Thala 2023 Year End Review

All updates and achievements throughout the year and what’s next for 2024

What a year it has been for us! From launching our v1 and THL on the mainnet to becoming the #1 protocol on Aptos to launching LSTs, we have been busy shipping throughout. It’s time to take a step back and reflect upon what we have achieved in these remarkable 12 months and what lies ahead for us.

To keep it simple, we will divide our annual updates into three parts:

1. Thala v1 and THL Launch
2. Thala v2 and Beyond
3. Ecosystem Initiatives

Thala v1:

We started our year by building Thala v1, which focused on three core products to form the strong pillars of Thala:

1. Move Dollar ($MOD) — a decentralized, over-collateralized stablecoin that vault depositors can borrow against using whitelisted collateral.
2. ThalaSwap — a rebalancing AMM featuring stable pools, weighted pools, and liquidity bootstrapping pools with permissionless, highly customizable deployment.
3. ThalaLaunch — a token launchpad that leverages ThalaSwap’s liquidity bootstrapping pools (LBPs) to enable equitable distribution and effective price discovery.

To decentralize the protocol from Day 1, we decided to launch $THL, the governance token, at the Thala platform launch.

Thala Launch — THL Token Generation

At the start of April, we had our historic moment with the successful launch of Thala’s governance token, $THL, via Thala Launch’s liquidity bootstrapping pool, where THL was paired with LayerZero’s zUSDC. Read our original post on our tokenomics and vision to learn more.

Furthermore, we shipped several important updates to THL tokenomics throughout the year:

1. THL emission rewards for liquidity pools to bootstrap initial liquidity.
2. A vote-escrow token (veTHL) mechanism, where veTHL is acquired by locking THL or THL-MOD liquidity pool tokens. Voting power is calculated as a function of the user’s deposit value and duration. This ensures that long-term aligned token holders are rewarded and value capture is provided at the protocol level.
3. In the first step to transition to more sustainable liquidity mining, THL emissions were reduced by 10%, effective from August 21st, 2023

Thalaswap — Aptos’ Liquidity Layer:

We launched Thala v1 on the testnet in February with our two core products: Move Dollar CDP vaults and ThalaSwap. It was a huge success, attracting over 55,000 users to explore the testnet.

After rigorous testing on the testnet and multiple audits, we went live on the mainnet following the successful launch of $THL. In this phase, users could deposit supported collateral types to borrow $MOD, provide liquidity in ThalaSwap pools, and more. We seeded liquidity for the following pairs: $THL-$MOD, $APT-$MOD, and $MOD-$zUSDC. In just 24 hours since the mainnet launch, Thala had already become the largest native protocol on Aptos, with $12 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) and $3 million in trading volume. In less than a week, Thala amassed over $24 million TVL, solidifying its status as the largest protocol on Aptos!

To foster greater ecosystem integrations, we announced a partnership with Hippo, the aggregation layer for Aptos, and an integration with MSafe, the multi-sig wallet designed for treasury management on Aptos.

MOD — The Aptos Native Stablecoin

As the first-ever decentralized, over-collateralized Move-based stablecoin, we enabled depositors to borrow MOD against their deposited, whitelisted collateral.

To further ensure the stability of the pool, we launched the Thala Stability Pool. Here, users can easily deposit MOD, withdraw from the stability pool, earn yield, and access liquidation history.

Thala v2:

Since our launch of v1 earlier in April, Thala has continued to grow and evolve — shipping numerous features and updates, strengthening the existing product suite, and introducing new protocol partnerships. This has helped us become the largest native protocol on Aptos, with a peak TVL of $30M and $50M in trading volume. In July, we unveiled Thala v2 to further strengthen our protocol and position ourselves as the leading player in growing the Aptos ecosystem. Thala v2 was aimed at making several improvements to the protocol, which include enhanced tokenomics, the PSM feature, DAO governance, and more.

MOD PSM — Enhancing the Stability of MOD

In order to facilitate recursive strategies and further strengthen Move Dollar’s peg, we introduced the Peg Stability Module (PSM). These are effectively interest-free vaults that enable users to swap 1-to-1 between MOD and whitelisted stablecoins for fewer fees

Tech Improvements: Enhancing Thala’s Resilience

In our v2, we also rolled out certain technical improvements, including:

1. UI: Revamped stability, analytics, and swap pages. Added pagination support for liquidations, historical swaps, and more detailed data on the UI.
2. Gas Optimizations: Reduced gas costs for CDP-related operations by 50%.

Cross-chain — The bridges to Aptos

1. Bridge Integrations: As the front page of Aptos DeFi, we integrated the top two bridges — LayerZero and Wormhole. This enabled users to bridge assets efficiently without leaving the Thala app’s interface.
2. Going Omnichain: Earlier this year, we announced our partnership with LayerZero Labs, integrating Move Dollar (MOD) and the Thala governance token (THL) as omnichain fungible tokens (OFTs). This integration facilitates seamless multi-chain connectivity.

