Frontier first used composability to “outsource” the wallet’s private key management function to a third party, and then captured the initial users and traffic by providing a more DeFi interface-friendly experience.
Written by: Pan Zhixiong
Decentralized finance (DeFi) transaction aggregation and revenue aggregation have long been popular concepts, but have you ever heard that “wallets” can also be aggregated?
That’s right, this is the direction Frontier wallet is trying to cut in. Specifically, the popular wallet product Frontier does not provide the core function “key management” of cryptocurrency wallets. Instead, it positions itself as a tool for the application service layer, and then based on an open standard, the industry’s “composability” “Advantages, and leave the key management to other more professional “wallets.”
This product construction method is somewhat similar to the idea of transaction aggregation platform 1inch and income aggregation platform yearn. Before 1inch did not provide a private liquidity pool, it only aggregated the liquidity of other third-party decentralized exchanges (DEX) to provide users with a stronger trading experience; yearn did not develop its own underlying financial tools, but Rebalance among various DeFi lending and interest-bearing platforms to find higher sources of income.
Frontier Wallet’s user interface
When the underlying tools are sufficiently rich and high-quality, the aggregation layer tools will have more opportunities. They can build products with a more user-friendly experience, lower the barriers to use, and be more flexible to adapt to market trends. This is exactly where Frontier wants to go.
In fact, Frontier’s product positioning has also been adjusted. When it went online in 2019, it used “wallet” as its positioning. However, it did not provide the function of key management, and it is not a cryptocurrency wallet in the traditional sense. Recently, they have revised their website, theme colors and logo, calling themselves a “multi-chain DeFi aggregation layer”, which is different from the previous “DeFi tools for everyone-safe, simple and fun.”
Frontier has not limited itself to the Ethereum network from the early days, and is even developing its own blockchain to achieve decentralized management of private keys. Frontier co-founder Palash Jain told Lianwen, “Ethereum’s high gas fees make it impossible for retail investors to use DeFi, so there are opportunities and possibilities for other public chains. ”
Support organization
At the end of last month, Frontier announced the completion of a total of US$1.85 million in private equity financing, covering seed rounds, private equity rounds and early backers, including Alameda Research, Woodstock Fund, Mechanism Capital, NGC Ventures, CoinGecko, Spark Digital Capital and other participations.
According to official public data, 30% of the total amount of Frontier tokens are sold to seed round and private equity round investors, and a total of 1.875% will be publicly sold, which is planned to be carried out around September 11. The date and details of the follow-up will be disclosed.
How does the wallet realize aggregation?
Frontier uses a technology called TxLink to open up the relationship with other cryptocurrency wallets that manage private keys, and achieve “combinability.”
TxLink is implemented based on the Ethereum standard EIP-681. The improvement proposal of EIP-681 was proposed as early as 2017. The full name is “URL format for transaction application”. Simply put, it is the most common URL protocol to transmit transaction data, and computers and mobile phones are compatible with URL protocols.
Just like visiting the www website, EIP-681 stipulates that the parameters that need to be added in the URL include the target transaction address, quantity, transaction type, gas parameters, etc. Through this form, the data to be traded can be transferred from Frontier to other third-party wallets. , Then sign and submit to the chain to complete the transaction.
The wallets that currently support this function are Trust, Formatic, MetaMask, imToken, Coinbase Wallet, and will add support for Argent, TokenPocket and Ledger in the future. EIP-681 should be a standard that is relatively easy to integrate. It is likely that mainstream wallets will be compatible, so that the barriers between various applications of the blockchain can be opened up and data can be transferred between apps.
In terms of the speed of supporting DApp, Frontier can be more flexible and efficient, because the data and projects are open and do not need to rely on any wallet. The transaction data on the chain is also completely open on the chain, and the experience in this respect should be similar to products such as DeBank or Zerion.
Carry out multi-chain support to the end: tokens will also be issued on multiple platforms
Frontier’s brand slogan is “DeFi aggregation layer supporting multi-chain”, so multi-chain support is one of their core features. Currently supported blockchains include the most mainstream ones, such as Ethereum, Binance Chain, BandChain, Kava, Harmony and Cosmos. The upcoming support is Solana, Elrond, Polkadot, Kusama, StaFi, Edgeware, and Frontier Chain that they will develop themselves.
One of Frontier’s major investors is Alameda Research. They also recently invested in the public chain Solana-based decentralized exchange Serum, so Frontier’s native token FRONT will also be issued under Solana’s SPL standard, and it can also be carried out on the Serum platform. transaction.
In addition, the official also stated that FRONT will be issued based on Ethereum’s ERC-20 and Binance Chain’s BEP2 standards.
