Thala Roadmap 2024

This article outlines the roadmap and unified vision for Thala in the coming months of 2024. This plan may evolve as the year progresses.

Intro

Thala began with a simple vision: DeFi HyperApp and Liquidity Engine, powered by the security and performance of Move. Now Thala is pushing boundaries to be best experience to collateralize, trade, and leverage crypto tokens and real world asset tokens. The Aptos ecosystem has a long way to go, and as the leading ecosystem project — Thala will play a pivotal role in shaping the chains future.

The Aptos ecosystem is highly nascent, with a fundamental premise that the smart contract language, Move, is a better alternative to anything else available and that the core infrastructure makes it fast, scalable, and ready for millions to use. So Thala is here for the long term, for the premise that crypto users will gravitate towards L1s that shifts complexity from users to the VM (Move) and they will seek out the best onchain user experiences.

Born in the depths of a bear market, over the past year, Thala has built an entire DeFi ecosystem on Aptos, including Thalaswap (AMM), ThalaLaunch (Launchpad), MOD (Stablecoin), Parliament (Governance), and Thala Foundry (Incubator). These high-conviction bets led us to achieve a peak TVL of $250 million and become the top DeFi protocol on Aptos. Thala has also enabled over $535 million in cumulative volumes through Thalaswap and ~6 million APT in Liquid Staking.

Product and Ecosystem

Product and ecosystem have always been Thala’s core focus. Some major items Thala Labs, its contributors and community have been working on:

1. ThalaSwap — While the current Thalaswap has been powering significant volumes, it is still not the most capital efficient (achieving higher volumes for a given TVL). To make it more capital efficient and increase LP profitability, ThalaSwap v2 will launch, inspired by Uniswap v3’s CLAMM implementation. Additionally, there is in progress development on lowering fees and improving routing algorithms to increase volume and Thala’s volume dominance on Aptos. More volume will help generate more fees, and hence, higher yields for LPs.
2. Launchpad: Thala’s first incubated project, Echelon, launched earlier in March and reached over $50 million in TVL. The protocol has become crucial in championing Thala’s existing products, having onboarded MOD and sthAPT as collateral. The community is also looking to make some key changes to Launchpad, including initiatives like requiring staking THL to participate in launches.
3. Foundry is leading the incubation efforts of several Aptos-native protocols, with Thala taking an active role in their development. These projects will follow Echelon and be pivotal in pushing forward not only the broader Aptos ecosystem, but complementing Thala’s extensive product suite. By the end of this year, Foundry seeks to deploy all of the $1mm granted so far to Thala Foundry by Aptos. Foundry is always open to onboarding new founders and projects — check out Thala Foundry!
4. Governance: On this front, Thala Governance will be promoted more actively, and community stewards encourage to submit more proposals for the long-term success of the Thala protocol. Additionally, the core contributors are working to overhaul the vote-escrow (ve) tokenomics, and more broadly help onboard THL as a widely integrated token within the ecosystem amongst partner protocols
5. Liquid Staking: There is significant potential to increase liquid staking TVL, as less than 5% of APT is currently staked. Furthermore, as more APTs are unlocked, they can be effectively converted into liquid-staked APT.
6. Marketing: To increase awareness for Thala, doubling down on marketing with initiatives such as:

• More integrations with analytics platforms like Dune and Flipside and offering bounties and compensation to those creating Thala dashboards.
• More community-building initiatives, such as Ambassador Programs (with token rewards as incentives) and hiring more moderators to ensure a 24/7 user response rate as Thala expands its product set.

New Product and Integration Verticals

Now that Thala has built a base infrastructure, it’s time to gear up and expand. This growth will occur in two major directions (opposite ends of the spectrum):

1. Speculative and Highly Leveraged Products — Highly revenue-generating
2. Real World Adoption and Integration of Real World Assets — Huge addressable market

Supporting Native Token Launches with ThalaLaunch 2.0

As an addition to Thala’s existing launchpad product, the protocol is expanding the bootstrapping of low-liquidity, long-tail tokens. Core developers are rolling out a memecoin token launchpad with 0 friction to launch a token (a la pump.fun). The token is auctioned on launchpad via a ‘Bonding Curve’ approach and when it reaches some set market cap (often 69k), the trading period will close and will automatically be seeded on ThalaSwap with a pool against MOD.

Why is this being built?

