Introducing Kartera Diversified Token and Swap Protocol

Background

Several Defi project have emerged in the last couple of years that have redefined investing and trading. Most of these projects are community governed offering a path away from traditional centralized control. Uniswap is a leader in the decentralized crypto trading space with daily trading volume exceeding $1 billion. Other projects like Maker through financial engineering have created stable coins that track the price of USD. Projects like Curve.fi and Balancer.finance generalized Uniswap and given more flexibility to users to manage their crypto portfolio.

The Idea

We have created Kartera a diversified multi token basket. Traditionally, diversification requires you to lock your holdings in a portfolio. On the other hand Defi projects have have found creative ways to earn returns on your holdings through lending and as provider of liquidity. Our goal is to combine the two: create a diversified basket that not only smooths out volatility, but also generates returns by using available liquidity. This is somewhat similar to Curve.fi and Balancer.finance. However, we make it much simpler. Locking tokens in a Kartera basket offers diversification without the complexities of other protocols while still generating returns for liquidity providers. If you have tokens that are constituents of the basket you may deposit them to diversify and start earning returns from trading commissions. When a user deposits their tokens in a basket they receive basket tokens equivalent to their share of the basket. The pricing of constituents and basket tokens is based on price feeds from oracles like Uniswap and Chain-link. Swap exchange rates are also priced from these oracles.

The Protocol

The Protocol is governed by Kartera Governance Token (KART).
When a user (LP) deposits their tokens they receive a token representing their share of that particular basket.
LPs can collect KART by locking their basket tokens in SWAP Farm.
Traders can swap between different basket holdings for a small fee (fee ~0.3% of trade size).
The swap fee is shared among the LPs and the holders of staked Kartera Governance token (KART).
The maximum trade size is capped at 10%.
To protect LPs from whales, the swap fee increases linearly with every percent share of liquidity that is drained from the basket. This means a trader looking to swap tokens and drain 10% of liquidity will end up paying 3% in fees.
The token weights are not fixed, however, when the protocol becomes widely accepted the weights should resemble that of the broad crypto market.
All pricing is done by aggregating feeds from Uniswap, more price oracles will be added later.

Incentives for Liquidity Provider

I am sure you are thinking, “OK, another Defi project and why should I bring liquidity here.” To us the answer is clear:

Diversify! Add your tokens to a Kartera Basket and diversify your risk.
Smooth out your APR, fees are shared among all LPs of a basket regardless of the token supplied.
Mining KART Tokens gives you claim to a share of fees. Early adopters will receive 10x KART tokens offering you a big piece of the pie!

Incentives for Traders

We offer swaps for any tokens without any slippage. Trades will happen at the mid price that is the best available price in the market.
Traders can easily bet one token’s performance against a broad market.

Basket Constituents at Launch

One swap basket will be created at launch. Initial constituents are 10 Ethereum Tokens (including Ether) with the high market cap and liquidity on Uniswap plus high trading volume.
ETH, WBTC, LINK, UNI, AAVE, MKR, SNX
More constituents can be added and other baskets will be created.

KART Token Distribution

KART token’s maximum supply is capped at 1,000,000,000.
Mining of KART tokens will begin 50,000 blocks (~ 8+ days) after launch.
1,000 KART tokens will be minted per block for the next 50,000 blocks.
Afterwards the mint rate will drop to 100 KART tokens per block.
The governance community can decide to lower the mint rate after that.

Development & KART Price Stabilizer and Marketing (PSF) Fund

To ensure long term developer and creator commitment 10% (100,000,000) of KART total supply will be set aside in a time lock with a cliff date of 6 months from launch date and end date of 3 years.
Additional 10,000,000 KART tokens will be minted to the creators account as PSF.
PSF will be used to offer liquidity on Uniswap at ~$0.00001 per KART token.
PSF will also be used to cover any transaction costs.
A part of PSF will be set aside towards marketing. KART tokens will be offered to Twitter and YouTube influencers.

Swap Fee Structure

0.3% of trade size is applied as fee for swaps that drain < 1% liquidity in any token.
Additional 0.3% is applied for every 1% thereafter.
Of the entire fee collected from a trade, only 0.05% of trade size is distributed among KART token holders. This fees is deposited in KART Farm as newly minted basket tokens.

Security Audit

Currently, the contracts have not undergone a security audit. The contracts are simple enough and we have done exhaustive unit tests. Feel free to go over them. The core contracts of the project are in beta, beware of the risks.

Smart Contracts

All contracts are available at https://github.com/kartera-org/kartera-contracts with WTFPL license.

KarteraToken: Native token with governance and voting (Copied from Comp)
SwapBasket: Token basket, holds tokens deposited. Owned by KART Gov protocol. Owned by Timelock and Managed by creator/developer.
SwapFarm: Deposit Basket tokens to farm KART
KartFarm: Stake KART token to earn Basket Tokens
GovernorAlpha: Compound governance protocol (Copied from Comp)
TimeLock: Owner of SwapBasket (Copied from Comp)
TreasuryVester: Development fund time lock(copied from Uniswap)
Libraries
SwapBasketLib: Implementation of SwapBasket functionalities
SwapFarmLib: Implementation of SwapFarm functionalities
KarteraPriceOracle: Aggregates prices from different price oracles

We are continually testing the contracts and if you find any bugs please let us know.

Time Table

Launch date: 03/27/2021
Start minting Kart Tokens @ 1,000 KART / block from block# 12,173,285
End of 10x bonus Kart Token on block 12,223,285
Swap trading begins around block 12,173,285
Kart Tokens mint rate @ 100 KART / block after block 12,223,285

Platform — How to use

Mainnet: http://kartera.org
Kovan testnet: https://kovan.kartera.org

Acknowledgements

Compound token/governance/timelock contract
Uniswap TreasuryVester contract
Sushiswap’s success story was a great inspiration. We have read their contracts and you may find our approach similar to them in many ways.