We are excited to share a personal message from Mihai, the founder of Dypius and World of Dypians. In this post, Mihai reflects on the journey of Dypius, sharing the challenges, milestones, and successes that have shaped the project since its inception. Here’s a detailed look at his story and insights:
For some time, I have wanted to make this post for the $DYP users. For those who don’t know me, I’m Mihai, and I am the founder of two great projects: Dypius and World of Dypians. Given the timing, I will focus more on Dypius in this article.
My background is pretty simple, I did not go to any fancy schools although when I was a kid I was always one of the best from my class. I started working at an early age and in 2013 I was already getting into Bitcoin. Of course, I did not hold it until now, but I am proud to be able to say that I was an early adopter. In 2017 I started mining Ethereum in my parents garage and later in January 2018 I had one of the biggest mining farms from Romania. I’ve always been a Degen (will talk more about this later) and that helped me a lot to hold the ETH when the price went down, buy more rigs and mine more Ethereum. Later it was proved that this was one of the best decisions.
Now, let’s go to DYP, this is something that I am proud of and I know that it made a lot of users happy. I started DeFi Yield Protocol (that was the name before rebranding to Dypius) back in 2020 shortly after Uniswap and SushiSwap. I still remember that immediately after the UNI airdrop was announced, I wanted to buy UNI worth $300k and I was not able to because the dApp was not loading due to the large amount of users that were selling their allocation. It was 3am, I just got home from a long trip and was too tired to make the transaction directly from the smart contract. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of money with that trade that I did not make because shortly after the airdrop, UNI saw a huge increase in price. I forgot to mention that besides mining Ethereum, until 2020 I was also doing a lot of trading. During that period I was trading roughly $80M — $100M monthly. My first good trade? I made $1M buying ICX during ICO and selling it at between $8 and $10. I still remember how good I felt.
So, I lost the opportunity with UNI and was looking for some new ones. That was the moment when SushiSwap was launched, but because I was not fast enough, I missed it again as they offered a high yield, and immediately after that, the price of SUSHI dropped very quickly. That was happening with most projects during the yield farming period. After missing Uniswap and SushiSwap, I was more convinced than ever that I would not miss the third one. That’s when KIMCHI was launched, and I aped in immediately with $250k in farming (as mentioned earlier, I was always a Degen). In less than 24 hours, I lost 90% of the deposited funds. You can imagine how I felt and how frustrated I was because of this. With some GOD luck, I did not sell KIMCHI, and overnight they launched GOD KIMCHI, which was airdropped to all the KIMCHI farmers. In this way, I managed to recover my investment and also make around $30k in profit.
After all these Degen adventures, I said that users need a farming protocol where they don’t have to worry about losing all their funds overnight. I had the initial idea of launching the DeFi Yield Protocol on September 8, 2020, and on October 4, 2020, we launched it! Even though we were a small team of just three people at the time, we moved pretty fast. With the unique approach we had in providing rewards in ETH and using some magic numbers (slippage) when distributing the rewards, we saw huge success, and most importantly, nobody lost any money! In less than one year, we had more than $50M in TVL, and users earned 9,188 ETH, 10,195 BNB, and 27,000 AVAX, worth a total of more than $35M. Do I feel proud of this? Hell yeah! These are some crazy numbers even now for a project that had no investors, no advisors, or strong partners at the time.
So, my vision back in 2020 was simple: earn yield without losing money! And that’s exactly what happened, as the numbers prove it.
Does this mean that because we did a great job with the yield farming strategies, we didn’t make any mistakes? Of course not. As I mentioned earlier, we were a small team at the beginning of our journey. Even though I had been involved in crypto since 2013 and thought I knew a lot, everything changed after launching DYP in 2020. From the inside, developing a project and interacting with CEXs and other third parties like market makers, marketing agencies, etc. I realized everything was different and basically a wild west!
Anyone who was in this space back in 2020 and 2021 surely remembers the period when Ethereum transaction fees were crazy. It was nearly impossible for a small user to pay the fees and make any money from yield. After seeing the huge success we had on Ethereum, and due to the high gas fees, we decided to expand to Binance Smart Chain as well. By that time, our team had grown to four members: me, our CTO Razvan, one engineer Gino, and our current COO Teki. We were also working closely with engineers from Blockchain Consilium, one of the first auditing companies. We discovered them in a SushiSwap blog, where they had offered to conduct security audits. An engineer named Levi from Blockchain Consilium worked closely with us, almost as if he were part of the team, for the first two years. Levi was incredibly smart and had more Solidity experience than Razvan at the time. From the very beginning, we invested heavily in security, even though our financial resources were limited. That’s why we conducted security audits with three different companies: Blockchain Consilium, CertiK, and PeckShield. At that time, security audits were much more expensive than they are now, but it was a good decision. Because of this focus on security, we didn’t experience any financial losses, while many other projects lost their users’ funds.
