The SigmaUSD stablecoin has been deployed by the community and is live and ready for all Ergonauts to use at https://sigmausd.io/
After several months of hearing whispers about a stablecoin being built and teasers being thrown around, the Ergo community enjoyed an information-packed Ergo Summit 2021 which explained everything they needed to know about the AgeUSD Protocol; a novel crypto-backed algorithmic stablecoin protocol that has been created in joint partnership by the Ergo Foundation, EMURGO, and IOG on top of the Ergo Blockchain.
In addition to several talks about the protocol itself, the specs, smart contracts, headless dApp (off-chain code), and a CLI app for testing, were all provided to the community at the Ergo Summit 2021. This release packed together all of the design & theoretical knowledge with the tools to deploy the dApp on-chain.
With many discussions across Twitter, Discord, Telegram, and the Ergo Forum, the community came to an agreement about how they wanted to move forward with deploying the dApp themselves.
A community-wide vote was held to decide on the exact names for the stablecoin and the reservecoin (the other coin part of the AgeUSD protocol). After many days of back-and-forth on what would make the most sense, the community landed on “SigmaUSD” for the stablecoin and “SigmaRSV” for the reservecoin.
For those who are new to the Ergo ecosystem, “Sigma” refers to the core of what powers Ergo’s cryptography & smart contracts, that being Sigma Protocols. No other blockchain in the cryptocurrency sphere uses Sigma Protocols, and thus this one of the strong selling points of what makes Ergo extremely unique. They enable privacy-preserving primitives to be used for cheap by anyone in the ecosystem, which has future potential for business/enterprise use cases, and more.
The Ergo ecosystem has a growing trend of Sigma Protocol-inspired themes with recently released projects such as the Ergo dApp explorer, The Sigmaverse. Thus the community-chosen SigmaUSD fits perfectly in place, and is a testament to the community’s appreciation for all of the impressive tech which is embedded within Ergo itself.
Jumping back to the deployment itself, long-time community member “DarkSideOfBrrrrr” announced shortly after Ergo Summit 2021 that he would deploy the smart contract on-chain himself. He ensured that he would keep the contracts unaltered and be transparent about the process. (These claims have since been verified by community developers once the contract was deployed on Feb. 25th)
A dApp isn’t complete with only a bare-bones smart contract available on-chain, thus community developer “Anon_real” jumped into the ring shortly after DarkSIdeOfBrrrr’s announcement and agreed to build a frontend web dApp to target his deployment. Community member “Glasgowm” also took part by working with Anon_real to deploy the frontend web dApp for all Ergonauts to easily access and use.
After working on all of these pieces of the puzzle for the next month (while keeping the community updated on their progress), DarkSideOfBrrrrr officially announced and deployed the final version of SigmaUSD on February 25th precisely on Block #432917. (The exact transaction can be found here on the explorer)
Within a few hours , Anon_real and Glasgowm worked to make the required edits to the frontend to target the deployed SigmaUSD dApp, package it all up, and officially launch it publicly for the whole community. As such, thanks to all of their hard work, the SigmaUSD stablecoin is now live and available for all to use: https://sigmausd.io/
This marks a historic moment as the first major DeFi dApp to be launched in the Ergo ecosystem. As such, SigmaUSD and SigmaRSV act as the very first DeFi primitives available for all Ergonauts. Furthermore , as these two tokens are 100% native assets they are composable with any future DeFi dApp. This thus allows dApp developers to expose the ability to go short/long Ergs in any dApp they are building without any extra work. (Reference the explanations/presentation slides in the github repo for more information about how these tokens and the protocol as a whole work)
Ergonauts all over the world were so thrilled by the release of the SigmaUSD dApp that it managed to accrue over $1.5million dollars worth of Ergs in the reserves within 12 hours of the website launch.
The Ergo DeFi ecosystem is just beginning to bloom, and it is clear that with so much interest in this first DeFi dApp we are only going to see more and more being developed and launched. With so much excitement coming out within just the first two months of 2021, this year looks like it’s going to be one to remember for Ergo and all Ergonauts.
What are you waiting for? Head to https://sigmausd.io/ and see what all of the Ergonauts are raving about for yourself.