SURF.Finance recently made public the tokens users can single asset stake to farm WAVE in its innovative new DApp on Polygon, polyWAVE. Included in the token pool is TITAN, an addition that has drawn some controversy. Given the circumstances, the SURF.Finance team thought it best to give some background on why TITAN was added.
The Iron Finance TITAN Incident
On June 16, 2021 the first “bank run” in the crypto space was experienced by Iron Finance, causing the TITAN token used to partially collateralize its IRON stable coin to drop to nearly $0.
Here is a brief summary of what occurred:
For a more detailed explanation of the IRON Finance bank run, please see this great video created by Finematics here.
- A few large liquidity providers (whales) started removed liquidity from IRON/USDC, and instead of redeeming the IRON, they sold for USDC causing the price of IRON to fall.
- This in turn caused users to start redeeming IRON and selling the newly minted TITAN in mass. Note: Redeeming IRON caused TITAN to be minted, while minting IRON caused TITAN to be burned.
- This caused a downward spiral that was further exasperated by an arbitrage opportunity to redeem IRON and sell the minted TITAN. The arbitrage opportunity was caused by a difference in the market price and the oracle price used by the contract to mint TITAN.
Within a matter of hours, this negative feedback loop caused trillions of TITAN tokens to be minted, and the value of TITAN to drop from a recent high of $64 to a CoinGecko reported low of $0.000000033681. Anyone owning TITAN or one of the TITAN liquidity pools, suffered huge losses. In the case of liquidity pool holders, there was a near 100% impermanent loss.
The fallout of this devastated thousands of peoples’ portfolios. Even well known billionaire and crypto advocate Mark Cuban was publicly known to have been affected by this event.
The TITAN is our DOGE Movement
The Iron Finance Discord and Telegram became so congested with angry users airing out their grievances, that both chats were effectively shut down. This lead to the development of new groups like the Unofficial Iron Finance Support Group, and the TITAN is our DOGE movement.
The Unofficial Iron Finance Support Group “was created for those impacted by Iron Finance TITAN incident. It is here for members to discuss, organize and help one another”. This group seemed to focus mostly on determining what occurred, Iron Finance, and the Iron Finance compensation plan for those affect by the incident.
The TITAN is our DOGE movement was created by a community of those affected by the incident, with the idea of bringing value back to TITAN as a meme coin. After the incident, there were tens of thousands of addresses holding trillions of TITAN tokens. The vast majority of these addresses represented those adversely affected by the Iron Finance TITAN incident, myself included.
I have always liked the idea of a community coming together to bring value back to a token that has rugged or been abandoned by the developers. The TITAN incident was a perfect circumstance for something like this to occur. Thousands of users were sitting on millions to billions of worthless TITAN tokens. These were people who had a vested interest in this token from both the psychological effect of the incident, and the financial effect of owning the token.
Before the Iron Finance Discord chat was shut down, I saw a member in there promoting the idea of turning TITAN into a meme coin. I loved the idea, and even Tweeted my own meme a day after the incident:
As terrible as this incident was, it did cause 35 trillion TITAN tokens to be distributed to over 36 thousand addresses. A new token is often released in an Initial Fair Offering (IFO). The distribution of trillions of TITAN tokens were dispersed in an oddly similar fashion. I referred to it as a Crash Market Distribution, which seemed like a good catalyst for a meme coin movement.
From there, it did not take me long to find the like minded individuals of the TITAN is our DOGE community. TITAN is our DOGE was initially galvanized by a lot of Mark Cuban and Greek Titan memes. The passion of people affected by the incident caused the group to grow and the value of TITAN to come back from that near $0 value. This caused a positive feedback loop. More people affected by the incident were discovering that their TITAN tokens were no longer worthless and joining the movement.
TITAN began a new price discovery phase, going from that low of $0.000000033681 to a high of .0000025, and increase of 7,323%. It has since settled down from that initial speculative boom, trading at $0.0000007264 as of this writing. This is still a 2,057% increase from that low reported by CoinGecko.
The Iron Finance TITAN incident has been a two-edged sword for the TITAN is our DOGE movement. On the one hand, there were thousands of TITAN holders affected and wanting to recoup some losses, on the other hand, there were many people totally dismayed by even the mention of the TITAN token.
This made it difficult to find a project willing to include TITAN in one of its farming pools. Eventually one did, Bull Ecosystem, which I couldn’t help but Tweet about when it happened.
Fast forward to today, TITAN can be used to farm tokens on ComethSwap, Dfyn, Firebird Finance, and Titan Bull. TITAN has even managed to cross over the Hoo Smart Chain, where it can be used on PuddingSwap to farm PUD.
With over 35 trillion tokens, there was a big push in the TITAN is our DOGE community to burn some of the TITAN supply. A big first step in doing this was assuring that no more TITAN tokens could be minted. This was accomplished when Iron Finance renounced ownership of the contract and the minting capabilities for TITAN tokens were disabled forever.
This opened things up to the most recent addition to the TITANDAO website, TITAN JACKPOT, a game where users can win TITAN and TITAN is burned.
Another big goal of the TITAN is our DOGE movement has been to increase the number of TITAN token holders, which has more than doubled to nearly 80,000.
There is, however, one thing the TITAN is our DOGE community has been asking for that, until now, has not been available: Single Asset Staking (SAS).
TITAN on polyWAVE
July has been a truly eventful month for SURF.Finance. Numerous long planned projects and partnerships are finally coming to fruition:
- The Gitbook was updated to reflect the current state of SURF.Finance.
- The SURF.Finance team helped tech/coding guru and influencer Matt Upham launch his new LMAO token on Ethereum. (Which you can single asset stake on both Ethereum here, and polyWAVE on Polygon here).
- The launch of the absolutely amazing SURF Dashboard.
- An action adventure arcade game in the SURF Universe called Tide Rider — The Legend of SURF.
- The launch of polyWAVE, SURF Finance’s innovative new farm on Polygon.
- And more to come . . .
As an active member of both the SURF.Finance community and TITAN is our DOGE, I thought that TITAN would be a great addition to the polyWAVE farming pool. The TITAN is our DOGE community were wanting a Single Asset Staking (SAS) option, and both were community driven projects that could mutually benefit from exposure to each other.
As was to be expected, members of the core team were initially apprehensive about the addition of TITAN. It was viewed as a protocol that rugged and lost a lot of people’s money. However, my excitement about the movement, and insistence that this was a community trying to turn lemons into lemonade (or a rug into a meme coin) eventually won the team over and TITAN was added.
When the pools were recently released to the public, there was a negative reaction by some respected members of the SURF.Finance community. In retrospect, we should have taken more consideration into how other individuals affected by the Iron Finance TITAN incident would react. Having become so used to looking at the TITAN is our DOGE movement as a way to have some fun with and bring value back to TITAN token holders, it is easy to lose site of the people adversely affected by the Iron Finance TITAN incident and perception of the TITAN token.
For anyone offended by the addition of a TITAN pool, we do apologize. Please do understand, however, that TITAN is our DOGE (TITANDAO) is not Iron Finance. It is a community of TITAN token holders, many of whom lost a lot of value in the Iron Finance TITAN incident. The TITAN is our DOGE (TITANDAO) community just wants to take a bad situation and turn it into something good, fun, and hopefully return a little value back to TITAN holders.
There’s a Tsunami coming. One made to be SURFed by TITANs.
