Fuse’s 2021 Road Map

The progress witnessed across the DeFi sector in 2020 was truly inspiring. It further solidified our belief that the future of money is open-source and non-custodial. We remain committed to paving the way for real-world adoption whilst simultaneously improving the lives of everyday people. Our overarching strategy for achieving this goal remains the same; empower disruptors by providing them with the tools and infrastructure needed to build new economic models and change the way value is exchanged tomorrow.

2020 in Review

Here are just a few of the many things we are proud to have achieved in just over a year.

• September 2019 — Fuse Network’s EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)-compatible blockchain network is born. This launch, which happened comparatively early in the project’s conception when compared to other blockchain projects, was necessary in order to begin building user-facing products and onboard early projects to validate the idea from the get-go. Pushing early MVPs is a core theme of Fuse’s product development philosophy.
• September 2019 — Valuable early investors join the mission as part of our seed round of $750K including Collider Ventures, Faculty Capital, TechMeetsTrader, Innovion, and WolfEdge Capital.
• January 2020 — Development begins on both the Studio and the Core Wallet (White Label Wallet). The ability to mint ERC-20 tokens with zero coding skills and launch a personalized wallet to begin onboarding users immediately was well received by our early supporters.
• May 2020 — Studio usage takes off with an average of 50 communities created per month during the second half of the year. Wallet creations also skyrocketed with over 100K new addresses created on the network over the course of the year.
• June 2020 — We witness a huge influx of projects beginning to build on Fuse including PayWise, GoodDollar, Wikibank, and Peepl.
• July 2020 — Private FUSE token liquidity round begins leading straight onto the public token release, concluding in October and raising a total of over $1.8 million.
• October 2020 — Uniswap liquidity programs are launched, growing to over $200K, in part thanks to various different LP Reward campaigns that were launched in Q4. Fuse Studio achieves the number #2 spot on Product Hunt.
• November 2020 — Mystic Valley Festival takes place in Thailand, integrating Fuse as the exclusive PoS system, processing over $1 million in payments during the 3-day event.
• November 2020 — FuseSwap is officially launched, experiencing steady consistent growth, now with close to $100K in liquidity and 10 main trading pairs.

A lot was learned during our first year whilst liaising with projects and building out our product suite. We quickly realized that Fuse is much more than just a “venture studio”. Instead, Fuse is developing into a melting pot that brings together builders, developers, company executives, non-profits, content creators, enthusiasts, and many more to create an ecosystem of change-makers looking to create new economic models and efficient payment systems that fundamentally change the way money is perceived.

We have also realized just how important fiat currencies are for projects building on Fuse. Stablecoins and other forms of on-chain fiat currencies have always been an important part of our strategy but we needed to ramp up our efforts in this area to ensure that we are able to serve people in different parts of the world and make on/off ramping as smooth as possible. This explains highly-strategic partnerships with providers such as Monerium and Ramp.

Finally, Total Value Locked (TVL) on the Fuse Network will be a big indicator of success in the months and years ahead. This means value being brought over from Ethereum, on ramped straight to Fuse Network from legacy rails, and, of course, being created by the amazing communities that build with us.

2021 Roadmap

We are already 3 weeks into 2021 and the momentum gained so far shows no signs of slowing.

We are hyper-focused on developing products that our users find beneficial and are keen to share with their friends and acquaintances. Building out strong analytics tools and processes also ensures that we have data available in a way that is insightful and actionable.

The development items below are intended to give readers a high-level overview of what the product team is working on. However, although timelines and commitments may be made now on certain items, more accurate estimations on many of the below items will be published throughout the year. We are operating in a fast-moving industry in which the technological landscape is constantly evolving. In order to remain competitive, it is important for us to remain agile. Providing that the vision and guiding principles remain intact, we will be giving ourselves the best possible chance of success.

Products and Protocols

Fuse Network 2.0

• A discussion is currently taking place on Fuse Forum about making changes that could impact monetary policy. Inspired by Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, the conversation revolves around burning the network fees in order to reduce inflation. Another idea is to reduce the yearly block reward allocation which is currently set at a yearly inflation rate of 5% distributed between all validators.
• A proposal has been posted to the forum to increase fees on the network which were initially set very low. This is seen as a necessary upgrade by the majority of validators and is likely to be accepted as it still keeps fees under the target rate of $0.01.
• We currently have healthy activity on the network, with increasing transactional flow, and have not to date experienced any congestion issues. Nonetheless, we do anticipate having to tackle this issue at some point in the future and research has begun in order to look at how solutions like ZK roll-ups could be used. The benefit of layer 2 scaling solutions is that they not only improve throughput but they also provide improved privacy and interoperability with other layer 2 integrations.
• Fuse governance — In addition to the validator governance system which dictates how the network functions including consensus and infrastructure, we plan to implement token holder-based voting to further widen decision-making on aspects like token allocation, grants, and product development. UI’s will be implemented for both of these, with validator consensus already being voted on but without a user-friendly interface for the moment.

