Brokkr Goes to Avalanche

Brokkr Finance
4 min readJun 15, 2022

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After the crazy crash of Terra, we, and everyone one of you, got stuck in the uncertainty of what is going to happen. Everyone suffered by losing funds, hopes, or even more.

Brokkr depended on Terra with Strategies, $BRO token, and having treasury in UST. We acted quickly, salvaged what we could, but the main question remained: What next after Terra?

There are many chains we could go to, Ethereum, Avalanche, Solana, BSC, Fantom, Juno, Polygon, and the list goes on.

But after thorough research, we came to a decision.

Avalanche will be the new home for Brokkr.

Avalanche

Avalanche hosts decentralized applications and lets any dApp create their own chain that can be highly customized for their needs— Subnets. The Primary Network of Avalanche consists of three blockchains that allows AVAX chain be more efficient and scalable compared to standard single-chains.

  • Contract Chain (C-Chain) — Used for all smart contracts on the network
  • Exchange Chain (X-Chain) — Used for creating and exchanging assets
  • Platform Chain (P-Chain) — Used for validators & Snowman protocol, also enables creation on subnets

Reasons Why Avalanche

The main factor that influenced our decision was Security & Decentralization. We will migrate the whole protocol and DAO, it needs to be well secured, we don’t want to go through this again. Then we needed good Bridges & THORChain link, major Wallets supporting the chain, built up DeFi ecosystem for the strategies, Fees, and quick Development speed.

Security & Decentralization

Avalanche has a strong security and decentralization standards. It has more than 1400 nodes securing the network and own security consensus protocol called Snowman.

Snowman provides a high security guarantees well-above the 51% standard of other networks. It combines the benefits of Nakamoto consensus (which provides robustness, scalability and decentralization) and Classical consensus (which ensures speed, quick finality and energy efficiency).

Furthermore, Snowman is very efficient at preventing network attacks. Double spend attacks have just a slightly higher chance of success rather than being guaranteed to succeed.

Decentralization was a potential issue for Polygon as the admin keys are controlled by a few people, which adds unnecessary risk to our DAO. On the other hand NEAR has just a few nodes and it hasn’t been properly stress-tested yet, otherwise it would be also a great candidate.

Total Value Locked (TVL)

Over $2,8b is locked in Avalanche protocols (at the time of writing), which is one of the highest from the chains we’ve been considering.

• It’s a trusted chain, that people like using
• TVL is locked across several protocols, that makes building strategies upon them possible

History

Avalanche is not a new chain, it’s been here from 2020, when it became open-sourced and available to public. Then DeFi started to emerge, and TVL and the number of protocols started to grow rapidly. And so far, without any major issues. That can’t be said about another candidate Solana, it is often down which makes it unreliable for proper DeFi.

Strategies

To build Brokkr Strategies we need at least a basic set of financial instruments that we can aggregate & automate.

Minimal requirements:
• Lending & Borrowing
• AMM
• LP pools
• Farms
• Stablecoins

This was an issue for Cosmos chains as there is not much of DeFi developed yet. Avalanche has it all, lending & borrowing with AAVE, Curve for liquidity pools, DEXes like Trader Joe or GMX, and farms like Yield Yak.

This infrastructure enables:
• Delta Neutral Strategy
• Liquidity providing strategies
• Dollar Cost Averaging strategies
• Stablecoin strategies
And more

Bridging & Cross-chain Possibilities

The Terra crash made us realize that we need to go cross-chain ASAP.
Brokkr protocol, $BRO token, and the DAO need one secured chain, but not the final product we deliver. Strategies & Portfolios should be independent of any chain.

Avalanche is EVM (Ethereum-based) chain, that means it’s easy to connect it with other major DeFi protocols on Ethereum. It is also the next chain that THORChain will integrate after ATOM. This will make investing in portfolios from any coin without wrapping possible. Avalanche is also connected to the main trusted bridges — Wormhole and Anyswap.

Wallets

Wallets play a huge role when using DeFi apps. Terra was hard to access and get out of, and you needed non-mainstream wallets to interact with the dApps. Avalanche is supported by all major wallets like Metamask, Trust Wallet, Ledger, and XDEFI. They’re widely spread and will make onboarding to Brokkr much easier.

Transaction Fees & Speed

Avalanche has low gas fees and fast transactions. And it stayed like that also during high congestion times, which is essential for all Strategies.

Median fees: $0.01
Transaction speed: <2s; 869 TPS (4,500 TPS theoretically possible)

Besides that, there are many tools for developing on top of EVM chains which make the dev speed much faster.

We already started working on the migration and rewriting smart contracts to recreate the protocol. We have the snapshot of all $BRO holders to enable claiming on Avalanche when it’s ready. Then we will implement first strategies, airdrops, and the rework of the platform will follow.

The full relaunch will take a few months, but in the end, Brokkr will be better than ever. In the meantime, we will actively work with you, testing new designs and features to ship the best product!

Follow Brokkr on:
🌎 BRO Website
🐦 BRO Twitter
🎮 BRO Discord
✉️ BRO Telegram

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