Glue

“Why another L1?” is a very reasonable question. There are new blockchains sprouting up constantly, especially whenever the L1 narrative is hot.

Glue got kicked off in 2021. Snapshot was deep diving into DeFi and found that even for someone who’d been building tech companies for over a decade, crypto was complex to understand and difficult to use. At first we contemplated building easier DeFi dApps on Ethereum but pretty quickly realized that having easy to use dApps on a system as complex as ETH (difficult wallets, difficult explorer, slow transaction times, bridging to L2 etc) was going to be a impossible. Further, we felt that the community itself wasn’t focused on being customer centric. Ethereum is built by developers, for developers and it’s easy to see that. Most of the alt-L1’s are also very much developer focused as well. They differentiate themselves through tech innovation but use the same business strategy. We believe that innovating on the business and economic approach is one of the missing pieces that keeps crypto from getting real adoption. There are L2’s like Base that are more consumer centric, but they didn’t exist when we get started nor do we feel that they will be able to compete with a ground up approach in the long term.

We evaluated using various open source technologies from ETH to SOL to AVAX. We ended up settling on Polkadots Substrate because we felt that it had the combination of technical aspects we were looking for. We especially value the ability to launch multiple native L2’s as it will let us innovate quicker than any monolithic chain can.

A second major aspect was funding. The blockchain of the future shouldn’t be owned by a small group of VC’s or early Whales. We have focused heavily on being as capital efficient as possible, to get to main-net while raising the minimal amount of funding necessary, so we can get a broad and fair token distribution without huge VC allocations dragging the network down.

That business approach also means the Glue treasury will have a LOT of tokens available to spend on customer acquisition through subsidizing yields to attract useful TVL, marketing to retail users or even buying traditional businesses that can be moved onto the Glue Network. 

Designing the stack end to end (L1 to dApp) allows us for a better user experience but also much more favorable economics to Glue token holders and Glue users.

Lastly, while we are a full stack tech ecosystem, we don’t intend to compete with other L1 and L2’s. Our focus is to offer a product that is competitive with centralized exchanges and peer to peer payment systems like Venmo. We aim to have tokens bridge to Glue from all other ecosystems and will be highly supportive of other approaches.

We believe the audience for Glue and for Crypto at large can be divided into three major categories:

1. Day to Day Users without much technical expertise. These users care about ease of use, security and day to day functionality.
2. Crypto Enthusiasts that have deep technical expertise. These users care about the technology, decentralization and yield.
3. Institutional Investors that have extensive technical expertise but are restricted by fiduciary duty from participating in much of crypto. They care about advanced security functionality, compliance and being able to offer quality products to Day to Day Users.

Much of on-chain crypto as it stands today has been built for the active crypto enthusiasts. There is effectively nothing on any blockchain that is simple enough for Day to Day Users to easily do without educating themselves enough to become Active Crypto Enthusiasts. Institutions are also largely excluded from the current on-chain environment because of issues like key handling.

While there are a lot of Day to Day Users as well as Institutions in crypto, they near exclusively are confined by centralized players offering them the ease of use and security they need.

Glue’s Mission is to develop an end to end product that is easy to use and offers the security necessary so that both Day to Day Users and Institutions can finally come on-chain. We believe that those two audiences are exponentially larger than the Crypto Enthusiast demographic, offering Glue a much larger possible market that is currently barren of on-chain competition.

Planning for Glue started in August 2021. In late 2021 Glue secured $1.5M from accredited seed investors. The founders additionally contributed $500k each, bringing the total to $2.5M. The seed round was at a 30% discount to the validator pre-sale price (calculated as the average price of the bottom decile of validator sale prices), which a liquidity bootstrapping pool will establish. Additionally, no investment besides the founders has exceeded $250,000. This ensures that there are no large allocations that could adversely affect the ecosystem in the long term.

Glue is mainnet ready. We are still doing some work to make it fully production ready, but the R&D phase as well as the development have been completed.

Throughout the bear market, Glue has been building. We launched our first testnet in May 2022.

2022 and 2023 has been the active development phase for Glue, including launching the L1 blockchain and three native L2s.

In preparation for the main-net launch, we have developed a decentralized exchange, lending platform, and stablecoin and integrated them all into one easy-to-use frontend, ensuring immediate utility from day one. No need to wait for third-party developers to arrive for users to be able to use Glue.

Our code is available for due diligence. Please message us for GitHub access, and we are engaging auditors for comprehensive, ongoing security audits of our work.

There are two strategies through which blockchains can scale:

• The monolithic, single chain, no L2 approach. Solana is using this strategy. The basic idea is to scale the blockchain by making it better and faster but to keep everything on one chain. The major advantage is that it doesn’t fracture the ecosystem as much as L2’s do. Solana has managed to dramatically increase the number of transactions per second as compared to Ethereum using this strategy but it seems likely that there will, eventually, be a cap and there are meaningful decentralization tradeoffs that have to be made.
• The L2 scaling approach. Ethereum is using this approach. The idea is that instead of trying to make the L1 faster, the L1 takes on a reduced role, which is that of providing security and rolling up L2’s. In Etherum’s case, the L2’s are built by totally separate and unrelated teams. The benefit of this strategy is that it allows for scalability as there is no maximum of how many L2’s can be hosted by a single L1. The problem is that it subdivides the ecosystem into many separate parts that can’t interact.

