It's been half a year since Peanut DeFi was launched, so it's time to write about it. So what is Peanut DeFi?

A Replicable DeFi Platform

Peanut is a DeFi platform based on Staking-crowdfunding (a stake-mining model) on Steem blockchain.

DeFi has been popular since 2020, but it has only propagated on a few chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Tron, Heco, and hundreds of blockchain communities are still unable to participate in DeFi. Why is that so?

Blockchain Communities + DeFi

A very obvious reason is that DeFi is an ecosystem and must be supported by many core components. First of all, in order for a blockchain platform to form a DeFi ecosystem, it must have huge amount of valuable underlying assets. For example, the prosperity of DeFi on Ethereum is because there are not only ETH and ERC20, but also cross-chain assets such as WBTC.

Secondly, the current DeFi ecological products are developed using smart contracts, and EVM supporting smart contracts is required. Finally, for the DeFi ecosystem to flourish, three basic components are needed: stable coins, decentralized transactions, and decentralized lending.

These components are a tremendous workload even for Binance, and many small and medium-sized blockchain platforms are basically unable to undertake them. Even if the blockchain is as large as Salana, EOS, Avalanche, Near and others
worth billions or even tens of billions of dollars, it takes a lot of time to form its own DeFi ecosystem.

Fig. 1 Combinatorial DeFi Ecology

The Steem blockchain cannot have its own DeFi platform. It does not have smart contracts and the three basic components. The market value of STEEM is only 300 million US dollars. What have we done under these conditions? How to build a DeFi platform, Peanut, for the Steem community?

Peanut's innovation is using the mature DeFi ecosystem (Ethereum, BSC, Tron, etc.), combined with cross-chain and PoS consensus mechanisms, to build an exclusive DeFi platform for STEEM asset holders. STEEM holders can participate in stake-mining (in the form of staking-crowdfunding), liquidity mining, pay PNUT for upvotes, and DAO governance, etc.

Fig. 2 Blockchain Community + DeFi Ecology

Trust-less Stake-mining

Although Figure 2 provided a possibility to build DeFi on blockchains that do not support smart contracts, the current decentralized cross-chain operation is extremely immature. Polkadot and Cosmos are also in the early stages of construction, and DeFi on various platforms cannot be widely spread.

Peanut DeFi first realized such a dilemma, combined with Steem's underlying consensus mechanism -- DPoS consensus, made some innovations on it, and developed trustless stake-mining.

The PoS chain has a staking economy. Holders of PoS chain tokens can stake Tokens on the PoS chain to obtain voting rights. Traditional staking service providers help Token holders to centrally operate this part of the voting rights, obtain staking proceeds, and return them to Token holders.

The most important thing is that the entire process is completely trust-less. The user's Tokens are staked on the PoS chain. There is no need to trust any third party, and the third party cannot use the user's assets. Staking rewards show that the value of staked assets is as high as 111.7 billion U.S. dollars, and the annual staking profit reaches 16 billion U.S. dollars.

Fig. 3 Staking-crowdfunding

Peanut uses such a mechanism to develop staking-crowdfunding. STEEM holders only need to stake their STEEM upvoting rights to Peanut to obtain Peanut Community Token (PNUT). This innovation alone allowed Peanut's platform TVL to reach $5 million.

Steem Cross-chain + DeFi

On the basis of staking-crowdfunding, we have developed a cross-chain asset transfer and staked-asset liquidity protocol to help STEEM and staked STEEM asset holders to transfer their assets to the Tron network so that they can participate in many products of Peanut DeFi.

We further launched PNUT mining by depositing TSP (Tethered STEEM Power), PNUT mining by depositing TSTEEM (STEEM's equivalent asset on Tron), PNUT mining by depositing PNUT-TRX LP, PNUT mining by depositing TSP-TRX LP and other DeFi products. In this way, Peanut, the DeFi platform serving the Steem blockchain, is already very complete. Members of the Steem blockchain community can easily convert STEEM into TRX, USDT and other assets, participate in stake-mining, liquidity mining, and etc.

In the future, we expect Peanut's contracts to be built on BSC. Binance Bridge has supported the cross-chain transfer of PoS chain assets such as DOT, ATOM, ADA, EOS, NEAR, AVAX, etc. We can easily build a Peanut-like DeFi platforms for communities on these blockchains.

By the end of 2020, a project for Nutbox v2 was initiated, and the v2 beta version will be launched in May to help communities building DeFi platforms on the PoS chain .

A Replicable DAO

In the early days of Peanut DeFi, it was just a DAO. In addition to stake-mining, liquidity mining, and TSP Token deposit mining, 10% PNUT generated per block will enter the Peanut.DAO Fund. This DAO Fund is managed by PNUT holders, and through the proposal voting system, encourages community to contribute to the development, operation, and market of Peanut DeFi.

In just six months, the community has submitted and voted on 18 proposals on the Peanut proposal system, and the Peanut.DAO Fund has paid 4.05 million PNUT to the community. Driven by the community, Peanut has gradually become a global DAO, with 6 global community ambassadors and hundreds of active participants.

A Replicable Content Media + NFT Platform

Peanut builds the community blog -- blog.nutbox.io based on the Steem blockchain. Community users can post on the community blog to get STEEM rewards, pay PNUT to get upvotes from Peanut, social interaction, and build Peanut together.

The Peanut team is also developing NFT components on the basis of community content media to support the NFT-ization of users' high-quality content to promote the transaction of high-quality content and bring high returns to the creators. Driven by the cryptos social community, content media + NFT will spread more widely to more ordinary users.