A 2nd place finish at Celo Camp
The amazing team at upright published a story on Kyle and I back in 2021 after winning 2nd place at the celo camp startup accelerator. What we were building at the time didn’t work out but the experience overall was a special one so I thought I’d repost here.
Read the orignal version: https://www.celocamp.com/post/dahlia-finance
Dahlia: From their university’s blockchain club to Dahlia, a leverage yield farming protocol on Celo
Jul 5, 2021
When Kyle and I met at our university’s blockchain club, we both already had a deep fascination with the emerging decentralized finance stack and connected to the mission of enabling permissionless access to financial services through open source software. Even more exciting to us, as computer science students, was seeing the plethora of the protocols that still needed to be built especially on the Celo blockchain. Soon after our finals concluded, we started Celo Camp and began building Dahlia.
Co-founders Robert and Kyle
Why did you join Celo Camp and build on Celo?
The fantastic community, tooling, and ample technical advantages made building on Celo an easy decision and superbly swift experience. With a DeFi ecosystem still in its infancy, we also felt like we had an enormous opportunity to accelerate its growth by building out a core money lego.
What did you build during camp?
Initially, our idea was to bring over the innovation of on-chain zero-coupon bonds through a fixed rate lending protocol. As time went on however, we came across the more serious and immediate issue of fractured liquidity and low interest rates. Given how early stage crypto is, liquidity is highly fragmented between chains, making it a significant impediment to capital efficiency and utilization of funds. So through the invaluable guidance of Ian Macilanao (Ubeswap) and mentorship from Ryan Berkun (Teller Finance) we made a quick pivot to building a liquidity engine for Celo that produces very high interest rates on idle assets.
Can you tell us about your Celo Camp experience?
The pivot spurred some of the most memorable moments of our Celo Camp experience. In the final stretches before demo day, we bootstrapped a new logo from our fantastic UX designer Ann Gao and rewrote the deployment scripts with the help of the technically savvy Brian Li (Poof.cash).
Those moments shaped what was an amazing experience with Celo Camp. Each week was not only highly engaging but critical in accelerating our projects development. From lessons on tokeneconomics to UX audits, all of it was foundational in our acceptance to the Idea Fair. But if there’s anything, it was the thoughtful input from Alon Shavit and Rachel Jakob that ultimately won us our second place finish and fundraising.
Next Steps:
In the next couple of weeks, we plan to deploy an audited version of our protocol to the Celo mainnet. Due to the high yields, access to undercollateralized leverage, and ease of use for both yield farmers and lenders, we are expecting a successful launch that will hopefully cement Dahlia as a core building block on Celo, so much so that others will build new and innovative protocols directly on top of it. All of this is in support of our core mission, to offer permissionless access to high interest on savings for anyone with a mobile phone and an internet connection.
Special thanks to everyone at cLabs, Upright, and Flori Ventures.
For more information:
Website: dahlia.finance