Next step? Public chain and smart wallet
Although Frontier has not touched the core “key” management in wallets, the management of keys in their plan is a set of less common solutions: develop a blockchain called Frontier Chain, and then Realize decentralized key management on a blockchain.
Palash Jain told Lianwen, ” Frontier Chain is a PoS blockchain based on the Cosmos SDK, which integrates a decentralized key management module, allowing users to store or retrieve private keys in a traceless and secure manner. ”
In addition, the official has announced the specific development schedule of this blockchain: Frontier Chain’s testnet is planned to be launched in the first quarter of 2021, the mainnet will be launched in the second quarter, and the decentralized management of keys will be realized in the third quarter. The decentralization of governance was achieved in the fourth quarter.
For more short-term goals, Frontier will focus on the update of wallet products. In the third quarter, Frontier plans to add a fiat currency into gold channel and launch a native application of the macOS version. In the fourth quarter, it plans to launch Frontier’s smart contract wallet and a repeater that can pay for Gas.
Token usage
FRONT, as Frontier’s native token, has been officially designed with a very rich and comprehensive use of functions, but the official specifically pointed out two points: to encourage players with smaller assets to participate in DeFi, because the current cost of the chain is too high; FRONT will provide security and governance for Frontier Chain. So FRONT is more like a tool token, and its specific value largely depends on the actual use.
In addition, the official detailed the specific uses of FRONT tokens, including:
- Staking: Frontier Chain’s native token FRONT, which can be used for staking to ensure network security;
- Gas-free transactions: By locking FRONT in the vault, users can conduct free or nearly free on-chain transactions for applications supported by Frontier;
- Incentives: FRONT tokens are motivated according to the user’s use of the application;
- Liquidity initialization: Users can get liquidity mining rewards by investing FRONT in DEX;
- Governance: FRONT will be used to create governance token gFRONT, and then conduct community governance on the platform;
- NFT acquisition and creation: content creators or institutions can use FRONT as a non-fungible token (NFT) payment tool;
- Recommendation plan: Recommend more users to use Frontier as the entrance to DeFi and get token rewards;
- Deflation model: In B2B integrated business, FRONT will be used for payment;
- More are still planned: such as discounts for access to CeFi services, mortgage loans, gamification attempts, etc.
Token distribution and fundraising situation
Frontier will issue a total of 100 million FRONT tokens. The official has made a comprehensive disclosure of the amount, quantity and token release plan of each round of fundraising. 100% circulation of all tokens will be 38 months after the tokens are launched, which is about 3 years. All tokens participating in the financing will be released after a maximum of 18 months, accounting for 30% of the total tokens.
Total : 100 million pieces
Initial liquidity after going online : 11.35%
Public offering and early supporters : 0.08 USD, 2.5% of the total tokens, no lock-up
Private sale : $0.065, accounting for 20% of the total tokens, all released after going online to the 9th month
Seed round price : $0.05, accounting for 10% of the total tokens, all released from the online to the 18th month
The specific token distribution is:
- Seed investors: 10.00%
- Private equity investors: 20.00%
- Early supporters: 0.625%
- Public offering: 1.875%
- Community: 8.00%
- Staking reward: 13.50%
- Eco: 20.00%
- Market: 6.00%
- Reserve: 10.00%
- Team: 10.00%
Is it a trend to “dig the wall” through composability?
Many people in the industry call composability the most important advantage of DeFi, but from recent trends, it can be found that it is actually a double-edged sword, because when all data, protocols, and businesses are fully open, new projects will have a lot of opportunities. Great opportunity to compete with vested interests.
Recently, a project called SushiSwap has become a hot spot in the cryptocurrency community. It cleverly uses the features of Uniswap’s unreleased native tokens and the composability advantages of DeFi, trying to migrate Uniswap’s liquidity to SushiSwap.
From the data point of view, the effect is not bad, because it forcibly adds a token model to Uniswap, so the valuation of the platform is easier to achieve. In contrast, Uniswap had only accepted equity financing before and never talked about whether it would issue tokens. And SushiSwap tokens are also very useful. The agreement will allocate a certain percentage of the overall transaction revenue to token holders. It is also because the cost of migration is so simple, so maybe there will be a fork version that is more worthy of attention.
Frontier first used composability to “outsource” the wallet’s private key management function to a third party, and then captured initial users and traffic by providing a more DeFi interface-friendly experience. According to their current plans, smart contract wallets will be released next quarter, plus Frontier Chain will be released in the future to achieve decentralization of key management, and key management functions will be added back to the wallet itself. Previously accumulated users can gradually migrate to Frontier’s full version of the wallet, and may not need to “use” a third-party wallet to achieve private key management.
