Exploring Mars Protocol: The Bank of the Future
By brendan
Climb aboard the Flipside Crypto rocketship. It’s time to take an interstellar trip to #Mars.
We’re not headed to the red planet just yet. Instead, we’re exploring the Mars protocol, a powerful borrowing and lending protocol built atop #Terra.
So, what is the #MarsProtocol, why is it garnering so much buzz, and how do you get involved and blast off?
What Is Mars? 🔭
Earth first made contact with the Mars protocol in April of this year, when the project’s Twitter account first went live.
Soon after, the team behind Mars shared an outline for their interstellar exploration in the form of a Medium post entitled “The Mars Protocol: Prologue” . In the blog post, the Mars Team, a.k.a Delphi Digital and Co-Lab Ventures, outline what they see as the progression of computing power, putting us in what they call the fifth epoch.
They also lay the foundation for the protocol itself, promising “Terra’s first-ever money market protocol… a place where users around the world can come to lend and borrow any form of value.” They expanded upon that with a so-called Red Paper.
Mars protocol, the paper states, will be “a bank of the future: non-custodial, open-source, transparent, algorithmic and community-governed.”
More specifically, the protocol will first issue collateralized as well as uncollateralized debt when it debuts later this year. These will “involve simple leveraged yield farming strategies on Mirror and Nebula,” according to the Red Paper. In the future, the Mars team plans to establish standards that will allow any smart contract to receive a credit line from Mars.
It seems this is the Terra network’s version of protocols like Alchemix and Aave, which offer similar lending markets on the Ethereum network. These protocols, however, are missing a key feature of the Mars protocol — uncollateralized lending.
Mars protocol: How to blast off 🚀
According to the Mars team, the plan is for the protocol to make its debut in Q3 of 2021. Want to climb aboard the spaceship and get involved? If so, start by reading the Mars Protocol Litepaper or following the team on Medium or Twitter .
But be forewarned! According to the Mars protocol Twitter account “there are no $MARS tokens or Telegram/Discord groups yet.”
If you do want to join in some conversation on Mars, you can join our community on Discord to follow the discussion on the protocol. We’ll even be hosting a town hall via Discord on Monday, June 14.