1. Aptos can be one of the best chains suited for memecoin trading, given its robust token standard (Fungible Asset Standard) and high performance (first blockchain to achieve sub-second end-to-end (E2E) latency).
2. Synergy with existing suite of LBP and batch auction launchpad products
3. Usage into Echelon, for isolated memecoin pools.
4. Increasing user activity across ThalaSwap
5. Increasing MOD utility

Trading Product

This part is in exploration mode, and nothing is finalized yet — but the core developers are exploring building out an integrated trading platform. Developers are actively collecting feedback and suggestions from users here in order to build out something truly exceptional which compliments the existing products.

Integrating Tokens with LayerZero OFTs

It’s clear that the lack of tokens has hindered volume growth for the Aptos ecosystem. Thala is actively integrating with multiple LayerZero OFTs from other ecosystems to fill the gap of non-native tokens — from RWA tokens, yield bearing stablecoins, and other popular assets that can find a natural place on Thala inside the CDP or DEX. APT and THL incentives and matching partner incentives can also be used to increase activity and liquidity here.

Real World Integrations:

While speculative products provide immediate revenue and attract sticky users, real-world integration will enable us to pioneer the open financial revolution. Thala has all the necessary infra to support most real-world use cases while being highly performant and transparent:

1. Real World Assets (RWA) — The Aptos Ecosystem is highly focused on RWA, with major ecosystem partnerships yet to be announced. Some of RWA initiatives, Thala is undertaking:
2. Thala has already announced the partnership with Ondo as the USDY launch partners. By end of month Thala will be adding USDY as collateral for MOD, with market makers seeding the initial USDY amount, making it one of the first protocols to have a significant RWA integration across DeFi.
3. Aptos Ascend — Thala is actively exploring areas of collaboration with Aptos Ascend, in partnership with global giants like Microsoft, Brevan Howard, BCG, and SK Telecom to build out the institutional platform.

The protocol is working with multiple potential RWA partners and protocols in the adjacent spaces for integration. Thala aims to be at the forefront of any significant partnerships the Aptos Foundation/Lab undertakes.

Go-To-Market Real World Adoption — Aptos has been highly focused on driving adoption through key partnerships. As one of the biggest apps on Aptos, Thala is at the forefront:

• Korean Audience — Aptos is big in Korea, and the Aptos Foundation continues to do significant work there. With the guidance of Aptos, the protocol contributors are working on establishing partnerships with traditional Korean giants in the wallet, gaming, communication, and analytic sectors. This will help Thala attract a large number of users from one of the most active user bases — and more importantly bring them onchain and using Thala.
• Mobile (JAMBO) — Thala will be one of the first DeFi apps to launch on Paradigm-backed Jambo, a crypto-based mobile phone targeting users in emerging markets. Jambo already has sold over 400,000 phones — a strong onboarding opportunity to brin the large Jambo userbase to Thala.

Institutional Adoption

• Validators — Validators on L1s have historically been some of the biggest public, advocates, users, and investors into their ecosystems. The protocol contributors are looking to make this happen on Aptos too, with the aim of benefiting Thala directly. Establishing lines of communication with many of the largest validators is a key priority, as they are earning nearly $40–50m in commission which the contributors believe is best suited to be directed into Thala incubated protocols and the products.
• Aptos Governance — The protocol contributors will evaluate the feasibility of submitting Arbitrum-like governance proposals to create value for the ecosystem layer, including Thala.
• Institutional Platforms — These platforms coming to Aptos, allowing more sophisticated institutions and users to interact with Thala more securely.
• Aptos Investors — Encouraging them to perform more on-chain, particularly with Thala.

Movement Expansion:

Lastly, earlier this year, the protocol announced its expansion to Movement, a network of Move-based blockchains that has raised $38 million from Hack VC, Placeholder, Archetype, Maven 11, and others. Thala will be deploying a standalone native protocol built on Movement The community has been strong proponents of the Velodrome-Aerodrome and Trader Joe-Merchant Moe model (airdropping new protocol tokens back to the first protocol). Stay tuned, as Thala has some really big plans to become the de facto app on Movement.

Thank you for being a valued community member and reading this post to the end!

Note that the roadmap is tentative in nature. Also, not nearly everything the core team and developers are working on is here. Most things stated here could change, pivoting and changing directions is key to stay competitive. The general goal of this roadmap is to engage the broader community and DAO into discussions about the future of Thala — not to guarantee specific outcomes. Based on market demand and community feedback, Thala Labs will continue building relevant products. Thala welcome your feedback and ideas — feel free to reply directly to the Twitter post or join the Discord.

Disclaimer

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