Stader Labs is a historical witness who directly experienced the collapse of Luna UST when UST depeg and returned to zero as it is now. Instead of choosing to stop and build a new project, the project continues to choose to stay and build new features and this makes me feel very interested in Stader Labs in thinking and construction. of the project team.
What is Stader Labs?
Stader Labs is a Liquid Staking platform that allows users to participate in staking easily and conveniently without having to lock their assets in smart contracts.
The difference of Stader Labs compared to some other Liquid Staking projects such as Rocket Pool, Lido Finance, Marinade Finance,… is that users can choose the Validators they want to stake and then can monitor and evaluate the activities of validators based on the level of effectiveness that validators bring to them.
Fatal Blow From Luna – UST
Started like a dream
Stader Labs’ first blog was published on Medium in the middle of May 2021, which is also the time when DeFi summer is exploding and activity is boiling. And the first blockchain choice of the Stader Labs team was Terra. It was correct to say at that time that Terra – UST was just the beginning stage of Terra. When Stader Labs first built Terra with the derivative token LunaX, Terra’s TVL was only about $2B and later grew and peaked at more than $20B.
In just a few months, Stader Labs quickly reached a TVL of $200M, equivalent to about 3.8M Luna. At that time, Stader Labs was one of the projects that was extremely active in building the Terra ecosystem in particular and integrating LunaX into platforms in general.
Gradually following the general market trend and integrating the development of its ecosystem, Stader Labs reached its peak TVL in early April 2022 with about $1B TVL.
Stader Labs’ dreamlike start not only stops at growth from TVL to users to ecosystem, but also comes from the fact that the project has successfully called twice.
- October 7, 2021: At the Seed round, Stader Labs successfully raised $4m at a valuation of $46M led by Pantera in addition to Near Foundation, True Venture, Ledge Prime, Solana Foundation, Triblock, Terra Foundation,…
- January 17, 2022: Stader Labs successfully raised an amount of up to $12.5M with a project valuation of $437M, nearly 10 times higher than just about 2 months ago. This round is led by 3AC, besides Figment, Amber Group, Digital Asset Capital Management, Blockchain.com, Acomplicate,…
With a dream start thanks to the right bet, Stader Labs’ valuation has increased 10 times in just about 3 months. This combines many factors such as Thien Thoi (Uptrend) – Dia Loi (Terra leads the growth market) – Nhan Hoa (Liquid Staking is fertile land).
The fall of the Luna UST empire
Luna – UST did not collapse for a long time, it was just a few short days and with a project associated with Terra from the very beginning, Stader Labs’ TVL’s decline was as if pulled by the earth’s gravity. and free fall is inevitable.
At the time Terra – UST was about to collapse, Stader Labs had two Liquid Staking products: Terra and Hedera.
And even if I owned Stader Labs, I would also be devastated by this situation of the company, a project from $1B TVL dropped to only $50M, equivalent to dividing about 20 times within a few days and I I’m sure the entire Stader Labs couldn’t believe their eyes.
Give Up Or Continue
What are Stader Labs’ options next?
After Terra collapsed, I saw that the team did not stop working and was still working very hard to support Terra’s next product, Terra 2.0, but perhaps somewhere they understood that the game was different so Stader Labs immediately started My own plan is to develop multichain. This strategy was mentioned a lot in the roadmap released in March 2022 but was only strongly implemented after Terra collapsed.
- March 9, 2022: Deployment of HbarX for Hedera blockchain.
- Late May 2022: Deploying sFTMx and MaticX for two famous blockchains, Fantom and Polygon.
- August 11, 2022: Deploying NearX on Near Protocol and Aurora’s Blockchain.
- August 13, 2022: Deploying BnbX on BNB Chain
- September 10, 2022: Stader Labs has officially cooperated with Aptos to deploy AptX in the near future.
The strong implementation on different blockchains has initially brought about certain achievements of the project when TVL started to grow again compared to the most recent bottom of $50M and currently about $160M has doubled. 3 times in downtrend. This is extremely encouraging as money and users are leaving DeFi this winter.
The Road Ahead
Stader Labs’s path forward is relatively simple. Their main work revolves around 2 main issues:
- Further development for many other blockchains such as Solana or Avalanche. Their goal from the beginning of the year is to develop on 10 different blockchains in 2022. Currently, the number only stops at 6 blockchains including Terra 2.0, Hedera, Near Protocol, BNB Chain, Matic, Fantom if further integrated successfully. 4 other blockchains including Aptos, Ethereum 2.0, Solana, Avalanche will complete their goals this year.
- Integrate additional use cases for current derivative assets.
Challenge
- Stader Labs’ future plans are relatively clear. The next challenge in development is how to keep users on the platform for a long time.
- Overheating development led to NearX on Near being attacked by smart contracts, but later the project fully compensated the victims.
- Use cases for derivative assets are still relatively limited for the project, so more development is needed in the future if the project desires long-term development.
Media channel
- Website: https://staderlabs.com/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/staderlabs
- Telegram: https://t.me/staderlabs
- Discord: https://discord.com/invite/xJURAhSmav
- Blog:
In addition, if you are not good at English, you can join the official Stader Labs Vietnam Telegram group to update the latest project information here.
In addition, you can support the project through the use of Stader Labs products that currently support assets such as MATIC, BNB, HBAR, NEAR, TERRA 2.0 and FTM.
Summary
For Stader Labs, it has shown me that a very new lesson in business and building a large company includes the following points to note:
- Before starting a business, you need to consider factors including Thien Thoi – Dia Loi – Nhan Hoa.
- Greater initial success does not mean you will become a unicorn in the near future.
- A true businessman never gives up when he fails and from the ashes he can completely rebuild his empire.
- Quickly awaken after stumbles, it’s not important what you’ve lost but what you’ve learned and what you’ll do next.
Stader Labs is a pretty good case of standing up after falling. It’s clear that they could completely abandon this project and build a new project, but they decided to stay. Anyway, I have a lot of respect for Stader Labs for what they have done after their failure and now what will their next journey look like? Can they return to the top?
