Launching on Optimism: Our Partners and Approach

Iron Bank
3 min readAug 17, 2022

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We’re excited to announce our launch on Optimism, a low-cost and lightning-fast Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain. With over $1B USD saved in gas fees and more than $800M already in TVL, we’re looking forward to working deeper with the Optimism team and community to fulfill their borrowing/lending needs.

We are spearheading this launch with our partners Homora V2 and Yearn Finance to strengthen cross-chain interoperability and improve DeFi scalability and reliability. Users will be able to borrow against their collateralised crypto assets on Optimism while benefiting from competitive gas fees, attractive rewards, and yield options.

Homora V2 will continue its longstanding relationship with the Iron Bank since launching on Ethereum, Avalanche and Fantom with partnerships on Optimism and other growing ecosystems. The additional liquidity flexibility Iron Bank provides as a protocol-to-protocol lending partner will allow users to get the best risk-adjusted yields in DeFi with low gas costs and fast transaction speeds.

The collective of Iron Bank, Yearn Finance and Homora V2 provides an incredible DeFi primitive as a comprehensive full product suite will be available to projects building with Optimism, which is an exciting next step in the creation of an even more robust DeFi ecosystem.

Iron Bank is providing rewards for supplying WETH, USDC and DAI assets on Optimism, with approximately 11.5K IB tokens allocated over the next 4 weeks. There will also be 3.8K IB tokens allocated to WETH/IB LP providers on Optimism for the same time period.

As described in a previous thread by our lead developer Tycho, safety sits at the core of Iron Bank. When launching on Optimism we applied the same approach:

Oracle Price Support: To ensure accurate pricing, we’re using Chainlink Price Feeds. As one of the industry’s leading and most well-known market data solution providers, they have helped secure tens of billions of dollars in value for leading DeFi protocols across multiple chains.

Bug Bounty: The more brains looking at the situation, the better the outcome. That’s why we expanded our bug bounty with ImmuneFi to include Optimism. A leader in their discipline, they’ve saved over $20B in user funds by paying out more than $40M in bounties.

Asset Protection: Nexus Mutual coverage is available for all Iron Bank markets on Optimism. This allows users the option to secure risk and be covered for events like smart contract exploits or bugs. With almost $250M in active cover, Nexus Mutual provides valuable infrastructure to the DeFi industry.

We are currently undergoing a new audit, and we continue to proactively monitor our protocol across all chains while maintaining collateral caps to further secure Iron Bank.

Our approach to safety is not static and we continue to evolve to ensure the safety of Iron Bank. The partners with whom we work take the same approach and are developing new technologies, such as smart contract auditing solution Chainlink Proof of Reserve. As new solutions and approaches are developed, we will work with our partners to explore applicability for Iron Bank.

We’re honored to be working with some of the leading projects within the broader cryptocurrency industry to jointly launch on Optimism together and provide core safety components to Iron Bank and our users. We believe that DeFi has an important role to play within the larger financial industry and that a commitment to safety is the best approach to wider adoption.

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