Studio

• “Core Wallet” improvements — the interface on the wallet used by Studio users to onboard early community members can be confusing for some as they see different communities and different balances. UI improvements are being made to the open-source repository of the wallet which has been forked by multiple teams. The aim is to provide a friendlier user experience and make the wallet more customizable.
• We are introducing more anti-Sybil functionalities for communities that provide joining bonuses. There can be an incentive for users to create multiple wallets/accounts and collect bonuses. A phone number is currently needed to generate a wallet but other solutions are scheduled for release in Q1.
• Funder balance integration — This will allow operators to fund and manage transactions sent by their community members.
• Multi-admin communities — Adding the ability for more than one administrator to manage communities and their assets using multi-sig.
• Community leaderboard — Allowing public access to key data about the different communities built on Fuse. In the short term, many of these will be available on Dapp.com which will integrate Fuse Network as a fully tracked blockchain in February.
• Better payment API’s — This will allow for “Stripe-like” functionality for teams implementing payments on Fuse.
• We’re also researching options for integrating a marketplace into the Studio. This has been requested by a large number of project leaders and is therefore an important part of our roadmap.

FuseSwap

• FuseSwap for mobile — Fuse’s native DEX integrated into the Core Wallet.
• Decentralizing governance — Protocol change decisions are currently made by the core Fuse team. As trading activity grows on the platform, users and liquidity providers gain a more significant stake in its success. We are researching various voting models to make governance more inclusive and potentially move to full decentralization.
• More liquidity provider incentive programs will be launched over the coming weeks. Users of FuseSwap are encouraged to make requests on Upvoty for token listings and features so that we can study the feasibility and reach out, where necessary, to the appropriate projects.

FuseX

• This is an early-stage concept designed to further increase FUSE token sink.
• Extensive research around the solutions that we plan to launch as part of the FuseX product suite is already underway.
• These include:
• Native Fuse Network stable coins — FuseDollar, FuseEuro & FusePound.
• An asset-backed token issuance tool that combines functionalities in the Studio and FuseSwap, allowing for immediate price discovery for projects launched on the platform.
• Brand new AMM functionality that increases the value of a community token as more payments are made by said community.

Consumer Wallet

Finally, there has been some discussion around the idea of launching a consumer-facing mobile wallet focused on enabling people and businesses all over the world to transact using suitable forms of crypto — predominantly stable coins. We acknowledge that the wallet market is highly competitive and devoting resources to developing a product would veer away from our key strategy of building products for a business audience.

Nonetheless, we see a huge opportunity for our technology stack to be leveraged to provide much-needed capabilities (notably fast, cheap transactions) to the growing number of people adopting open-source financial systems globally. It is also a great opportunity for the team at Fuse to “eat its own dog food” by showing how Fuse’s technology stack can be used in the real world. More detail on this concept to come as it develops.

Ecosystem Development and Partnerships

Between the Studio which is focussed on payment-oriented community creation, FuseSwap which is focussed on decentralized asset exchange, FuseX which is focussed on asset-backed decentralized financial instruments, and the underlying blockchain network which supports everything, Fuse boasts a wide-ranging technology stack. This means that we also have a really broad community to serve including general project supporters, business users, traders, stakers, and developers.

A key undertaking that all of these stakeholders will benefit from is increasing liquidity across assets on the platform. Liquidity begets liquidity by improving transactional flow and creating better opportunities for business users to serve their communities. It also reduces price slippage on FuseSwap and improves the incentives for token holders to delegate to stakers and receive rewards.

Multiple initiatives are being put in place to tackle challenges around liquidity, including launching more attractive liquidity provider incentives, partnering with existing projects to move portions of liquidity from Ethereum to Fuse, and providing better on-ramp solutions straight to Fuse Network.

Partnerships and integrations that ensure connectivity and coherence with the rest of the DeFi ecosystem on Ethereum and other layer 1s are also a priority. These include price feed oracles that allow for improved AMM functionality in FuseSwap, fixed transaction fee targeting on the network, and proof of reserves for FuseX’s asset-backed stable coin products.

Other ecosystem development and partnership initiatives include on-chain voting systems, Dapp exploration and tracking (a partnership was recently agreed with Dapp.com to make Fuse the 21st blockchain tracked on their platform), an ambassador program for dedicated community members who wish to play a bigger role in the project’s success, and Gitcoin bounties.

Growth and Adoption

Fuse is attracting interest and adoption from all corners of the globe. The UK, Spain, and the US are examples of highly-developed economies that have found utility in building on top of Fuse with projects like WikiBank and Peepl, not to mention GoodDollar’s UBI project which is truly global and has over 40,000 daily active users. However, we have also seen significant interest and adoption in Subsaharan Africa, the Caribbean, South East Asia, and South America. These include projects like E-Sol the Peruvian stable coin and CuraDAI for payments and community-led social impact initiatives on the Island of Curacao. These are strategically important regions that will be subject to increased focus from the team throughout the year.

We have a consistent pipeline of projects seeking to launch tokens, build payment communities, create cutting-edge economic models and migrate tokens, and users from Ethereum to Fuse’s scalable network. A big part of our focus is ensuring that these projects obtain not only the technical help they need to build out features and capabilities but also assisting with ideation and conceptualization. We are also working on initiatives to improve the flow of communication between projects to create a more serendipitous environment of discovery and invention.

We remain predominantly focused on non-crypto-native audiences that wish to take advantage of user-friendly tools that make blockchain technology accessible. It is nonetheless paramount that Fuse is presented in a way that ensures that the crypto and DeFi ecosystem is aware of the considerable progress we are making in bringing about real-world adoption as it helps solidify our image and position as an important institution and further catapults our growth trajectory. We, therefore, continue to work closely with leading media organizations, aggregators, data providers, and event organizers.

Finally, a top priority over the coming months is for the website to evolve as it no longer reflects the current state of Fuse.

We would like to thank our community for its continued support and encourage you to get in contact with any feedback or ideas. Team members can be found in our Telegram group or via email at team@fuse.io

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Thanks to Isaac Rodgin and Mark Smargon