Bastion is an Aurora-based lending and stableswap protocol equipped with an autonomous interest-rate engine that produces fast transactions, low fees, and accurate liquidations.
In recent data released by Statista, the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry has seen a continuous rise in demand for its services since 2017. With DeFi services remaining active in giant platforms such as Uniswap, Aave, and Ethereum, this industry will likely have a more dominant impact on the future of the global financial landscape.
Table of Contents
Background
Bastion was built by a dynamic team with expertise in data science, AR software, tech startups, and MEV research. It has also launched a series of coins listed on Binance, FTX, and Huobi, which altogether achieved a $1 billion + market cap. The team aims to make Bastion a liquidity hub of the NEAR Protocol, where no digital assets remain idle, ensuring holders that the inflow of profits remains constant.
What is Bastion?
Bastion is an Aurora-based lending and stableswap protocol equipped with an autonomous interest-rate engine that produces fast transactions, low fees, and accurate liquidations. The platform focuses on the elements of composability, algorithmic risk optimization, tokenomics, and user experience to deliver the best possible DeFi services to its users.
It also provides services such as single-sided staking, interest rate swap, supplying of assets to help users earn interest, and turning assets as collateral. The platform does not charge any upfront fees for lending and borrowing, but it takes a percentage from the yield produced by these transactions and funnels it to the Bastion DAO.
Aurora: A Refresher
Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) spearheaded by the same core team who created the NEAR Protocol. With NEAR code inside it, Aurora can seamlessly deploy advanced features on Bastion, such as high throughput and high scalability, making its transactions smooth and secure.
BSTN Token
$BSTN is Bastion’s governance token that serves as an incentive to fund borrow demands and infuse initial deposit rate stability. The token, which is now available at Trisolaris, allows holders to vote on critical aspects such as staking mechanisms, feed models, and how to manage Protocol Owned Liquidity. It also serves as the tool to align incentives between Bastion’s borrowers, lenders, team, and partners.
As of this writing, Bastion’s Discord channel serves as its official community governance platform, but it will soon migrate to a more advanced one as increasing Aurora-based DAO tooling becomes available. The team will also use the Treasury for the ecosystem’s insurance fund, grants program, allocation of budget for DAO-related expenses, and BSTN’s public sale.
Also, anyone who purchased and HODLd all their $BSTN for more than one month will get the rare ‘Diamond Hands Bastion NFT.’ It is a highly valuable and tradable asset that honors the ecosystem’s most loyal supporters. Other utilities of $BSTN include veBSTN, borrowing free rebates, rewards boosting, and more to follow as the team plans to further improve the token.
cToken (Collateral Token)
cToken serves as a ‘receipt’ when users deposit tokens into Bastion and a medium to claim back underlying tokens. Instead of earning interest through distribution, users automatically earn it by simply holding cTokens, and it also has a uniform exchange rate across all users.
Major Components of Bastion
Stableswap
Bastion Stableswap is a slow-slippage automated market maker or AMM for Aurora-based staked assets, stablecoins, wrapped tokens, and eTokens. It serves as a yield-on-yield savings account, gauge systems for lending and stableswap, and a multichain gateway. Compared to AMMs such as Trisolaris and Uniswap, Stableswap can implement a lower slippage on assets with close prices.
Through Stableswap, traders have the privilege of trading pairs while leveraging the trinity benefit of lower fees, lower slippage, and increased capital efficiency. Also, liquidity providers can give single-sided liquidity the advantage of lower impermanent loss risk with the help of the Stableswap curve.
Realms
Realms is Bastion’s isolated pool equipped with a ‘Hub-and-Spoke’ model, facilitating leveraged yield farming and full-stack customizability of asset parameters. Its mechanism is the opposite of what most DeFi platforms implement, which involves having only one cross-collateral pool, which exposes an entire protocol to a series of attack vectors that could drain TVL anytime.
Realm’s major advantages include higher loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, higher liquidation thresholds, and the ability to test advanced oracle mechanisms. The downside is that users cannot directly borrow and collateralize assets from Aurora Ecosystem Realm and the Main Hub because of liquidity fragmentation. But Bastion counters this problem by infusing USDC in all of its Realms, resulting in a common exchange currency between all of its isolated pools.
Security
Bug Bounty
Bastion is currently collaborating with ImmuneFi, web3’s leading bug bounty platform, to launch its bug bounty on its smart contracts. This partnership aims to prevent high-level risks such as fund thefts and freezing, which faceless hackers can remotely launch once they detect bugs or loopholes in any blockchain platform.
Bastion x Halborn for Security Auditing
Bastion has collaborated with Halborn, an award-winning blockchain security firm, for a long-term partnership to improve the protocol’s security standards. Halborn has deployed its whitehat hackers and blockchain experts and is currently conducting penetration testing and auditing of Bastion’s smart contracts. It has already served giant web3 clients, including Coinbase, Terra, Sushi, and Avalanche, proving its extensive capability in high-level blockchain security.
Partnerships
Bastion Partners with Flux Protocol
Bastion has partnered with Flux Protocol, a NEAR-based cross-chain oracle, to get direct access to reliable oracle price feeds. The main factors that make their partnership even stronger are
their series of security measures, including fallback and 24/7 notification systems, and safety switches. Flux is currently the biggest oracle solution for NEAR and Aurora, which is already a testament to its capabilities.
Bastion Partners with Rift Finance
Bastion has collaborated with Rift Finance, a decentralized protocol that enhances DAO’s efficiency through restructured incentive frameworks. This partnership responds to the problems faced by most DAOs, which is the struggle and failure to maintain the liquidity of their governance tokens. Rift Finance has committed $1.8 million in liquidity in the BSTN/NEAR pool on Trisolaris for the first 90 days, which will create a liquidity floor and the development of organic liquidity at the same time.
Conclusion
Bastion’s Aurora protocol, strong security infrastructure, competitive features, and relevant partnerships are the major aspects that make it a robust DeFi protocol. With all these things under its belt, it can certainly withstand the increasingly heating DeFi competition, pushed mainly by the continuous expansion of the market.
