This DAO is opening up DeFi’s most advanced strategies for higher yields [INTERVIEW]

Stake DAO is opening up DeFi’s most sophisticated products and strategies to the masses, a human-friendly application layer making sense of raw DeFi protocols. The platform allows anyone — with any level of knowledge of crypto — to manage and track their entire portfolio, stake an array of PoS tokens, leverage DeFi’s top strategies, and more, being rewarded with DAO revenues in the form of the SDT token. By boosting the returns on the underlying protocol with additional SDT incentives, Stake DAO can offer some of the highest APYs on the market.

The contributors are wholly committed to accelerating and democratising DeFi, and you can see this in the structure of the DAO. DAO revenues are aggressively distributed to users of the platform — everything is done first and foremost with the community in mind, to benefit the community. The ambition of the DAO is to be an easy way to complete the entire lifecycle of onboarding into DeFi, with every tool and product under one roof. 

There are 30+ Stake DAO contributors all over the globe, with a heavy presence in Europe, some in Asia, and also in North America. The team has noted expertise across a broad range of verticals including smart contracts, algorithmic trading, visual art, product marketing, community building, blockchain advocacy, and more.

One of the foremost challenges right now is optimising for gas — DeFi has historically been a whale’s game where the largest players have tremendous leverage, earning a disproportionate share of rewards. A number of DeFi’s most experienced Solidity developers are contributors at Stake DAO, and they are constantly innovating new ways to reduce gas fees via L1 and L2 solutions.

A second major challenge is sourcing talent. There is a profound shortage of experienced Solidity developers, and so Stake DAO needs to offer competitive incentives to attract top talent. The contributors just reallocated ~$20m worth of SDT to launch a Foundation, to make sure the DAO has the funds to be able to do this. 

At present, users can present their case for a major new feature or code changes using the proposal tab via gov.stakedao.org. If this is sound and has enough discussion DAO will vote on it using signal. This process needs refining, and will eventually be structured in such a way that gives users more autonomy from the brainstorming to execution stage.

SDT is essential to the platform: it serves as a yield-bearing token that provides access to voting rights, as well as passive, Impermanent loss-free, gas-less compounding to holders via the xSDT mechanism or Sanctuary. Almost every action a user makes on Stake DAO will result in them being rewarded in SDT. They can stake this for additional SDT, and bonus points, redeemable for Stake DAO NFTs. 

Stake DAO is excited to bring a number of entirely new strategies to market including: flash loans, arbitrage, and liquidations, while rethinking the experience of onboarding into DeFi with innovative like one-click staking and more. The aim of the game is to bring absolutely everything anyone could ever want, and everything they don’t know they want, under one human-friendly roof. This will be driven by governance; by community desires.

Stake DAO is closely aligned with Curve, Yearn, Pickle, Badger, and Sushi, which it uses as trusted protocol layers. For an intuitive on-ramp experience Stake DAO uses Ramp Network, and for low-cost swaps it uses 1inch and Paraswap.

The team is currently building an Academy which will help new and existing users of Stake DAO better understand the platform and its capabilities, as well as educate them about broader DeFi concepts. Until that is live, users can check out the Stake DAO Gitbook, Twitter, Blog, and Discord.