Hermes DeFi - The Hermes Protocol Investment
After successful completion of 4/5 Harmony launch grant milestones, Hermes is seeking an additional investment from Harmony ($305,000) to fund the launch of Hermes Protocol, Harmony will receive HRMS tokens at a discounted market rate (15%), which they could use to provide additional liquidity or recover their initial investment.
As part of the Tokenomics of HERMES, we have set aside 6% of total tokens (1,800,000) for private sale. We currently are modeling a launch price of HERMES of $0.46 per token. We are seeking $305,000 in $ONE for this investment proposal.
Team Biographies and commitments
CEO, Roberto Quintero, has well-established connections within many aspects of the crypto community along with a business management degree at University of Porto. He manages all aspects of Hermes.
CMO, Austin Hovland, has experience with marketing strategy, data analytics, linux system administration, and a PhD in Bioinformatics from Cornell University. He is deeply involved in the Harmony community, the validator and RPC technical space, and researching DeFi strategies.
Two back end developers, Wendel and PestCtrl, have experience with DeFi 1.0/2.0, market lending, and are very familiar with Uniswap contracts. They are responsible for contract development, peer review, and platform security.
Two front end developers, Miguel and Marvin, who have built customized user interfaces 60 from the ground up, backed by their work in consolidated companies in Madrid and Berlin. Both have worked together flawlessly to design a functional, responsive, and beautiful UX for Hermes.
Graphic designer, Kami, is in charge of the graphics for social networks, internal documents, and website graphics. He is fluent in all Adobe software, illustration, and video production.
Communications Director, Aaron B, his expertise in data analysis and extensive connections with Harmony projects make him a perfect fit for this position. He has demonstrated great skill in organizing and motivating the Hermes community.
The team’s commitment is aligned with the values of both Harmony and Hermes, which are based on giving value back to the community with a quality / safe and decentralized product.
Current Market Equity
Hermes DeFi has a two-token system, $IRIS which is a governance and reward token, and $PLTS, which acts as a farming reward token and pre-sale for The Hermes Protocol. IRIS is listed on Coingecko, is fully emitted (1,000,000 tokens), and has a price of $0.98. PLTS circulating supply, market cap, and price can all be viewed directly from our website. It currently is still being emitted (2,718,00/3,000,000 tokens), has a price of $0.38, and has a market cap of $1,015,000. This means the combined market cap of Hermes DeFi is around 2M.
Product demos and technical roadmaps
An interactive (and fully functional) demo of our vaults, pools, farms, and bank is online at Hermes DeFi
Our roadmap is as follows:
Q1
PLTS Swap Mechanism
TraderJoe V2 Core DEX/AMM
IRIS Buyback/Redistribution of Platform Fees
Bonding as a system of Protocol Owned Liquidity
Dual Farms
New UI/UX for trading
Team Dox
Hermes Foundation (Charitable DAO)
Q2
Auto Compounding Vaults
Lending/Borrowing System
Zap + Migrator
Advanced Charting Features (TradingView)
Improved IRIS governance Strategies
Q3
Limit Orders
Cross-bridge Liquidity
IRIS Node
Order Book Visualizations
FIAT onramp integration
HERMES Tax Reporting
Trade History Report Generation
Q4
Leveraged Trading & Farming
NFT Staking
NFT Marketplace
Market and peer analysis / Market Strategy
The DeFi ecosystem in Harmony consists of a few major players, none of which match the expanded trading capabilities of major applications on Avalanche (Trader Joe), Fantom (Spooky Swap), or BSC (Pancake Swap). To put this into perspective, we are drawing from the excellent work of one of our community members, Valclereon, who did an extensive comparative analysis across these chains. Harmony has a much lower than expected annual volume/TVL, likely because there isn’t a platform that enables easy trading.
The Hermes Protocol will use a TraderJoe-V2 modified Uniswap framework as the core of our DEX/AMM. We will bring a competitive edge to our platform with low trading fees (0.2%), deep initial liquidity, no reward lockups, native charting and quantitative analysis tools, tax reporting, money market products, premiere partnerships on Harmony, and a UX that works for both new and experienced DeFi users. Hermes wants to bring a trader-first DEX application to attract significant volume and liquidity to Harmony. This facet of Harmony is underserved by gamified DeFi products or those who do not support and elevate the Harmony community. We will continue to develop new products (listed on our roadmap) and expand our team to pursue new opportunities when they arise to continue a truly powerful innovation cycle.
Finally, Hermes is committed to the education and onboarding of completely new members to DeFi. We have created a LearnToEarn DeFi onboarding system, which makes Hermes a perfect introduction to users unfamiliar with DeFi. In the future, this will expand to more detailed videos, helpful things like tooltips on our interfaces, and an ever-present community in Discord ready to answer any and all questions.
User reviews and analytics
Since our initial launch grant post on January 27th, we have seen continued community growth at an amazing rate. Over the past 28 days, our twitter has gathered 465,000 impressions, 203,000 profile visits, and 1,159 followers. We also recently became the second most influential project on Harmony in data-driven Twitter social analysis, even surpassing DeFi Kingdoms. Our discord server continues to grow at an incredible pace, up from to 2,775 members (+44% in 22 days). According to Dappradar, the Hermes staking contract ranks #9 in users (2.59K) on Harmony, with the highest rate of growth on Harmony (107.85%) over the past 30 days. All of this has been achieved through organic community growth with no paid marketing.
Hermes has also launched a number of services dedicated to helping the Harmony blockchain as a whole. This includes: Running a geo-routing and load-balanced RPC service as well as Austin running to be a governor of the RPC 2.0 DAO, a community wiki with 16 community-written education articles from the past week, and a validator node. In his time at ETHDenver, Austin has been a strong advocate for Harmony, and has proven to be a transparent and collaborative member of the ecosystem. This builds on top of our already strong history of establishing partnerships with well-known and respectable projects (Cosmic Universe, Crypto Royale, Tranquility City, and Harmonape). An investment into Hermes is an investment into the future success of Harmony itself.
