Saber is an AMM that provides the liquidity foundation for stable pairs such as USDT/USDC inside the Solana ecosystem. This liquidity comes from users, they deposit USDC and USDT and receive part of the fees from the other users when they make a trade, plus they receive rewards in Saber proprietary token SBR.
Saber has partnered with some of the leading funds and trading firms out there, such as Race Capital, Multicoin Capital, Jump, Solana Foundation and others.
It has a strong team focused entirely on shipping new functionalities, recently they added DAO Governance and Gauges.
Gauges are extremely important as they allow SBR owners to vote on SBR rewards allocation on all the different pools.
Gauges and DAO Governance require users to lock their SBR in veSBR for a certain amount of times, driving down the available supply.
metaCOLLECTIVE will soon deploy capital in Saber AMM pools and it is just natural that we start allocating capital to SBR token itself too to so that we can participate in Gauges voting and maximize our yield-farming operations, these are the so called “Saber Wars”, I wrote a small thread about it also on Twitter.
As such I would like to initiate a vote on deploying 150000 USDC into SBR. We shall split the order over 2-3 days to have less impact on the AMM or use Jup.ag for routing the order where we get the best price.
I really like the idea, and we are using only 3% of the total fund to invest in it. However, what is the competitive edge of the saber against raydium? or even sol? (i think there are room to all of these ones in our portfolio, im just asking to see if saber is really a good investment when we compare to other ones that can be a better invesment)
Saber is only focused on Stable pairs such as USDC/USDT, mSOL/SOL whereas Raydium is focused on non-stable pairs such as SOL/USDC.
From a risk perspective, providing liquidity onto a stable pair AMM suffers of little impairment loss and it’s a relatively safer compared to LP’ing on non-stable pair. We expect Saber to become the leading liquidity aggregators for stable pairs and accumulate huge TVL and volume in the future.
From an utility point of view we see more upside in SBR as we can use it to vote in the DAO and have an impact in yield farming emissions. RAY has no such option at the moment.
Could you expand a little more on why you think that Saber will be the dominant platform apart from the big name partners that are named? Won’t the DAO voting just mean that the biggest pool will get the bulk of the rewards? I don’t really see how it brings additional value.
Besides the reasons mentioned above they also have a strong first-mover advantage. I don’t see anyone else launching a competitor of Saber anytime soon as liquidity tends to have “winner-takes-all” dynamics.
The DAO voting allows for interesting dynamics with protocols bidding for liquidity on their pools, see also my other answer here
There are also other possibilities such as metaCOLLECTIVE initiating a token swap with Saber to further cement our respective positions in the Solana DeFi environment. A similar proposal between Saber and UXP Protocol recently has passed so we could approach them as well.
Thanks for the explanations guys, I feel more comfortable with the dynamics. Even if not everything is completely clear for me. I guess I’m still a crypto n00b.
After the Cashio hack, the response by the Saber team has been abysmal. They refused to take responsibility, they provided little updates, while also being extremely unresponsive to requests for clarifications from the community.
They have been called out several times on this, and I think many in Solana are re-evaluating their role in the ecosystem. This ecosystem is still very small and reputation means a lot. In these times of crisis the real character of a team comes out , and for Saber it hasn’t been good at many levels.
In light of their response I don’t feel comfortable in holding SBR anymore (and as a consequence, SUNNY). While the CRV/CVX dynamics are still relevant on paper, I have now serious doubts that the Saber team will be able to deliver on them, or that they will still be a key part of the ecosystem in the long-term.
For this reason, I think we should consider selling all of our SBR and SUNNY, even if that means realizing a loss on SBR as the price has gone down since we bought in.
I believe as a DAO we could try to approach them directly and have them on a Twitter Space to share more details and perhaps how&if their long-term vision and strategy are changed.