[BIP-52] 2025 Annual Agenda

This proposal will seek to elect Chickn and Fabiaz for a second year as maintainers for the project and agree on our goals for 2025. We'll also take a look back at 2024 and identify some things we can improve on.

Learnings from 2024: Shaping Our Path Forward

Reflecting on the past year, we’ve identified key insights that will guide our efforts in 2025. These learnings highlight our challenges, growth areas, and opportunities to strengthen Bao Finance as we move forward.

Building Is Harder Than It Looks

This year, we undertook a major fork of the fx protocol to create our minter. Initially, we believed the work would take just a few months, with a mid-year launch. However, integrating the minter into Bao’s existing infrastructure turned out to be far more complex than anticipated. The experience taught us a valuable lesson: even straightforward ideas can take far longer to execute when adapting to an existing ecosystem.

Making Bao Developer-Friendly

One of the first observations from our new lead developer—who has over 30 years of experience in TradFi—was how difficult it was to understand and contribute meaningfully to Bao’s infrastructure. This challenge is not unique to new contributors; even experienced developers within the team have faced friction due to the lack of standardization and documentation.

If Bao is to truly thrive, it must be easy to contribute to and build on top of. In 2025, we’ll focus on improving tooling, documentation, and infrastructure to lower barriers for both new and existing developers.

Trust and Sticky Liquidity Are Everything

Liquidity in crypto is notoriously mercenary—funds flow to wherever the highest short-term yield is offered. Attracting sticky liquidity requires creating products that go beyond yield farming by offering exceptional opportunities for yield, unique strategies, or robust risk management.

Additionally, trust is a major factor in user adoption. Protocols with strong reputations and clear security measures naturally attract more loyal participants. Bao needs to focus on: • Enhancing user trust through transparency and proven reliability. • Maximizing depositor yields to attract and retain liquidity providers.

Collaboration Beats Isolation

This year, we’ve seen the power of collaboration firsthand. Becoming a friendly fork of fx protocol has brought Bao far more attention and recognition than it had previously. Working with established protocols, sharing resources, and leveraging the expertise of other teams has proven to be invaluable.

Our task now is to keep this momentum going by delivering products that exceed expectations, maintaining strong relationships, and pursuing more partnerships where they align with our goals.

Adaptability is Essential, but Comes with Trade-Offs

This year taught us the importance of staying flexible and responding to industry trends. At the start of the year, S-Tokens weren’t even on our radar. However, observing the success of yield-bearing products like MakerDAO’s sDAI and USDe’s sUSDe, we recognized the importance of integrating similar functionality into Bao’s ecosystem to remain competitive.

While this adaptability allowed us to pivot and build a superior product, it came with trade-offs—adding complexity and extending development timelines, which delayed the release of other key features like lending markets.

2025 Goals

2024 has been a year of building. Good progress has been made on our innovative s-token-backed lend markets, cross-chain expansion, and development of the minter.

2025 will be the year of shipping, with all of these products expected to be ready at the beginning of 2025, we can focus on expanding to new markets, adapting the contracts to fit new use cases, and integrations with new chains and other projects.

Expand Core Products

• Deploy minters for baoUSD, baoETH, baoBTC, and future synths on multiple chains.
• Launch Lend markets around our synths on new chains.
• Tokenomics upgrades and adjustments based on opportunities

Deliver New and Innovative Products

• Develop Real World Asset (RWA) synths like baoTSLA or other innovative minter markets to attract new market participants depending on legal outlook and research.
• Explore the possibility of S-Token backed minters, enabling unique strategies like short and leveraged synths using yield-bearing collateral.
• Implement a Minter Factory, enabling external teams to launch custom minters using a standardized framework.

Enhance Developer Friendliness

• Overhaul documentation, tooling, and infrastructure to make Bao easier to build on and contribute to.
• Standardize and automate development processes to reduce friction and speed up product rollouts.

Strengthen Trust and Liquidity

• Build trust through enhanced transparency, security measures, and partnerships with reputable protocols.
• Focus on creating sticky liquidity by offering high-yield, high-utility products that attract long-term participants.
• Expand the use of BTC-backed collateral to tap into the large Bitcoin market cap, prioritizing decentralized and fully unwinding assets.

Foster Collaborative Growth

• Deepen relationships with partners like fx protocol, leveraging shared expertise and recognition to boost Bao’s profile.
• Explore additional collaborations and integrations with protocols and ecosystems to expand utility and reach.
• Launch a new booster program based on the Aladdin dao implementation.