Wrapping up January

The shake-up in some major DeFi protocols together with the on-going BEAR market add powerful ripples on-top of an already rapidly shifting industry just requires us to adapt and adjust even more than usual.

Nonetheless, we are more than dedicated to ensure the protocol vision is realised despite the challenges (no matter their nature), and have been busy this month deepening foundations from which we can move forward!

The BEE Team has been expanding and continues to ramp up for a big 2022 with work for the XBE Hive Launch, Hive Pro integrations, XBF Hive Launch, and XBF mobile apps all under way.

While the contentious legislation proposals in the USA dominates the crypto news cycle, institutions and regulators in other markets are steadily increasing adoption of blockchain and decentralised finance technologies - and our experience in the central and commercial banking space is proving invaluable in presenting compelling roadmaps for these players to offer and support new services to their markets.

We are really looking forward to the veXBE DAO hangout this evening on the official veXBE DAO discord, and hope to answer plenty of questions as more DAO members take up active roles to help the XBE protocol grow!

If you have veXBE, you should verify your account in the veXBE DAO discord beforehand and then join the #beehive channel on discord at 7pm UTC time tonight (Monday 31 January).

Hive Update

Many non-critical items have been reported and addressed over the course of the Hive Testing this month, and we deeply appreciate the work of our community, the bug bounty hunters, Peckshield, and CERTIK that have helped us improve the product substantially!

Early on in the month our testing team identified some unexpected behaviour with LP reward rounding errors in our baseV2 Vault contract - and with further testing we identified a code bug that amplifies this error over time.

While the bug is a relatively simple item in itself to fix, it was passed over by both the bug bounty hunts and three audit rounds.

Its an important reminder that smart contract development is still an emerging field, and just reaffirms our approach of slow and steady with the alpha launch of the Hive where we have the luxury of identifying and addressing issues like this without the concern of user liquidity being impacted.

As part of this process our team's test coverage of the XBE smart contracts has also expanded substantially - which helped us identify and address a potential referral reward logic issue as well.

Since these issues impact smart contract logic, we are working closely with our auditors to verify the code fixes after which we will soon be redeploying several affected contracts to Mainnet. During this same redeployment process we will also be replacing the MIM Hive Vaults with FRAX Hive Vaults to adjust for the recent shift in market liquidity and sentiment.

It also looks like the majority of CERTIK's remaining audit changes will be implemented soon (the majority of which pertained to Key ownership and effective DAO participation in order to remove centralised control)!

Hive Pro & Easy Apps

While we are still under NDA with various partners, we are very happy with the progress in integration and expansion of the Hive Pro application, and attracting new Hive Pro customers.

Easy XB App work also continues specifically around simplifying the FIAT On- and Off-ramping journeys for users as this is still intended to offer users with low literacy the simplest way of getting into DeFi yield!

We are proud to have industry leading partners commited to take the Hive Pro White label solution to market, and as always more information on this will be released publicly when applicable.

XBF News

Fantom has proven itself to be a robust and extremely fast network, which has allowed us to implement processes for the XBF Hive that are simply not feasible on ETH due to the prohibitive gas fees.

With this in mind we've rewritten a lot of the smart contract code for our XBF launch, and kept the XBF team looped-in on all the testing and fixes we've been implementing on the XBE Hive as well.

The team focussing on XBF has also grown in size, as there are a number of other L2 deployments planned to follow the Fantom release, requiring much more adaptability to this codebase than was planned for ETH.

Code delivery is well on track and scheduled for March 2022, and Peckshield has already been retained to commence the first XBF code audit at this time.

Thereafter launch is just subject to audit findings.

SOLIDLY

Majority of our initial focus on ETH has been on Curve and Convex, and while Curve has a viable footprint on Fantom the team also felt it prudent to include native Fantom Protocols in our XBF implementation.

With this in mind XBF will be launching on Solidly on Fantom, with Curve Pool support following in v2.

For more information on Solidly, please visit the insightful posts here and here.

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