Fantom Ecosystem Spotlight – Orkan by Strudel DAO
In the Fantom ecosystem, Orkan fills a very particular niche, which is offering users high-yield DeFi opportunities that are backed by wrapped Bitcoin and Bitcoin derivatives. More than this they’re moving now to offer a stablecoin backed by BTC reserves.
In German, “Orkan” means hurricane or very strong wind. Given how quickly this team has moved since launch earlier this year, we’d say the name fits pretty well.
1. What is Orkan?
The ORKAN token is the Bitcoin-backed reserve currency of our protocol. It represents fractional ownership of the treasury, which consists of wrapped Bitcoin tokens like wBTC and vBTC.
2. How do you explain Orkan to a DeFi novice?
Orkan in short: Take Bitcoins, lock them in a vault, then distribute tokens that represent pieces of ownership of that vault.
But wait there’s more! You can stake those fractional BTC-treasury ownership tokens (ORKAN) back into the protocol for auto-compounding interest. It auto-compounds every block, which is why the interest rate gets so high.
You can also bond assets to the treasury to increase the value of Orkan’s treasury. Bond is an old starchy word, but is a great way to get into the thing we made. Usually, you get additional ORKAN by bonding assets, check the bond page for the premiums we’re offering on assets like FTM.
3. Can you give us a rundown of what the protocol offers?
Bitcoin-backed, meta-governance, reserve currency. The ability to have the strength of time-tested wrapped BTC protocols held in a protocol-owned treasury, fractionally owned by ORKAN token holders.
I’ll cut the jargon; this protocol offers an incentive for people to bond wBTC, vBTC, and ORKAN-FTM LPs to the protocol’s treasury. When you “bond” the protocol’s desired assets, it mints ORKAN tokens to you, usually at a premium ‒ you get more than the value of the tokens you bonded. Vesting period ranges from 4 days (common) to 30 days (super bonders).
After bonding, there is the ability to earn interest in your newly minted ORKAN, and this kind of staking doesn’t interfere with your ability to vote. You can vote for the protocol to dissolve if you wanted, and you would be sent your percentage portion of the treasury.
Seeing as how that is the basis for how your token derives ownership value, it seems like a silly thing to do; it would be better to bond assets, stake returned ORKAN, and vote on future asset additions to the treasury. The larger the treasury grows, the more stable your investment gets, the more valuable your vote becomes.
4. What are the team members’ backgrounds?
The team is made up of individuals from multiple countries across Europe, South America, and North America. Their backgrounds are in healthcare, finance, and technology.
5. How did you learn about Fantom?
Fantom has always been on our radar since Andre developed interest in it. Technologically speaking it’s quite accommodating and handles L1 traffic quite well. We liked the distinct lack of VC funding and commitment of strong developers. If the question is *how* specifically, did we learn about Fantom? By reading the developer docs.
6. Why did you decide to integrate Fantom?
This is a great question. Originally we developed a completely decentralized trustless Bitcoin bridge from the Bitcoin blockchain to the Ethereum ecosystem. Yield farms, though great, tend to have the downside of being rather gas-intensive which can make it less inclusive of smaller participants.
We started down the road of moving to a different L1 to accommodate that and went with the chain we thought had the better financial and technical foundations ‒ Fantom Opera.
7. How did the Fantom community receive Orkan?
Honestly, it was a slow uptake. We did come into the chain with some legitimacy via a seed investor, Information Token DAO, which helped a lot. The model of a OHM style protocol was also helpful as people had seen them be successful on mainnet.
Once we got into SpiritSwap’s Boosted Farms, there was a ton of interest, and rather than spend money on marketing we started pushing on-chain bribes and setting a track record of paying, which helped grow the protocol quite nicely. Many more users have been added since, even in the midst of market turmoil.
Beefy and Ola maintain partnerships with us as well.
8. What’s in the pipeline?
This is one of those questions you get a lot as a team. It’s tricky because what people want is new and exciting stuff every second. What we want to do is build a well-foundationed currency that extends the strength of Bitcoin with the mobility and utility of EVMs.
We want to grow to a point where the protocol owns sizable BTC reserves so that when we do expand to include more assets, we do so securely with our investors’ full confidence.
Being a metagovernance protocol, the next step after we hit a threshold for wBTC and vBTC in the treasury is to offer bonds for as much Spirit and LQDRx as possible.
Simply put: expansion.
9. What advice can you share with developers thinking of building on Fantom?
Strong recommendation. If/when you do get here though, recognize that the users are very intelligent and will grill you about your tech. There are a lot of collectives on here that steer a fair bit of liquidity and they are well educated on investments and on-chain analytics. Don’t expect adoption overnight. Plan in advance and be well documented for them to review.
10. Is there anything we didn’t ask, and that you’d like to share?
One thing that we’re really excited about is the launch of our stablecoin MitiCushqui (M), which is a predominantly BTC-backed stablecoin on Fantom.
We’re very communicative on our Discord/Telegram for any questions that the Fantom community might have, and look forward to being questioned about the finer details of our protocol.
Engage with Orkan Finance
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