The Glue approach:

Glue’s approach largely follows the L2 scaling strategy. Unlike Ethereum though, because Substrate (on which Glue is built) was conceived with L2’s in mind, Glue’s L2’s are much more functional.

The substrate approach solves multiple challenges:

• The L1 doesn’t get cluttered up with legacy smart contracts. Etherum continues to host all kinds of dApps. They take up a significant amount of throughput and will in the long term impede L2 scaling. Glue’s L1 does not have smart contract functionality. It exclusively provides security for the L2’s. There will be no legacy code running on the L1 that gums things up.
• Polkadot, the original developer of Substrate, uses the same technology stack as Glue, but a very different strategy. On Polkadot, the L2’s are built by individual teams with individual incentives. They have shown to have a limited desire to cooperate, and instead we have seen a more Ethereum-like ecosystem develop where the L2’s are relatively siloed and generalized because they are incentivized to do anything to compete with other L2’s.
• Glue uses a different approach. We believe the way to scale is to have usecase specific L2’s, all of which collaborate with each other. One L2 is optimized for the highest possible speed at the lowest fees where another L2 is focused on financial transactions where higher fees aren’t a major problem and reliability through a lack of congestion is most crucial. Because the Glue team sets the roadmap for the L2’s instead of using the Polkadot anarchy approach, we believe it will yield a more functional and user-friendly ecosystem.

Because Glue L2’s are natively connected through the L1 and because all L2’s are deployed by the Glue team after being audited by third parties, the L2’s can interoperate much easier than in a more hostile Polkadot-like environment. This means that through cross-chain messaging, developers can do smart contract calls on an L2 that gets executed on a different, trusted L2. Combined with usecase specialization, that opens up the door not only for many different scalability applications but also a whole slew of new and innovative dApps not seen so far.

Because the L2’s are connected through the L1, not only are cross chain calls possible, assets can be transferred directly and instantly from L2 to L2 without the need for bridges.

The L1 as well as all L2’s use the same Glue token for fees. That’s both easier for users and aligns the entire ecosystem to the same mission.

Yes, all of Glue’s codebase will be under open source licensing. We have made substantial use of open source code and want to contribute our innovations back to the community.

Our immediate next step involves conducting a validator sale on Ethereum. Glue is already fully developed and the code can be reviewed. No major development is needed to launch the L1 post validator sale, the sale is needed to build a decentralized group of validators to launch the network. 

We will utilize a Balancer liquidity bootstrapping pool (LBP) for the sale. LBPs provide a fair and egalitarian approach to fundraising, allowing equal participation opportunities for all buyers, irrespective of their size. This model also establishes an equitable market value for the token.

We will release 0.5% of the total token supply in this sale. These tokens will be non-tradeable post-LBP and issued on the main-net upon launch with no lockups. We encourage token holders to consider becoming validators (which requires no technical expertise) upon main-net launch, although it’s not mandatory.

Our plans remain tentative since the exact amount raised via the liquidity bootstrapping pool is uncertain. The key areas of fund allocation will include:

• Roadmap development. Depending on the level of funding raised, we will detail our pre-ICO and, potentially, post-ICO roadmaps.
• Preparing for main-net launch. The code is near final, but some funds are needed for audits and ensuring there is a broad awareness in the crypto community of Glues Vision.

Our principle is to maintain maximum transparency by keeping all funding on-chain, whenever feasible. Validator pre-sale funds will be stored in a multi-signature wallet on ETH managed by the founders. A Swiss association established for the initial raise will be utilized for expenses that can’t be paid on-chain.

The main-net sale, unlike the validator pre-sale, will happen on the Glue main-net itself, and all funds raised will remain in an on-chain treasury. We are committed to avoiding the opaque spending practices commonly seen in foundations and will ensure token holder oversight and voting on fund usage.

Efficiency in capital utilization is a cornerstone of Glue’s philosophy. Our seed round was conducted at just a 30% discount to the upcoming validator sale, reflecting investor confidence in our long-term vision rather than immediate high returns. We intend to leverage liquidity bootstrapping pools for ongoing development funding, allowing the network to retain most tokens.

Our capital efficiency means that the vast majority of tokens will be owned by the main-net treasury. 

There are no lockups for investors, validator sale buyers, or ICO participants, aligning with our ethos of transparency and practical enforceability. The only strict lockup applies to the team tokens. The co-founders have contractually committed not to liquidate or even hedge their tokens in any form before the lockup is over.

Glue focuses on sustainable, long-term effectiveness rather than short-term token price fluctuations. We believe delivering an exceptional product and achieving widespread adoption among retail users will create significant long-term value.

• Coordinated ecosystem-wide roadmap. We emphasizes integrating development across Layer 1 (L1), Layer 2s (L2s), and decentralized applications (dApps). This coordinated approach contrasts with the more anarchistic, less user-friendly methods of other ecosystems.
• Permissionless development with a unified vision. While Glue supports open and permissionless development, it advocates for a unified vision driven by token holders. The founders craft this vision, guiding the ecosystem’s overall development.
• Structured approach to new developments. For new developments, like the introduction of a new L2, Glue outlines specifications and consults with development firms for proposals. The most suitable proposals are selected to align with Glue’s vision and roadmap.
• Decentralized yet coordinated decision-making. Key decisions, including fund allocation for development and main-net code integration, are made through token holder votes. This ensures a balance between decentralized governance and coordinated development efforts.

Check our official treasury on DeBank profile.