Financials and token distribution schedules
The distribution of the HERMES token has been designed to return high yields to liquidity providers, support further development of Hermes Defi, and incentivize various community programs. Forty percent (all non-farming rewards) of HERMES will be minted at launch and stored in appropriately secured mutli-sig wallets under the control of KYC’d members of Hermes DeFi core leadership. The definitions of each category are as follows:
Farming Rewards (60%, 18,000,000 HERMES). Farming rewards are the majority of token emissions and represent rewards for participating in Farms, Pools, Vaults, or other DeFi applications that reward HERMES. The emissions schedule will run for two and a half years. We balanced our initial reward rate based upon leading exchanges (SpookySwap and TraderJoe), initial HERMES supply, and initial HERMES liquidity. Furthermore, we have scheduled small increases in APR on a quarterly release cycle to sync with new product launches.
Developer Fund (8%, 2,400,000 HERMES). The developer fund supports the growth of the Hermes development, management, and business expenses. Our developer allocations match the timeline of our farming emissions to ensure that we act in the best interest of the protocol at all times. As part of this distribution, the developer fund will be vested over the lifetime of emissions as follows:
- 20% (480K HERMES) Unlocked on launch
- 20% At 6 months
- 20% At 12 months
- 20% At 18 months
- 20% At 24 months
Ecosystem Fund (6%, 1,800,000 HERMES). Partnerships and supporting the growth of the Harmony ecosystem is core to Hermes’ mission. As such, we are reserving an allocation of HERMES to participate in partnership and promotional activities.
PLTS to HERMES Swap (6%, 1,800,000 HERMES). All finally circulating supply (about 2,350,000 PLTS) will be migrated to 1,800,000 HRMS, however the swap ratio will be different between Bank-locked and circulating / public PLTS. This transition is necessary due to the 3% transaction tax on the PLTS token.
Private Future Sales (6%, 1,800,000 HERMES). In the event that HERMES identifies an opportune fundraising partnership, we are reserving 6% of the HERMES supply for a fund-raising private sale. Until such a condition is met, these tokens will be held as part of the Hermes Treasury. These funds would be used for major expansions (ie. CEX listing)
Validator Boost (5%, 1,500,000 HERMES). As part of our ongoing effort to help secure and decentralize the Harmony network, we will continue to provide HERMES tokens as additional rewards for our validator smart contract staking system.
IRIS DAO (4%, 1,200,000 HERMES). The IRIS DAO represents ownership of the Hermes platform and will receive multiple types of incentives. Part of this includes governance voting of investment strategies (AlgoFi) to help bring stable returns to our investors from outside the Hermes platform.
Initial Liquidity (2%, 600,000 HERMES). To help build the liquidity of our platform and minimize volatility during the PLTS to HRMS transition, we will deploy 2% of total HERMES tokens as initial liquidity in a HRMS/ONE pair. At a launch price of $0.46, this would require $275,000 in ONE tokens ($150,000 provided by Hermes).
Community Fund (2%, 600,000 HERMES). To help build initiatives on DeFi education and the Hermes & Harmony community. This includes support for under-represented minor group outreach, DAO partnership and funding opportunities, and more.
The Hermes Foundation (1%, 300,000 HERMES). As part of our commitment to giving back to the communities our communities live in, we are dedicating these funds to the management of The Hermes Foundation. These funds may be donated directly or utilized to provide a sustainable revenue stream.
Feenomics
We also wanted to clearly communicate the expected fees for using The Hermes Protocol DEX. Overall, we wish to continue to offer services at lower cost to users across our entire platform. We will continue to offer low/no-fee services like vaults, zappers, and migrators to help enable easy onboarding for new investors to our platform.
Swap Fee
The swap fee for Hermes will be set at 0.2%. This is 33% cheaper than any other exchange on Harmony. From this swap fee, 85% will be returned to LP providers as trading fees. 15% of this fee will be used as ‘Platform fees’ that will be distributed as follows: 65% to IRIS buyback, 15% to development/operating expenses, and 20% of a flexible allocation the team will use to bolster support in whatever area they think would help platform growth the most.
Farming Fees
As we are no longer reliant on new deposits to fund development, our farms/pools/vaults will have no deposit fee. To help prevent flash/loan attacks and incentivize stable liquidity, we will implement a tiered withdrawal fee. The LP’s collected from these fees will be locked as protocol owned liquidity to help grow stable liquidity over time.
- Deposit and Withdraw in the same block: 15%
- Withdraw after 1 day: 1%
- Withdraw after 1 week: 0.2%
- Withdraw after 2 weeks: 0.05%
Technical review including audits
Our published contracts and code is publicly available at (Hermes Defi · GitHub). We are also willing to show Harmony the current repositories the team is working on if necessary as a sign of our transparency. Among other things, we require this funding for an audit of our contracts by a tier 1 auditor such as Certik. Our previous contract audits for the IRIS token was performed by Paladin (Hermes Defi – Paladin Blockchain Security). We were able to resolve 100% of the issues found, and the released code was totally clean. In addition, our team has stood the test of time in the rapidly moving crypto ecosystem. The initial liquidity for our IRIS token was added on the 12th of August, and our team has been working together for more than six months. In this time, we have become tight knit and work together with trust.
We look forward to working together in Harmony to bring DeFi to all.
-Hermes DeFi
Prepare to have your competitive edge crushed soon with various swaps acting at cheaper rates and or moving to even lower swap rates (incentivized by the user holding gov tokens for example)
