Bobby’s Gem Bags — Bag No2: Polkastarter $POLS
Welcome back to Bobby’s Gem Bags — if you’ve missed my introductory article, feel free to pop over and check it out now. You can also check out our previous entry, $ALBT. If you’re a TL/DR type, I’m Bobby, I got a nice $UNI airdrop and I’ve decided to divide it into 100USDT bags that I’m gonna try and fill up with crypto gems to see what happens. It’s tons of fun.
So, as you may know, my mate The DeFi Naut have decided to start a channel dedicated to seeking out quality DeFi projects over at DeFi Raccoons. What we didn’t count on is that our growing community will help us unearth so many good projects that we barely have time to cover everything.
While I was researching PlotX, one of the projects we’ve covered in our series on perspective soon-to-list projects, Raccoon’s Nest 🦝, has listed (and boy, was it a listing). I’m of course talking about Polkastarter and their $POLS token. As soon as the dust settled, I’ve jumped in with a small bag and made mark on Twitter, getting back to my article. Since then, there has been a massive exchange of volume at ~$0.3 and started moving upwards, touching my profit taking target at x2 so I’ve sold half my bag as per the rules of Bobby’s Gem Bags.
And all that happened before I had time to piece together this article - just goes to show at what pace this space is moving. Nevertheless, we’re covering Polkastarter as a Bobby’s Gem Bag, it certainly showed of potential already.
Polkastarter DEX
When it comes to DeFi, decentralized exchanges have become all the rage when it comes to trading, and the biggest one of them, Uniswap, now rivals conventional centralized exchanges in volume. DEXes are slowly making their way into the mainstream of the crypto ethos and Polkastarter is setting out to build one. However, the team is aiming to add features you can’t currently find on decentralized exchanges, or at best, you can find them scattered across a number of platforms. These include crosschain token pools, crosschain auctions as well as password-protected OTC deals. Of course, these features will be implemented over time, according to the roadmap below.
In addition to these ambitious goals, the team is building it on Polkadot, an ecosystem which doesn’t currently feature a prominent DEX such as Uniswap is on ETH, so they could have the first-movers advantage to the entire DOT ecosystem. They’ve also updated their lightpaper into a whitepaper since we last talked about them, so take a look at the details of the DEX features and roadmaps here.
$POLS metrics
Everything described above is to be powered by the $POLS token, which is now successfully trading on Uniswap. The first and most important piece of utility comes from the transaction fees paid in $POLS. However, the team repeatedly stated they are contemplating between building their own parachain on Polkadot or piggy-backing onto an existing one. If they go for the latter, this could mean the utility will probably shift to discounted fees, which isn’t bad as such, as we’ve seen plenty of exchange tokens do extremely well regardless ($BNB much?), but it would take away some of the appeal.
The rest of the value proposition hinges on staking - staking $POLS for pool creation, pool access and governance benefits. While staking has been around for a long time, it still serves as a great mechanism of locking in value and relieving sell pressure at the same time.
In true DeFi fashion, the team announced an LP incentive program as well, which should go live with the Ethereum MVP launch later this year and reward liquidity providers. It remains to be seen how this is implemented and what impact will it have on the platform, but similar past programs have been very well received, generating a large interest for the project, which could serve as a great introduction before the shift to Polkadot.
When it comes to the unlocking schedule, things are pretty much what you’d expect from any recent project, with the majority of the tokens becoming available in the first few months following the listing, but at the moment, there are only 17.875M $POLS in circulation, contributing to a small marketcap that leaves a lot of room for growth.
The Team
As we’ve mentioned before, the data on how big is the team currently working on Polkastarter is quite scarce, and this lead to some FUD that the project isn’t associated with the Polkadot ecosystem at all. These rumors have been put to rest by the recent announcement of a partnership with Mantra DAO as well as being featured on polkaproject.com as a part of the DOT ecosystem.
The team has recently added two new advisors, John Patrick Mullin from Mantra DAO and Matthew Dibb, a partner at Astronaut Capital and the COO of Stack Fund. Both coming from impressive backgrounds, Mullin is to focus on ways of growing the ecosystem userbase while Dibb is to offer his expertise in project fundraising to better facilitate team looking to start of their project using Polkastarter. Both additions make sense, especially considering their advice can be implemented from the earliest development stages.
Final thoughts
Well, I’ve already unveiled some of my thoughts in the series of excited tweets, but here are they nonetheless. Polkastarter is an ambitions project that might have first-mover advantage into the Polkadot ecosystem when it comes to DEXes. While there is competition (Polkaswap), their plans offer less of a rounded-off picture than Polkastarter currently does, so even if they don’t have the movers advantage, they are likely to push them out.
At the time of writing, $POLS can be traded on Uniswap and it’s currently going for 715POLS per 1ETH which works out to about $0.47 per token. However, I’ve gotten my Bobby’s Gem Bag at $0.32, some time after the launch and since the token even managed to touch $0.9 for a short period of time, I’ve sold off half of my bag to recover the initial investment at x2 the price, as per our rules. So, from now on, I’m keeping the rest of the bag (still up by cca. 50%) to see where $POLS can take me.
If you’d like to discuss your thoughts on $POLS or any other token, please join our DeFi Discussion in
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Now for a disclaimer — I’m not a financial advisor, anything you read on my Medium isn’t financial advice, it’s a log of myself doing due diligence on projects, please verify any and all information presented (error reporting welcome) and make your own decisions.
