What Is ICHI?
ICHI is a decentralized community-driven platform that allows various crypto projects to mint their branded stablecoins. ICHI operates based on a Decentralized Monetary Authority model through which crypto communities can issue their branded stablecoins using native cryptocurrencies as collateral. Thus, community members will not have to withdraw value from their cryptocurrency to buy stablecoins of other projects. On the contrary, they will be able to bring more value to their own crypto projects. To date, ICHI already has a number of partnerships with leading crypto projects: 1inch, Filecoin, Uniswap, DODO, and others. As a result, these crypto communities have launched their own stablecoins — one1inch, oneFIL, oneDODO, oneUNI — and have contributed to the development of their ecosystems and the DeFi sector as a whole. With the help of branded stablecoins, the projects can provide better payments, rewards, and incentives that are not subject to volatility and take a step toward a stable DeFi world.
How Does ICHI Work?
Let’s say the Bitcoin community decided to launch a stable analog of the first cryptocurrency — oneBTC. Each oneBTC will be exactly equal to $1. In order to issue 1000 oneBTC, you will need to pay $1000 of value in two parts: part in wBTC (Bitcoin pegged stablecoin of ERC20 standard) and part in USDC. The percentage of parts is set by the minting ratio. For example, if the mining ratio is 70%, then to issue 1000 oneBTC, you have to pay $700 in USDC and $300 in wBTC. The crucial point is that you are not paying to the ICHI protocol. That is, the project is not a custodian issuing stablecoins. Furthermore, the part paid with wBTC is sent to the Community Treasury, and the portion paid with USDC is sent to the Collateral Reserve.
Community Treasury
As we have already said, in order to issue stablecoins, the crypto community locks part of the project tokens in the Community Treasury. This has several advantages for minters. Firstly, holders of issued stablecoins have the right to vote regarding the further use of this treasury. On the official ICHI website, the developers present several examples of issues on which holders can make proposals and vote. For example, community members can place tokens stored in the treasury in one of the DeFi protocols to make a profit. The crucial point is that it positively affects the value of the project tokens. Usually, community members sell their project tokens to buy other third-party stablecoins and lower the value of their own project. But with ICHI, the situation is changing dramatically. Community members lock part of the project tokens to mint branded stablecoins, thus removing part of the tokens from circulation. And if the number of tokens in circulation decreases, a deficit is created that pushes the price up.
ICHI And Passive Income
In addition to the fact that ICHI is a convenient and effective platform for issuing branded stablecoins, the project also provides several tempting opportunities for passive income that can be configured directly in the ICHI official app:
- Holders of branded stablecoins can deposit their stablecoins into the ICHI farming contract and receive ICHI rewards. At the moment, more than $29 million in 10 branded stablecoins are locked in the built-in farm contract. Most of the funds come from oneUNI, a stablecoin issued by the Uniswap community.
- Community members and LP providers can receive rewards through yield farming using major decentralized exchanges (Uniswap, Sushiswap, Bancor, Balancer, or 1inch). To start receiving rewards, it is necessary to: select one of the five currently available farms, add the pre-determined cryptocurrency to the liquidity pool (most often ETH), and deposit LP tokens.
ICHI Benefits
- Fairness
To date, there are three main types of stablecoins on the market: fiat-backed, crypto-backed, and algorithmic. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, fiat-backed ones are less transparent and decentralized, and crypto-backed ones force the user to deposit a larger amount to issue stablecoins (over-collateralization) and also have the risk of collateral liquidation. In the case of ICHI, minters pay, for example, $1000 and receive 1000 oneTokens. No overpayments, no risk of liquidation. In addition, the number of project tokens is locked in the Community Treasury, which is entirely governed by the oneTokens holders.
- Growth enabling
By buying stablecoins of a third-party community project, participants simply transfer value from their cryptocurrency to another. Within the framework of ICHI, everything is provided in such a way as to help projects increase their value, adoption, and expand use cases. Thus, as we have already mentioned, in order to issue branded stablecoins, minters will need to lock part of the project tokens in the Community Treasury. In addition to the fact that thanks to the Treasury, all holders of one token receive voting force, this also has a positive effect on the price of the project tokens. As a result, the number of tokens in circulation is reduced, stimulating the price to grow.
- Ecosystem acceleration
DeFi projects’ teams benefit greatly from creating branded stablecoins. The price of any crypto asset is highly volatile, which creates obstacles to its practical use as payrolls, grants, bounties, and other payments. Therefore, the parties often sell their tokens to buy stablecoins in order to avoid the risks of price drops. Again, this devalues the crypto project and forces the parties to rely on the third party of stablecoins. On the contrary, ICHI offers the crypto community the issuance of its own stablecoins that can be used for payment, exchange, or preservation of value.