work, and can be intimidating due to the different UIs and a steep learning curve.
While tools like zapper.fi or debank can help maintain an overview of your portfolio, they are much less useful for active management.
This is where we want to make a difference with Ithil. Our goal is to make DeFi accessible, to not just current but also future users. To this end, we have created a uniform, easy to use interface that we will keep improving through an iterative process.
This UI is also a tool to abstract away complexity from advanced strategies. Even the most complex flywheel strategies can be selected and executed with a few simple clicks, while all the hard work happens under the (pretty looking) hood.
Ultimately, we will provide our Users with high quality strategies through an interface that is inviting and feels intuitive to use.