So, I was talking about mistakes, right? I’m not even sure if I can call it a mistake, but it wasn’t the best approach at the time, and you’ll understand why later. On April 4, 2021, we launched DYP on Binance Smart Chain as well, and once again, it proved to be a huge success, considering that users earned 10,195 BNB. Please note that these rewards were generated only from the yield farming pools. Users also earned DYP from staking, as well as other assets from vaults and other products we offered. So, besides the +$35M in rewards from yield farming, our users earned at least $10M more from other products like staking and vaults.
Another huge milestone was the launch of DYP on Avalanche, which took place on July 6, 2021. I’m happy to say that DeFi Yield Protocol was one of the first projects to support Avalanche and one of the first to receive a grant for building on Avalanche. I’m not sure if they still remember, now that they’ve become so big, but that’s how it went, and I’m proud to have been an early supporter when only a few were. Thanks to this, we managed to reward our users with an additional 27,000 AVAX.
So, until now, we have three important dates:
- October 4, 2020: Launch of DYP on Ethereum
- April 4, 2021: Launch of DYP on Binance Smart Chain
- July 6, 2021: Launch of DYP on Avalanche
And in less than one year, more than $35M was distributed to users in ETH, BNB, and AVAX! Pretty crazy, right? I often ask myself how it’s possible for this project to have a $5M FDV with all these achievements. I know life isn’t fair, but our time will come!
I started talking about mistakes, but did I actually tell you about the mistake — or rather, the wrong approach? Let me explain :) DYP on Ethereum initially had a fixed supply of 30,000,000, but after multiple token burns, we had 24,963,431 tokens remaining. When we expanded to Binance Smart Chain and Avalanche, our team, along with Levi (the engineer from Blockchain Consilium), decided to create the same supply for the new chains without the ability to mint additional tokens. Why no minting? To ensure safety and avoid creating the impression among users or partners that someone from our team could mint more tokens. Of course, this later proved to be the wrong approach. Despite this, everything went smoothly with the bridge, and DYP became successfully available as a multichain asset.
I almost forgot to mention something important. Since day one, and continuing to this day, we’ve always prioritized our users and community. We’ve never done, nor will we ever do, anything to harm them. With Ethereum’s high fees and DYP initially available only as ERC20 for deposits on CEXs, users frequently asked for BEP20 support on CEXs. In April 2022, we reached out to all the CEXs to add support for DYP BEP20, and initially, all of them agreed. This was done to offer lower fees and more incentives to our users. At that point, we decided to stop using the bridge and instead rely on the CEXs as a bridge, assuming all of them would support at least two chains of DYP. Even though all of them initially confirmed support, one later decided not to support other chains. Regardless, everything worked out in the end. We didn’t stop the bridge, users were happy, and starting April 14, 2022, DYP was available as ERC20, BEP20, and ARC20 across multiple CEXs.
Another huge milestone! I started talking about mistakes, but there’s nothing wrong so far, right? The next milestone, and the biggest one so far, came in June 2022 when Coinbase, one of the world’s largest CEXs, announced support for DYP. That was huge for us, a small project with no investors, getting recognized by one of the biggest CEXs from the world. I can’t describe the feeling; I finally felt that someone appreciated our work. Earlier, I mentioned the “wild west” nature of this space and how I learned a lot about market makers, marketing agencies, and other aspects — essentially encountering a lot of scammers. Two years later, with significantly more knowledge than I had before, I was already working with a market maker I was happy with. Naturally, I contacted them for the Coinbase launch. They requested a significant amount of liquidity for the launch, but to be honest, we didn’t have that kind of money. I forgot to mention that the listing on Coinbase was absolutely free! The initial contact from Coinbase shared a pitch deck containing some information about market makers. Even though it included a disclaimer stating that a market maker wasn’t mandatory, everyone knows you need one. Without a market maker and sufficient liquidity, the launch simply can’t proceed. I wasn’t willing to take that risk. In the pitch deck, I found a list of market makers endorsed by Coinbase, though it came with a disclaimer. It stated: “As a helpful starting point, below is a non-exhaustive list of Market Maker partners with whom Coinbase has had positive experiences in the past. You are not required to partner with a Market Maker on this list.” While this was helpful, it was clear that there were no guarantees, even for those endorsed by Coinbase.
After getting the list, I started reaching out to all the market makers mentioned. After a few responses, one of them made a really good offer. Even our previous market maker agreed it was a good choice, suggesting we should launch with them and, if unhappy later, we could always return. So, we went ahead with the launch on Coinbase on June 22, 2022, and it was a success. As part of the agreement with the new market maker, they provided liquidity across all markets, not just Coinbase. For reference, we started working with the new market maker on June 14, 2022, and the partnership ended on August 22, 2022. Why only two months if the launch was a success? Now comes the hard part of our journey.
