Euler Labs’ 2022 send off

Wow, what a year! Where to begin? The Euler protocol has gone from a few lines of code on mainnet to competing with the leading lending and borrowing protocols. Despite some ups and downs in the industry, the Euler protocol has persisted throughout! The Euler Labs team has been equally busy to match. The following is a brief overview of what the team and the protocol have been up to.

People

The Euler Labs team has overseen some incredible growth. Given the scale of this growth, we’ll only touch briefly on the highlights:

• Brandon Neal joined the Labs team as COO. He spent 20 years on Wall Street, 10 years of which were at the NY Fed.
• Maryam Beria, previously a Senior Product Manager at Ridgeline, joined us as Head of Strategy and Operations.
• Wojtek Zajac, came on as a tech lead - more on him in this thread
• Lee Mount, an ex-tradfi trader (MS and Citadel), joined and is actively contributing to EulerSwap
• Alicia Katz, Euler Labs’ Head of Marketing, came aboard as well. Alicia had spent the last decade and a half in media.

Other areas in the Labs team have grown too: community, ecosystem growth, front end development, smart contract engineering, governance systems implementation, open-source DeFi risk tooling and writing (among other areas). For a complete list, see https://www.eulerlabs.com/#team.

Euler Labs will continue to invest in people and build on the vision of an “Olympic team” in 2023.

Excursions

Euler Labs team members have been far and wide this year, with representatives visiting almost every continent. The Labs team visited four main events this year: Paris Blockchain Week, Consensus, Messari Mainnet, and ETH Lisbon. Paris was especially exciting since for the first time, many Labs people actually met each other. We made friends with many at Consensus in Austin, despite the incredible heat.

At Messari Mainnet, we spoke onstage and hosted a happy hour at one of NYC’s most beloved beer gardens. Finally, Euler Labs sponsored the ETH Lisbon hackathon, where Michael was invited to adjudicate. See the hackers in the image above (they won a prize for Gnosis). Euler Labs also sent representatives to the Blockchain Oracle Summit, Permissionless, Korea Blockchain Week, Devconnect, TOKEN2049 and ETH CC. It’s been a truly global year for the team.  Michael, Brandon, and Alicia were all fortunate enough to be invited to engage with policymakers in DC on responsible development, including on Capitol Hill and a special visit to The White House.

Euler updates

Euler has seen a huge number of updates over the course of this year. To begin with, and most importantly, the DAO was launched with the aim of decentralising control of the protocol. This has been quietly proceeding on the forum, with many delegates participating in Euler DAO.

In terms of contract improvements, governance was further assisted with the implementation of Tally. Countless audits happened on the protocol (and will continue to), and Euler partnered with Immunefi to offer a bug bounty for any security researchers. It also partnered with Sherlock to get TVL insurance (alongside an audit).

For users looking to get more information about their positions in Euler, it’s been a great year. The Account Health Simulator gave them a good insight as to what effects different market conditions would have. The account spy is also a great tool that launched, enabling users to see how other users are operating Euler. Dune dashboards, DeFillama tools, subgraphs, social media bots, APY tools and more have been included this year. Many are included in this roundup.

The gauge system has been reworked to include more assets while also ensuring core Euler assets remain sufficiently considered. Governance has been extremely active and important to euler so for a list of all changes please see https://snapshot.org/#/eulerdao.eth.

Euler by the numbers

Euler has had a good year in terms of clear metric growth.

Users, the primary metric for any growing DeFi protocol, are steadily increasing. Over the course of the year, some 6,000 users came to know and love Euler’s innovations over existing lending and borrowing protocols. In addition, many different DeFi protocols began to build on top of Euler such Sushi, Angle, Opyn amongst many others.

While the protocol started the year with a very modest TVL, it has grown well with an especially good run in between the months of June and November. Even despite the setback the protocol faced in the wake of broader market fallout, Euler TVL is up. Since the base was essentially 0, making % comparisons isn’t especially valuable but it is still notable that Euler has seen some good growth. This is remarkable for a lending and borrowing protocol (where TVL isn’t the most perfect indicator) in such a crowded market against such a tumultuous background.

Thanks to a great report by Delphi Digital, we can see that utilisation on Euler (another key metric for DeFi protocols), is consistently higher than other leading money markets. Since Euler has a smaller TVL, this makes sense, but it is still impressive and indicates higher capital efficiency - something all DeFi protocols should aspire to enjoy.

In addition, we can see Euler is competing with the best in terms of revenue vs far larger TVL DeFi protocols despite distributing far lower than them in token emission terms.

Among perhaps the most important of all metrics is the deposits versus withdrawals. So long as Euler can keep this gap consistently widening while remaining sustainable, the protocol is sure to continue its upwards trajectory.

Next steps

Looking to the future, Euler Labs has many plans. A few particular highlights involve some of the following raised by Seraphim, Euler’s Head of Risk:

• EulerSwap
• Isolated lending pools that allow people to spin up their own DeFi protocols
• A new chain deployment
• Liquid Staking Derivatives being further integrated into Euler
• More UI enhancements for users to enjoy
• “👀”

It’s been a great pleasure for the Euler Labs team to operate in such a dynamic environment and interact with so many unique people. From our family to yours, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! We’ll see you all in 2023!