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What is Sandclock? - Quartz Explained

 

By Nerly Shammah Sep 27, 2022.

 

 

In an era of diverse financial crises, Defi platforms are stepping in and creating value-generating protocols to empower the growing population caught between the lines of inflation and bearing market environments.

 

Sandclock is a wealth management system designed to allow for programmable means of managing, saving, giving, and investing money. With the creation of Metavaults, one can control how yields are allocated or where they are allocated to.

 

 

Understanding Sandclock

 

Sandclock is a wealth management protocol with more to its work than what can be read from a sentence line of six words. Notably, wealth management translates to a lot of things, and as obvious as it is, it encompasses all the matters of one's finances.

 

The world suffers from financial crises that suck away value from the population and feeds it to a few, Defi and its vast numbers of protocols are created to fill in the gap and create sustainable structures to facilitate financial products to hedge against value loss caused by numerous economic factors.

 

Attaining this can be a wholesome task, but not an impossible one, the Sandclock platform is an embodiment of well-curated strategies engaged to hunt yields and feed into its vault.

 

There are notable features of the protocol and that include:

 

● Yield Aggregation

● Zero-loss Donation

● Charity Mining

 

Yield Aggregation On Sandclock - How It Works

 

Sandclock, asides from its extensive list of features that revolutionizes the Defi ecosystem, building new markets for vast adoption, can likewise be used as a regular yield optimizer but with advanced modules of aggregation.
 

Fun Fact: Sandclock is insured, this covers smart contract risks or a potential capital loss. The protocol is fully insured via the yield payments directed towards small premium insurance.

 

It is perhaps worth noting that, unlike most yield aggregators, our strategies will be as non-adversarial as possible, though it may be inevitable in some cases. An interesting experiment that we may or may not run for a specific token, is to have two vaults that utilize the same underlying token, but with slightly different strategies — an adversarial farm-and-dump strategy, and another with a non-adversarial one.^[1]

 

Sandclock is a body of risk-adjusted vaults, the protocol via its employed cross-chain strategies creates Connext’s state channels for Layer 2 (L2) composability in addition to bridges to the chains, such as xDAI’s OmniBridge, or Terra’s Shuttle depending on the strategy.

 

In essence, the sandclock will chase the yield regardless of the blockchain and feed it into its vault, covering for smart contract risks, impermanent losses, and most primarily, reward participants.

 

Zero-loss Donation - Explained

 

As aforementioned, Sandclock creates an environment to not only grow an income via yield optimization but also a space to allocate funds for personal charity foundations. 

 

This is where zero-loss donation comes into play and it is called so because it adds no extra cost to one's initials or principal. Typically, a zero-loss donation does not task the capital deposited to a vault, rather, by choice a user can set to allocate a portion of the yields earned for charity donations.

 

Additionally, zero-loss donations can be directed to startups listed on the platform. This specifically creates room for crypto projects looking to access liquidity and not wanting to be exposed to venture capital(VC). This creates a streamline of value to help fund these startups while also making assets of the startups which are portions pledged by the project to sandclock to be available to KYC’d Quartz holders.

 

Charity Mining - Explained

 

Charity mining is an interesting piece of the ecosystem, a structure that helps the protocol reach its goal while also rewarding those enabling its success with governance influence.

 

So What is Charity Mining?

 

Typically, it's a no-brainer that the vast majority of cryptocurrency and Defi users or participants are focused on maximizing profits on whatever platform engaged. Considering this, a way to incentivize users to donate has to be created, thus, charity mining does just that.

 

Charity mining is a way of incentivizing participants to allocate a portion or all of their yields for charity and in exchange gain governance influence via the backend delegation of its governance token - Quartz.

 

Quartz - Governance Explained, How Charity Mining Applies

 

To better explain how charity mining works, we have to quickly pin what Quartz is so as to have a better understanding of the previous section.

 

So, what is Quartz?

 

Quartz is the governance token of the Sandclock Defi protocol, it is basically used to influence the development process of the protocol via voting. The Quartz token has a max supply of 100 million with a unique range of asset allocation structures. 3% of the supply(3 million tokens) was issued as presale which as per reports sold out in three minutes.

 

That said, a significant portion of the supply, 37%(37 million tokens) is permanently locked up to be utilized as an incentive for donors via charity mining.

 

So then, in-depth, when a user allocations a portion of his yields or whole to charity via the sandclock protocol, he is awarded delegated Quartz until the maturity date. The tokens grant the user influence on governance, qualification for airdrops, and lots more.

 

However, to ensure that the protocol always has the liquidity to incentivize donors given the limited supply, Quartz is withdrawn if a user removes his principal or the maturity date is reached.

 

ProjectZircon - Tax Receipts as NFTs, Reducing Tax Burdens Of Donors.

 

Donors get their hands on a lot of value mechanisms for their charitable acts. You can say the Sandclock protocol is focused on rewarding them accordingly.

 

ProjectZircon is basically a tax deduction strategy on the Sandclock protocol. Typically, this gives both zero-loss donations or whichever donation on their platforms a tax receipt as NFT, which can be burned to claim the off-chain receipt.

 

Regardless of where a user donates via Sandclock, an NFT receipt is issued to the user’s account or whichever address is specified as a reward for donating. Donors can make use of these NFT receipts to redeem a reduced tax sum off-chain.

 

These tax receipts are issued as “nameless NFTs” which means that users can typically trade them away. This entirely shows the potential NFTs hold and How Defi protocols can be utilized to do a number of great things.

 

Considering that these NFTs are nameless, they can as well just be given out. To redeem the off-chain receipt, a holder has to fill in some information and burn the NFT. Once it is burned, the donation record is triggered and the rest is handled by Sandclock to issue the desired tax receipt.

 

Find out more about Sandclock from their official website, for full-track story coverage see their medium. 

 

How or Where To Buy Quartz? You can buy the Sandclock governance token- Quartz from Kucoin as it was newly listed with lots of rewards to be shared, see the kucoin announcement in-app or site to learn how to participate.