Our supporters and even casual observers are aware of our protocol’s tagline and introduction:
Oxygen Protocol is an on-chain prime brokerage built on the growing and liquid Serum ecosystem, running on the scalable Solana blockchain , and seeded by Maps.me’s 140 million users.
Users have expressed enthusiasm over our decision to build our borrow-lending protocol on Serum, leveraging an on-chain orderbook to match borrowers and lenders to provide fair rates. A project like Oxygen would not be possible without Solana blockchain’s massive throughput and ultra-low costs.
The idea of integration with Maps.me has been met with excitement and wonder. What do we mean when we say Maps.me’s users ‘seed’ or ‘provide liquidity’ to Oxygen? And how does this fit into Oxygen’s greater plans for establishing robust liquidity at the outset and building strategic partnerships that will cement Oxygen’s place as a cornerstone of the DeFi world?
What is Maps.me
Many Oxygen supporters are surprised when they hear about Maps.me while discussing our protocol. A lot of them turn out to be existing Maps.me users themselves.
Maps.me is the world’s leading navigation and offline mapping app with nine years of history and 140 million registered users. Maps.me users download offline maps to guide their travels. This is a concrete, ‘real world’ application with a well-known success story and established use case. What does Oxygen and DeFi have to do with this?
To summarize, Maps.me is undergoing a pivotal evolution. Maps.me seeks to become the ultimate travel companion by empowering travellers with powerful and convenient financial tools and enhanced travel and mapping experiences.
More specifically, Maps.me 2.0 will offer a new, embedded digital wallet. The wallet will work with 35 different fiat currencies (and is, notably, not a crypto wallet). Wallet features will include convenient payment options, FX conversions at affordable rates, cross-border transfers, and a savings account whereby travellers can store excess funds and generate passive income.
These are all fiat-related features that are familiar to everyone, including crypto and non-crypto audiences alike. It is important to take a closer look, however, at the passive income (yield generation) function. This is where Oxygen and DeFi get involved.
That function is powered by Oxygen Protocol , which will act as a financial backend. Maps.me users will interact with a highly intuitive and simple UX to enjoy their wallets earning them an APR of 8% (as an example). In fact, the Maps.me user is lent digital USD to participate in Oxygen in the backend; they do not ‘see’ Oxygen’s operations or anything beyond the Maps.me interface. The lent digital USD is pooled for use on Oxygen, where the protocol matches borrowers to that liquidity through the Serum DEX. It is worth noting that the provision of this valuable service to Maps.me users provide liquidity for Oxygen from the lending-side.
Maps.me is the first major application to build on Oxygen, allowing its users to earn passive income on their embedded DeFi wallets. In this use case, Maps.me users benefit from a familiar retail banking-like function without needing to know the complexities behind how it is powered. Maps.me users will form a critical mass and bring liquidity and credibility to Oxygen, jump-starting our protocol as one of the largest fintech applications.
Partnerships and Ecosystems
Oxygen is built on Serum and Solana to base the borrow-lending protocol on a completely on-chain orderbook. Hence, Oxygen will rely on Serum DEX prices for order execution, market data, pricing, and risk management. And naturally, players in the diverse Serum ecosystem can integrate and expand on Oxygen’s functionality thanks to the composability of DeFi. As Oxygen leverages Serum and its vibrant ecosystem, we expect projects interested in integrating with or expanding on Oxygen’s functionality to take advantage of DeFi’s composability and build with us. Just as there is a burgeoning Solana and Serum ecosystem, there is also a budding Oxygen ecosystem.
That said, we will need to work with Serum and Solana to get more people to develop and build on these ecosystems. Solana and Serum would also be tested in terms of concurrent transactions from individual users. These are crucial objectives to account for when rolling out a platform like ours to millions of users, and we are proud to partner with incredibly talented project leaders who have demonstrated their abilities to overcome the unique, technologically demanding issues of today.
We are also finalizing details on a wide variety of incentives programs to continue attracting developers to build on the Oxygen protocol. We launched our alpha UI to allow users to create and invest via their own pools. And as is natural in DeFi, we expect the Oxygen community to develop UI interfaces that will ultimately become the primary interface to Oxygen Protocol and become new points of engagement with worldwide users. Liquidity provision partners will also be in place to bootstrap liquidity starting on day one and we continue to engage with and plan out more exciting things with those wishing to build on Oxygen, Serum, and Solana. We are just getting started.
Website: https://oxygen.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/oxygen_protocol
Telegram community: https://t.me/oxygen_protocol
