Ahoy, fellow Dropsmans!
Ever since we officially launched our mainnet on May 4, 2022, we’ve been off to the races with further developing our platform through various efforts.
We’ve also been listening closely to our community for your valuable feedback and thoughts. Keep them coming, as we’re always taking them into consideration!
To that end, our team has taken your recommendations and feedback into consideration for the next iteration of our journey. We’ve already hit the ground running with some major news and advances to our protocol and ecosystem, plus we’ve got even more big news to share with you all today.
A Look Back & Where We Are Today
Before we jump ahead to what else is coming in the pipeline, we want to take a quick look back at our recent efforts to shine a light on how we’ve gotten here today.
Since our protocol’s inception, our focus has been mainly on development — we went through the testnet phase, which started in November of 2021. This led to the successful launch of our mainnet in early May 2022, allowing users to finally collateralize their NFTs for loans.
Now, our platform has the necessary infrastructure to support smooth and instant NFT loans, opening the door for further DeFi opportunities for users and investors with their non-fungible assets.
Given that we’ve established the technology and architecture needed to allow NFTs to thrive on Drops, we’re now shifting our focus to the next stage of our journey, which is broken into multiple different areas and strategies.
Future Plans & Developments
At this stage of our project’s life cycle, we’re going to expand our horizons past the development and production of the platform. It’s now time to implement strategies to bring in more NFT communities and users by spreading the word — this can be done through targeted initiatives that will help grow the Drops ecosystem and bring more exposure to the brand.
Our team understands that we’re still in the infancy stages of the NFT lending and borrowing space — we’re doing something different and want to lead the charge and make this market a fruitful and viable environment.
Here’s a breakdown of our multi-layered strategy to maximize the potential of Drops DAO, from what we’ve already done to what’s coming:
DAO Governance
At Drops, our community is everything. You are the ones who will be helping influence and drive protocol decisions to make the experience better for our users. More importantly, this keeps our platform decentralized, staying true to the nature of what the blockchain was intended for.
To do this, we’ve already launched veDOP and created a Snapshot vote where proposals will take place for token holders within the community to vote on. Holding veDOP allows users to determine the future addition of NFT collections and reward structures for pools.
This means that you (the community) is now able to determine which NFT collections get added and what the rewards look like within each respective lending pool, all in a completely decentralized way.
NFT Community Competitions
On our platform, NFT communities are a key piece to helping us achieve our long-term goal of becoming the premier non-fungible asset loans platform. To boost engagement, we want to begin putting out competitions for NFT communities where winners can use veDOP to vote to increase pool rewards for their NFT community.
The hungriest NFT communities will fight the hardest to vote the pool’s rewards structure in their favor, driving DOP value and utility.
To do this, we’ll be using the veDOP token together with a new partner to help coordinate votes. Details surrounding this specific partner are yet to be revealed, but keep your eyes peeled on our social channels for the big reveal!
Ambassador Program
We want our NFT community members to be incentivized to help us drive Drops to greater successes down the line. Of course, we understand that while people want to become more involved in Drops, they also need to be rewarded for their efforts.
That’s why we’ve introduced our very own ambassador program, where we’ll select passionate individuals who we believe can help us grow our ecosystem to the fullest. Ambassadors are an essential part of any project, as they help organically promote projects and drive discussions that help raise awareness in a positive light.
Our ambassadors will also be able to help recruit other NFT community ambassadors, adding a referral program into the mix to further incentivize bringing in quality individuals to help promote and grow our project.
So far, we’ve brought 2 ambassadors aboard to help support the CyberBrokers NFT lending pool that was added via a governance vote.
This is just the beginning as we continue to add more lending pools!
Partnerships & Integrations
To leverage network effects, we’re shifting our mindset to partner and integrate with other projects and platforms. This is a key step to making our platform shine, putting us in a position to not only receive support from our partners (and their respective communities) but also help them in their efforts.
The last few weeks have been extremely exciting for Drops ecosystem developments — check out who we’ve brought onboard as partners to accelerate our offerings:
- Pocket Network: We’ve partnered with their project to help build a more robust and decentralized network infrastructure, leveraging their relay chains and nodes
- Bridge Mutual: Drops is working with their team to provide insurance coverage on NFT assets sitting within our lending pools
- NFTBank: Our collaboration involves integrating their technology in order to leverage NFT loans tracking and optimize NFT portfolio management on Drops. We’ve also added their floor price feeds to our Chainlink nodes to make the oracle more robust and resilient.
- REDACTED Cartel: This partnership will enable bribing for NFT collections and collectors to influence veDOP holders to vote on their behalf, both for whitelisting collections and distributing rewards (emissions)
We’re currently in talks with several other projects regarding partnerships and collaborations, which will be shared with our community soon.
Drops DAO presents strongly for product novelty, community size, and security. Working with other leaders in the blockchain and crypto space will help us grow and develop, setting the stage for much more to come.
There are so many exciting things coming, so stay tuned for announcements within our social media channels!
Communications
We’ve already discussed how important our community is to Drops. In order for us to grow and retain users, we know it’s critical to improve upon our methods of communication, from events to blogs.
In order to do this, we’ve already taken the first step by restyling our newsletter with a beautiful refresh of new and exciting content. Furthermore, we’ll be hosting more AMAs and creating engaging community events to keep participation active and incentivize people to love Drops and more!
Take the Ride With Us
As always, we want to thank you for staying with us. We hope you’re already enjoying the current version of the Drops DAO platform and are excited to see all of the exciting developments and changes we have in store!
Our ultimate goal is always to improve so we can become the premier NFT loans platform of the metaverse. Join us and help our team realize this dream — we’re all in this together.
All aboard,
The Drops DAO Team
About Drops DAO
Drops DAO provides loans for NFT and DeFi assets, supplying them with much-needed utility.
The protocol uses lending pools that enable any type of NFT asset to be used as collateral — from collectibles and metaverse items to financial NFTs. Users can leverage their idle NFTs and DeFi tokens to obtain loans and earn extra yield.
