Introducing: The Standard Ecosystem

4 min readMar 31, 2021

Stablecoins have proven to be extremely valuable in the crypto ecosystem — one plagued with volatility and speculation. The crypto sector itself has grown to love its utility. Take this statistic, for example. Over the course of the last 365 days (as of 29th of March 2021), we’ve seen a massive 800% increase in the market cap of Stablecoins, from about $6 billion to $54 billion, according to the Stablecoin Index published by Messari. Check https://stablecoinindex.com/marketcap

What’s Holding the Stablecoin Ecosystem Back?

However, issues such as centralization, censorship, and less than transparent activities by the issuing authorities have created a need for a truly decentralized stablecoin, staying true to the spirit of cryptocurrencies.

This need was supposed to be met by Algorithmic stablecoins, which ultimately failed to live up to its expectations. The current-gen of algorithmic stablecoins definitely had some glaring shortcomings that needed to be addressed, including:

Price Instability: Despite being stablecoins, we rarely saw coins such as ESD and BAC stay true to their peg value. Tokens are not collateralized, making them extremely prone to overexpansion.
Potential For Manipulation: A lack of a properly incentivized ecosystem to decentralize oracles.
Auction mechanics are archaic and outdated. Creates a wealth divide, allowing only the wealthy to govern the currency.

The Standard Protocol: Features

The Standard protocol aims to bridge the limitations of traditional and algorithmic stablecoins. The price of the $MTR will always be pegged at $1, with an elastic supply, adjusted by oracles using a rebase mechanism. This Collaterized, Rebasable Stablecoin meets the volatility of the erstwhile current-gen of algorithmic stablecoins, by bringing in the stability of a collateralized stablecoin. The CRS solves the problem by

Collateral Synthetic coin, with an elastic supply. Imagine the collateralized nature of DAI, and mix it with the elastic supply of AMPL, where the total supply is defined by Oracle pricing.
Oracle Incentivization to promote decentralization of oracles, where the block rewards are split between validators and liquidity providers in an 80–20 ratio.
AMM — With Automated Market making, the auctioning mechanisms of other stablecoins are made completely redundant. Standard Protocol also promises to use the liquidated assets for providing arbitrage trade.

The Standard Protocol is built on the Polkadot network, to take advantage of the extremely innovative, and cheap blockchain experience on offer within the crypto space. Users will find that MTR can be extremely profitable in both bullish and bearish circumstances.

MTR can be used to sell additional collateral to the Standard Protocol in a bullish environment, while users will be able to purchase these digital assets from the liquidation process, to be sold on other crypto exchanges.

Standard Protocol: The Three Tokens

The Standard Protocol depends on three tokens to successfully achieve their vision of providing a Collateralized, Rebasable Stablecoin

METER — The stablecoin itself. This can be synthetically generated and can be used as a medium of exchange, buy bonds, or farm tokens within the Standard ecosystem.
LITER — LTR is the liquidity provider token that represents a share in the Automated Market Maker module. The LTR is extremely similar to LP tokens in Uniswap, in the sense that it can be burned in AMM to receive corresponding assets in the fee pool. Can be used for Yield farming
STANDARD — The governance token of the Standard protocol. Standard users can earn additional rewards by staking and participating in on-chain governance and can be used as transaction fees within the ecosystem.

Meet The Team

The project is spearheaded by Hyungsuk Kang notably the head ambassador of the East Asia division of Polkadot, Lead Developer at Plasm
and the Co-founder of PolkaKR.
Kang is partnered with Jaewon Shin — the Korean partner at BitBlock capital, and the co-founder of PolkaKR. Billy Lee, Tony Ling, Charlie Hu, March Zheng and Jasper Byun also play a crucial role in the success of the organization.

The Present and the Future Outlook

Currently, the Standard Protocol is supported by the web3 foundation grants program and backed by multiple VCs and other organizations such as 4SV, DFG, Blocksynvc Ventures, Master Ventures, A195 Capital, Lotus Capital, BITBLOCK, PolkaBase, and LINKPAD among others.

This project looks extremely promising, filled with potential, and if the shared roadmap for 2021 is on track, we could be seeing a lot more about the Standard Protocol.

Standard Roadmap

Here’s the roadmap shared by the team behind the Standard Protocol, featuring test runs, yield farming initiation, several Polkadot parachain activations, and much more, all within 2021.