Introducing $YBX

Solana's inflation protected, decentralized stable asset

Today, we unveil the YBX whitepaper to our earliest supporters. This is our first flagship product built on the foundation we’ve established with marginfi. We’re excited to dive into the details of what this means, but first we think it’s important to highlight how we got here. Here’s our announcement on Twitter.

At the start of 2023, many people had lost faith in the Solana network. The media hounded on FTX’s involvement with Solana, defi teams were crushed by the rapid decline of SOL, and opportunistic players had moved on from Solana to chase other short term options.

However, everything we needed didn’t change.

• The developer community on Solana molded into an incredible group of teams like Jito, Drift, Phoenix and so many more.

• Liquidity on Solana hung tight. ~70% of the network remained staked to Solana validators (billions). A massive pool of capital we’re focused on converting into LSTs like $LST.

• A differentiated group of users stuck to Solana. They fell in love with its fast, low-fee experience and its increasingly better UX.

• Solana only got better. The team at Firedancer strengthened our conviction on the magnitude for which Solana will improve.

At mrgn, we continued to build. Around March of 2023, we unveiled mrgnlend. Since then we’ve grown to become the largest defi protocol on Solana. We launched $LST, the highest yielding Solana liquid staking token – meaning if you’re holding SOL, you won’t get more staking rewards, MEV capture, or lower fees/commission (it’s 0) than with LST. We launched a radically new UX redefining the lending experience – and we have a new mobile experience coming soon.

Altogether, we’ve set the foundation to become Solana’s liquidity layer. Teams across the ecosystem recognized this and started building on our infrastructure. We’re excited to support Meteora, Fluxbot, Splitwave, Flexlend, JuicerFi, DreamOS, Heimdall, and a plethora of unannounced teams we’ll bring to the forefront soon.

YBX will be at the heart of everything we’ve built thus far. The two most important assets on Solana are SOL and USDC. On marginfi’s liquidity layer, we’re replacing that with LST and YBX. 

We invite more teams to come and work with us! You have marginfi’s community, liquidity, security, risk management, and off-chain systems to help you get started. We also have an incentive program we’ll soon be rolling out that we’d love to connect with builders on.

If you’re a larger Solana defi power user, we invite you to get in touch with our team. To start YBX’s integration journey across Solana defi, we will work with a group of stellar partners on bootstrapping liquidity. This will come with a YBX incentive program that is worth your time.

Now we can dive into the details of YBX. Our whitepaper v1 can be accessed here. This whitepaper does not yet include our plan to pass lending yields from LST minters/depositors to YBX value accrual.. We will be working to increase LST borrowing activity on marginfi before including the resulting higher LST lending yield in YBX’s value accrual. If you’re building products around LST borrowing, get in touch with our team!

YBX is about to enter its audit period. We expect this to last for 2 weeks and are targeting middle of March for YBX’s rollout. If you hold significant balances on-chain and have a single risk vector to Circle or Tether while earning no yield, we invite you to get in touch. We are crafting a YBX incentive program to bootstrap initial liquidity and believe this program will be worth your time.

Finally, we will be running a public campaign on LST and YBX as soon as YBX goes live. SOL and USDC are currently the most utilized assets on Solana, but both of these products are constantly losing value to inflation – missing out on staking rewards, MEV capture, and lending yield. LST and YBX are the inflation protected, optimized equivalent to SOL and USD exposure.

We are working with teams to make these tokens central components on marginfi’s liquidity layer, while also compounding the use case of other LSTs and tokens. Current and future holders of LST and YBX will be a central part of our incentive campaign – we will update past, current, and future accrued points for those utilizing LST and YBX in defi once YBX goes live.

I’d like to make note of the stellar team that is bringing YBX to the finish line. In no apparent order, Cavey, Jakob, Edgar, man0s, Adam, Anders, Dan, Kobe, Lara, Pearce, and myself. We are hiring by the way :)

This is just the start of YBX. We’re not even at Day 1, but the excitement is rapidly building. If you want to be ready to mint YBX on Day 1, make sure you’re lending LSTs into marginfi — that will be what collateralizes your YBX, making you eligible to mint!