You do remember that DYP was available on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Avalanche, right? Fixed supply on each chain, no possibility of minting new tokens. Just to be 100% safe and not to create the wrong impression. Also, you do remember that some of the CEXs were supporting ONLY DYP as ERC20 while others were supporting also the BEP20 and ARC20 versions, right? If not that was the exact situation when the Coinbase listing happened. Important to mention that Coinbase listed ONLY the DYP ERC20, the Ethereum version.
I am not saying that the marker maker did a bad job with purpose, I understand that this was his business model, but for our case when he was previously informed about the exact tokenomics and bridge, for sure he did a terrible job! What was the market maker doing? He was buying DYP as ERC20 from other markets (CEXs) and selling it on Coinbase for profit, essentially conducting arbitrage. Within just a few days of the Coinbase listing, he drained all the other markets of DYP ERC20. Next in line was our bridge, which had limited liquidity for DYP ERC20 because we couldn’t mint additional tokens. After the market maker had sold all the DYP ERC20 from the other markets and depleted our bridge, he requested more DYP ERC20 tokens to continue providing liquidity. At that point, in order to maintain healthy markets, I agreed to swap all his DYP BEP20 with DYP ERC20, pulling from both our treasury and my personal holdings (DYP I had purchased from the open market). However, it didn’t end there. He soon sold those DYP ERC20 tokens as well, leaving himself again with only DYP BEP20, which couldn’t be deposited on Coinbase, as Coinbase only accepted DYP ERC20.
I started to get nervous because a price difference began to emerge between DYP as ERC20 and DYP as BEP20. This was due to the lack of liquidity on the bridge and the markets, all the tokens had been withdrawn by the market maker and sold on Coinbase. After multiple discussions with the market maker, he suggested that the solution was to list DYP on a new, bigger CEX than those where it was already available. At that time, we were already in ongoing discussions with a larger CEX, and DYP was listed there with the assurance from the market maker that this would resolve the liquidity issue and eliminate the price difference. However, in just five days, the same thing happened on the new CEX. The market maker bought all the ERC20 tokens from the new CEX and sold them on Coinbase. In less than two months, he had sold all the DYP ERC20 tokens from the other markets, the new market, our bridge, our treasury, and even my personal holdings on Coinbase. We had no choice but to stop the collaboration. When we ended the partnership, he returned DYP BEP20 instead of ERC20, which we had originally provided for the loan.
By August 2022, we were facing a growing price difference between DYP ERC20 and DYP BEP20. Many users were complaining and struggling to understand why this was happening. Despite our best efforts, including working with different market makers and spending significant funds, it became clear that fixing this issue was nearly impossible. The gap only widened day by day. We realized the only viable solution was to implement a migration with an improved token contract and bridge that included a mint-and-burn function.
In October 2022, we began reaching out to Coinbase and all other CEXs and partners about the planned migration. Even after discussing and waiting for over a year for Coinbase’s confirmation, they were unable to confirm whether they could support the migration. By November 2023, following a governance proposal passed in October 2023 regarding the DYP migration, we decided to proceed with the process. The migration began in November 2023 and was supported by all other CEXs, except Coinbase, which still could not accommodate it. Although the initial plan allowed for a 12-month migration window, we extended it by two more months to give users a total of 14 months to complete the migration.
Almost 85% of the tokens have been successfully migrated, with all the CEXs (excluding Coinbase) supporting the process. This allowed us to grow further and launch new products based on the new DYP contract, so I genuinely believe the migration was a success. While it’s disappointing that Coinbase has not supported DYP v2, our journey will continue. I want to reassure our token holders and community that we will keep doing our best, just as we have since day one.
Once again, I want to thank Coinbase for the trust they showed us back in 2022 as it was a huge milestone for us! We’re continuing the journey stronger and wiser, and we hope to see their support again in the near future!
We have an ambitious roadmap for this year, with exciting plans ahead. Expect to see more projects launched through our launchpad, like we had with World of Dypians, new incentives for our users, expanded utility for DYP, more strategic partnerships, and some truly innovative AI features!
That being said, we will never stop, we will never accept the impossible, and I want to take this moment to sincerely thank everyone who has supported us and continues to stand by our side. Your belief in us fuels our journey forward
About Dypius
Dypius is a powerful, decentralized ecosystem with a focus on scalability, security, and global adoption through next-gen infrastructure. We offer a variety of products and services that cater to both beginners and advanced users in the crypto space including DeFi solutions, analytical tools, NFTs, Metaverse and more!
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