Greetings community,

On May 1st, we will begin to reveal an internal initiative, story, and brand that outlines the future of Shade Protocol. The first two years of Shade Protocol was sharply focused on building the key building blocks for unstoppable finance — a world of decentralized money and products that help people reclaim their autonomy & digital sovereignty.

The road has been arduous.

In early 2024 we collectively had a chance to take a deep breathe and reflect. We considered what has been built, how it was built, and why it was built. We’ve built the following primitives:

• SILK (unstoppable private stablecoin tracking a basket of currencies & commodities)

• ShadeSwap (DEX that protects your privacy)

• ShadeLend (private collateralized positions)

• Bridge (onboard & wrap public assets into private assets)

• Staking (passively earn real yield for securing Shade Protocol)

• Bonds (protocol treasury management tool)

• Transaction History (examine your private transactions)

  
  

A deep analysis left us dissatisfied. This is an absurd amount of product; what is stopping growth? What is disabling our ability to onboard millions into true unstoppable finance?

https://www.iflscience.com/how-a-helmet-and-a-bulletriddled-plane-perfectly-demonstrates-survivor-bias-60930

Enter survivorship bias.

You see, we started noticing a trend — thousands of new users were interacting or checking on Shade Protocol for the first time that never came back.

It was troubling.

The brand penetration of Shade Protocol is consistently generating new users, which considering our size is somewhat remarkable. However, when users actually landed on the product suite and tried to start using it we began to uncover a common trend:

Shade Protocol is too hard to use.

The core contributors began to talk to users. Hop on calls. We gathered the harshest feedback from the fiercest critics. It gave us the realization that if we continue down the path of building more and more complexity into the product suite, it will go unused. The beautiful, innovative pieces of the DeFi puzzle that have set the stage so well would slowly be wiped off the table of the Free Market.

Utility without simplicity is unused utility.

At it’s worst, complex utility is a repellent.

Naturally, the current users are okay with the user experience. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be here continuing to use the app. This consumer survivorship bias has perhaps blinded us to the truth of the quality of what we have built.

Await our next blog post on May 1st, where we reveal the next stage of Shade Protocol’s evolution — a quest for simplicity that will redefine unstoppable finance, expanding its reach in ways yet unseen.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shade_Protocol
Telegram: https://t.me/ShadeProtocol

——————————————————————————————————————————

Information provided in this post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute formal investment advice. Please read the full disclaimer at shadeprotocol.io/disclaimer before relying on any information herein.