Becoming Exponential — A Roadmap for 2021

Greetings From the Exponent Team 👋

We’d like to introduce our roadmap for 2021 covering what we’ve done so far, what we’re currently doing, and what we have planned for the rest of the year. If you’re unfamiliar with Exponent, you can check out our litepaper and website. If you want to save it for later, here’s a TL;DR:

Exponent is the first open DeFi platform for crypto alpha curation, catalyzing the growth of asset management in DeFi. We’re providing a gateway to factors-based strategies to bring financial empowerment and freedom to everyone on a global scale.

The Exponent platform provides users with access to financial products that match their risk and return preferences. Beyond simple market-cap-weighted baskets, our products may take into account a multitude of factors such as growth, sectors, liquidity, or volatility, forming a basket of assets that are curated and backed by analysis. We enable users to express their investment views and find resonance in thoughtful strategies.

Our main objective for 2021 is to ship the first product out to the public as the first step towards the Exponent vision of unbridled financial access and opportunity.

Q1 & Q2 2021 (January — June): What We’ve Done ✅

TL;DR

• Meet the Fennecs

• Contract development

• Application design

• Business setup

• Litepaper

Q1 and Q2’s primary focal points were business setup and finalizing V1's design.

Meet the Fennecs 🦊

Since coming together earlier this year, we’ve been extremely busy focusing on validating and optimizing our design based on market developments and user feedback. With so many exciting things happening, we’re continuously seeking innovations in the space. Today, our core team at Exponent is nine fennecs strong, comprising of crypto natives and TradFi converts 😼

Product & Engineering 💻

The product and engineering side focused on initial application design and smart contract development. This included integration tests, establishing the user journey, prototyping, as well as finalizing Exponent V1’s architecture and smart contract development.

Let’s Talk Business 💼

We launched our website, Twitter, and Medium, and began taking signups for early product access. We also announced our presence to the world after building in the shadows with our first blog post, Introducing Exponent.ai, explaining our mission and vision, which was further expanded with the release of our litepaper.

In parallel, we conducted user interviews, persona interviews, and competitive landscape analysis in order to validate our idea and plan our market positioning.

Q3 2021 (July — September): What We’re Up To 🛠️

TL;DR

• Vault V1 backend development

• Vault V1 frontend development

• Contract audit process

• Closing the seed round

• Public Discord launch

• Alpha release

• Testnet dApp

• Internal and external user testing

The primary focus for this quarter is to get our gated alpha release out the door and build out the core community of strategists and end-users.

Engineering 💻

On the smart contract side, We introduced a new feature that would reduce the gas cost of a deposit by 2–10 times compared to the likes of similar products, making the entry cost competitive and closer to the deposit cost of lending pools such as AAVE and Compound. The new issuance design will expedite the TVL growth process!

At the end of August, we sent our smart contracts off to Quanstamp for audit

With our contracts under audit, engineering tasks shifted towards the client application and backend service. We developed the first backend service with a simple portfolio rebalance feature, with a more complex rebalance algorithm currently under research. We finished developing the client dApp, set up a testnet environment so that real users can interact with the Exponent platform application without having to install anything on their machine, and also began conducting user testing.

Audits 🔧

We received our initial audit report on September 10. We’re currently working to fix the issues identified in preparation for our alpha release.

Closing the Seed Round 🌱

We officially closed our seed round earlier this quarter and made the formal announcement at the end of August. You can read the announcement here.

Discord Launch 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

We launched our public Discord earlier in September! Join our server here or via our website to discuss our platform, share new vault ideas, hang out with other community members, or chat with the Exponent team!

Alpha Release 🚀

Our ultimate goal for this quarter is for a gated testnet alpha release. This release will consist of the Exponent platform and the first vault. More details about our first vault and its underlying thesis and strategy, as well as details about the alpha release will be published soon. Keep an 👀 out for that!

The goal of the alpha release is to gather product feedback and issues from real users to help improve Exponent as we gear up for the beta and public releases in the next quarter.

Q4 2021 (October — December): What’s brewing for the rest of the year ☕

TL;DR

• Beta release

• Development of new features

• Extensive testing

• Mainnet public open beta

• Code freeze and cutting our first V1 engineering release

For the last quarter of the year, we’ll be focusing on the beta and public releases, including revamping the client dApp based on feedback from internal and external users. We will also be conducting extensive testing, fixing any issues reported, and developing more complex portfolio rebalance algorithms as we get ready for the public release.

Wrapping It All Up 🎁

That’s it for our plans for 2021! If you have any questions, join our Discord and ask the team, or reach out to us on Twitter.