Namada began with a vision for the future: a portal between public and private worlds.
Leading up to and after Namada’s Dec 2024 mainnet launch, early initiatives and experiments united us as the community we are today. We’ve learned a lot and developed to be a community and network with many possibilities. We can do anything, but we can’t do everything. It’s time to focus, it’s time for traction, and it’s time to place our bet. Privacy tech is seeing adoption, and we’re ready to prove that Namada has PMF.
We have some excellent candidates for product-market fit, and we already have clear paths for testing them. This is an exceptional position to be in, because the vast majority of the projects in our broader decentralized project ecosystem have struggled to find PMF. Namada is fortunate to be ready and well-positioned for the coming stablecoin revolution.
The Namada network, tooling and teams will be laser-focused on user traction, flows, and growth that drive value to NAM. Speaking for Knowable, we’re incredibly excited about three opportunities:
Borderless Private USDC
USDC in Namada’s Multi-Asset Shielded Pool can come from anywhere and will go anywhere that native USDC has been issued. Check out Namada’s Borderless alpha showcase app: https://usdc-mockup.netlify.app/ (
this is experimental! do not share this publicly yet)
New users can easily fund their Borderless wallet and privately pay USDC to anyone on any EVM chain (Solana’s next). Our goals are to support Borderless end-user product integrations and to scale private flows with Borderless service integrations. We at Knowable are spearheading the Borderless initiative.
Polaris’ Shielded Token Portal
The Polaris integration is an ambitious experiment to scale private swaps across many assets and chains. This is important because it will grow Namada’s asset privacy infrastructure to support the most traded assets. The Polaris team is spearheading this initiative–they are tenacious, capable, innovative, and dedicated to bringing the best private finance solutions to the world.
Namada Value Flow Control
The Namada network is poised to capture revenue from shielded flows, like deposits, withdrawals, and even assets at rest in the shielded pool, such as USDN yield. There are also other value capture configurations, such as non-native gas fees from transaction execution. The protocol can then use revenue to buy NAM tokens, which is the most straightforward way for fee revenue to drive NAM value accrual. Applications and services are incentivized to use Namada infrastructure because they can directly capture revenue from the transactions they facilitate. This initiative is being spearheaded by Heliax, the Namada founding team.
What’s next?
We propose that the Namada community align and focus the majority of our interests, efforts, and economy toward furthering these missions.
Namada’s economy is currently being used to incentivize shielding (5.33%), staking (2.7%), validator operations (0.67%), and Namada has also used some of its PGF budget to issue new tokens for arbitrary funding toward initiatives, including funding the Namada explorers. There have been many contributors engaged in getting to this point, and we’d like to see this be recognized as we move forward to Namada’s next phase.
If we’re to focus on product-market-fit and traction, our economy can also focus on driving this. We could begin by reducing the set of shielding incentives and focus PGF issuance on incentivizing and rewarding mission-focused activities, such as bootstrapping new shielded assets (ZEC) and rewarding only top performing critical infrastructure services.
We’re incredibly excited about what we’re working on, and grateful to be working alongside this community 