Liquid Staking — APT Staking

One of the year’s biggest releases was the Thala Liquid Staking launch in November. This launch allows anyone to stake their APT and enjoy high yields, unlocking liquidity and leverage for broader DeFi applications. Thala’s liquid staking derivative follows a two-token model, including thAPT and sthAPT. thAPT is a non-rebasing deposit receipt, pegged to APT at a 1:1 ratio, while sthAPT is a rebasing deposit receipt that grows as validator rewards accrue over time.

We also announced our LST’s integration with MSafe, allowing treasuries to directly stake from the MSafe interface.

For a recap of all the products we’ve shipped this year, take a look at this ecosystem map! 🚢 🙂

Ecosystem Initiatives:

As the leading protocol on Aptos, our aim is to significantly grow the Aptos ecosystem and ensure that all teams on Aptos ultimately succeed. To support this mission, we have launched numerous initiatives in addition to our core product:

Thala OSS — Aptos Dev tooling:

One of Thala’s core principles is to build, publish, and maintain open-source software (OSS). Through OSS, we aim to advance the development of the Move language, fostering greater developer adoption and enabling more applications to be built on top of Move Dollar and ThalaSwap. To achieve this, we have developed:

1. Thala Run — Analogous to Etherscan’s Write Contract, but for Aptos, this enables transactions to be included directly in the URL.
2. Thala Faucet — A platform to claim significant sums of testnet BTC, ETH, USDC, etc., on Aptos for development purposes.
3. Thala FixedPoint64 — A Precise FixedPoint64 Math Library that allows more granular calculations and accurate logarithmic and exponential calculations.

Later this year, we also contributed to:

1. Aptos Labs Explorer — To improve the developer/user experience on Aptos, we helped redesign the account modules page to include three new features:
2. Code: This feature allows users to read module source code seamlessly from the browser.
3. Run: It enables users to execute transactions directly via the explorer.
4. View: Users can execute the view function API.
5. Surf, the TypeScript Library: We released Surf, a type-safe TypeScript library that leverages React Hooks for Aptos. It addresses key issues by providing instant static type inference without requiring a code generation process.

Community Initiatives:

1. Thala Foundry: In collaboration with the Aptos Foundation, we introduced the Thala Foundry, a DeFi-centric incubator designed to grow the Aptos ecosystem, backed by an initial fund of $1 million.
2. Thala was launched on OKX Wallet, enabling millions of users to seamlessly access Thala’s suite of products. This includes opening new vaults and swapping assets, among other features.

https://x.com/okxweb3/status/1733316810026459344?s=20

Security and Analytics:

Security is our topmost priority, and all our codebases have been audited by Ottersec, the leading audit firm. Additionally, some of our codebases have been also audited by Zelic.

To help users access key protocol metrics, we developed a dedicated site at app.thala.fi/stats. Additionally, we integrated two major external platforms:

DeFiLlama — This integration allows users to easily access key Thala stats such as TVL and fees.

Sentio (Analytics) — Used to gather important data like pool TVL, volume, and swap history, among other metrics.

Moreover, THL can easily be tracked across major tracking platforms like CoinGecko and CoinMarketcap.

What’s ahead — The 2024 vision

Over the past year, we have built an open parallel financial system where anyone can exchange and invest their assets over the decentralized rails of Aptos. The next step is to enable and grow the ecosystem:

• Doubling Down on Launchpad and veTHL utility: In collaboration with the Aptos Foundation, we have gathered some really exciting projects emerging from the foundry. These will be launching on our launchpad. We will soon be announcing a project that deeply enhances several of our core products — stay tuned!

• LayerZero OFT: Thala integrated Layerzero’s OFT standard, allowing THL to be a cross-chain asset for future expansions.
• Tokenomics: Shift towards deflationary tokenomics and reduced liquidity mining emissions.
• Governance: Upcoming release of Parliament, Thala’s on-chain governance platform.
• LST (thAPT and sthAPT): Given that LSTs are one of the largest sectors in DeFi, we plan to further deepen liquidity for thAPT and sthAPT across the ecosystem. Additionally, we aim to enable recursive LST strategies through integrations with lending and borrowing protocols. Keep an eye out! 👀🐳

Thala is a decentralized finance protocol powered by the Move language, enabling seamless borrowing of a decentralized, over-collateralized stablecoin in Move Dollar and capital-efficient liquidity provisioning via a rebalancing AMM on the Aptos blockchain.

Website: http://thala.fi/

Foundry: https://thalalabs.typeform.com/foundry

Discord: https://discord.gg/thala

Twitter: http://twitter.com/thalalabs

Documentation: https://docs.thala.fi

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