Introducing Seeded Network: A New Approach to Project Incubation

The phenomenal growth of decentralized finance over the last two years has seen the total locked value in defi rise from $628 million in November 2019 to over $113 billion today, a staggering 18,000% increase. Such growth demonstrates the tremendous demand for defi projects, offering an escape from the centralized control of traditional finance gatekeepers and enabling a peer-to-peer revolution in the privacy, sophistication, and speed of various financial transactions. It also explains why so many start-ups in the space are turning to project incubators as a source of development fundraising to help meet this demand.

The trouble is, despite the plethora of incubator and launchpad solutions now on offer, tiered systems, where the investor has to hold a certain amount of tokens, become too expensive to participate. Projects end up providing large allocations to seed and private investors that then sell for substantial profits, with projects becoming too decentralized too fast without the support or governance assistance in place to help oversee the growth of the project.

To create a solution that is truly fair for the investor, the team, and the incubated project, a more sustainable approach to this launchpad dilemma is desperately needed. That’s where Seeded Network comes in.

What Is Seeded Network?

Seeded Network is a project incubator built on Solana, with unique borrowing, lending, and staking incentives that leverage the expanding world of defi. Seeded Network aims to provide investors with access to quality hand-selected projects while also offering its technical, auditing, tokenomics, and fundraising expertise, and network connections to projects looking to incubate with it.

The Seeded Network project incubator is not an investment firm, launchpad, or completely decentralized platform. It aims to provide value beyond the standard launchpad approach by incorporating projects into a community-based ecosystem of thriving investors, adding utility to their tokens through its lending and borrowing products, and providing them with the resources, tools, and funds to kickstart their innovative solutions.

Why Solana?

As defi adoption has grown, so has the demand for cheaper, faster, and more scalable solutions that can handle the transaction throughput required for mainstream users. For Seeded, Solana answers that call, utilizing a new type of design for a high-performance blockchain. Based on a unique Proof of History architecture alongside a Proof of Stake consensus algorithm, Solana can deliver sub-second finality times, over 400,000 transactions per second, and less than $0.01 gas fees, while remaining secure, scalable, and decentralized.

Solving the Launchpad Dilemma

To break away from the existing launchpad dilemma and deliver a more sustainable and scalable solution, Seeded Network plans to solve for true fairness via a no-tiered system, a unique decentralization model, and product usage incentives.

No-Tiered System

Instead of the tiered systems behind much of the launchpad dilemma, Seeded Network’s incubator is designed as a weighted average. This enables any participant, no matter how many tokens they are holding, to be eligible for incubation fundraising.

Decentralization Model

Fully decentralizing a protocol at an early stage can hinder project development. To counter this, Seeded Network offers projects the support and governance of a less decentralized platform, working alongside the Seeded development team to successfully grow while also launching a fully decentralized product to allow any project to set up its own fundraising process with Seeded’s audited smart contracts.

Product Usage Incentives

The Seeded Network ecosystem enables users to borrow native $SEEDED tokens by lending out other assets on the platform. The borrowed tokens can then be staked for ten days before the launch of an incubated project to gain an allocation. Staked tokens can be withdrawn at any time with a 30% penalty distributed equally among users, the Seeded treasury, and the Seeded community charity. 

Its locked lending product enables users to lend $SEEDED tokens to borrowers, locked for a duration of 90 days, to receive a bonus allocation for an incubator project. Again, locked tokens can be withdrawn at any time with the same 30% penalty distribution.

Native staking on Seeded Network then allows holders of non-borrowed $SEEDED tokens to earn rewards and exclusive airdrops, and to stake for seven days prior to the launch of an incubator project to receive an allocation. Non-borrowed staked tokens can be withdrawn at any time without penalty, however.

What’s Next?

Having already secured a partnership with Waggle’s decentralized investor marketplace, and integrated Chainlink’s price feeds to enable secure lending services on Solana, Seeded’s smart contracts will be sent for audit with leading security experts CertiK in preparation for the launch of borrowing, lending, and staking services. 

Longer-term, Seeded plans to enable multi-chain support to expand its service offering to the wider defi ecosystem, as well as developing synthetics, stablecoins, farming, and other products.