Path to Axis
In the past few months we've made significant strides, launching Axis on several Layer 2s and establishing strong proof points for token launches using our auction infrastructure. While there's much to celebrate, we’re even more excited about the upcoming news on the horizon. But before we dive into what’s next, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on the journey that brought us here.
The Beginning — Bond Protocol
Our story began in October 2022 with the launch of Bond Protocol, a permissionless product suite designed to optimize DAO treasuries through its unique bond offering. Using bonds, protocols are able to acquire new assets by issuing vested tokens at a discount to market price. The protocol introduced a variety of bond types, each using different auction mechanisms and vesting types to meet diverse needs.
At the time, our mission was to solve two critical challenges:
- Limited treasury diversification options: Projects looking to diversify or acquire assets had to rely on open markets, where slippage and price impact posed significant challenges — especially when involving native tokens with low liquidity.
- Inefficient token distribution: Many projects distributed large portions of their token supply to incentivize usage or liquidity provisioning, but these traditional methods often led to misaligned incentives and mercenary capital. This birthed the narrative for Protocol-Owned-Liquidity, a strategy that Bond Protocol helped enable and is still widely used amongst DeFi protocols.
Bond Protocol successfully helped raise over $200M for various protocols. While we remain confident in its value proposition, we saw a broader opportunity: auctions in DeFi could go far beyond treasury management. On-chain capital formation is a largely untapped space in need of better solutions, and innovation has been slow to meet that demand. This led to the creation of Axis.