Saber

Finally, Saber offers zero opportunity cost. Its LP tokens can have many use cases: from lending markets to collateralizing other stablecoins. This provides a passive "risk-free" rate of return to the decentralized financial ecosystem and reduces the opportunity cost of deploying capital. At thist, Saber’s goal is to maximize the protocol's revenue.

Saber technology

Saber relies on two Solana aggregators: a yield aggregator Tulip and a composable Sunny Aggregator for DeFi. To provide lending services, Saber uses Apricot, Solana’s next-gen lending protocol. Governance is handled by Tribeca, Solana’s protocol for creating, managing, and interacting with decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Liquidity mining is handled by the Quarry protocol. The latest is also based on Solana as it was launched in August of 2021 to help Solana users to discover, farm, and eventually launch their own DeFi liquidity mines. The Quarry protocol represents a set of smart contracts, which work together to create an open standard for launching liquidity mining & staking campaigns on Solana. At this, it offers rewards, quarries, and gauges.

There are also various protocols that the system uses to ensure the work of its services. Thus, the Stable Swap program is responsible for creating LP tokens and swapping. The Saber Periphery handles many functions and consists of several other protocols. For example, it uses the Decimal Wrapper for adjustments of decimals, and the Continuation Router for routing between different Saber pools and the Add Decimal program. Also, it enables the Lockup to control the release of tokens for the Saber team and pre-token investors. The Mint Proxy handles the issuance of new Saber tokens and the Redeemer allows burning an "IOU" token for a Saber token. The system also features the Saber Registry, an automatically generated JSON list of all Saber pools that contains metadata not present on-chain.

Stablecoin Swapping on Saber

Saber focuses on the stablecoin swap niche without going into the hotly-contested general coin exchange market. Thus, Saber allows users to swap any coins pegged to the same asset, even if a user wants to swap fiat and crypto. Besides, Saber enables low slippage trading with low fees even at large volumes. At the time of writing, the maximum commission rate for swapping stablecoins on Saber is 1%. The Saber platform also facilitates swaps between pegged assets bridged from other blockchains, for example from Polygon or Terra to Solana.

Liquidity Pool Staking

The Saber platform also offers liquidity provider (LP) staking. By contributing their funds to a pool of their choice on Saber, LPs can earn yield which is paid in SBR tokens. In addition, Saber LP token can be used as collateral.

The Saber token

The protocol is fueled by a native token with a ticker SBR. The standard of this token is SNL, which is the Solana equivalent of the ERC20 token standard used on Ethereum. SBR token was launched in June of 2021 with two key purposes. First, it was designed to provide utility to its users, which means that holders of this token can get SBR rewards for providing liquidity to pools. Second, it serves the governance purpose, which means that SBR token holders can vote on proposals and hold rights within the Saber DAO while locking the token and swapping it for veSBR (voting escrow Saber). As a Solana-based token, SBR is supported by the following wallets: Phantom, Sollet, Sollet Extension, Ledger, MathWallet, Solong and Coin98.

The total supply of Saber tokens is 10 billion SBR which were distributed during the first two weeks of the liquidity mining program. The tokens were allocated as follows: 31.42% for mining reserve, 8.42% for liquidity reserve, 25.10% for partnership and ecosystem, 19.58% for team advisors, and 15.48% for strategic fundraising.

The Saber team

Saber Labs was founded by the Macalinao brothers. Dylan Macalinao graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, he became the founder of Texas Crypto. From 2020 to 2021 he was responsible for product and design in Pipe and was building a new asset class based on digital recurring revenue and empowering founders to catalyze growth without dilution or debt. In 2021, Dylan Macalinao was Founder-in-Residence at Solana Labs. At the moment of writing, he is also a co-founder and investor in Protagonist, an early-stage crypto VC and an incubation lab.

Ian Macalinao studied mathematics and computer science at the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of Texas at Austin. In May 2016, he co-founded Asuna, where he also was a CTO. Together with his brother, Ian founded Texas Crypto in 2018. Ian Macalinao also worked as CTO for Abacus, an administration platform for the company, fund, and real estate securities. From 2020 to 2021 he was a software engineer at Pipe. As well as his brother, Dylan Macalinao, Ian is a co-founder of Protagonist.