Raid.Farm

Should I buy RAID?

# TL;DR While building dApps, developers need to work with a lot of on-chain actions. Unlike web2, it's incredibly hard for them to link these actions together. There're no APIs for smart contracts to communicate asynchronously. To ensure all on-chain actions are taking place smoothly, developers build in-house infrastructure to monitor events on the blockchain and manually trigger each sequential action. Raid's mission is to remove friction from this process and enable developers to build a ***workflow for on-chain actions*.** This workflow is similar to Zapier’s interface of trigger-action pairs and Raid takes care of smoothly executing these workflows. Raid acts like ***server-less infrastructure for executing on-chain actions.*** ### The interface As a product, we're hyper-focused on developers. Hence, the interface for developers to interact with Raid is via SDKs & APIs. We have powerful SDKs that developers use to define how their event workflows/automations should work. These are sent to our automation engine which takes care of everything else. The automation engine indexes chain data, extracts specific events to find matches for user-defined triggers and takes care of executing on-chain actions after a trigger is found. ### Initial use cases and focus areas Our primary focus areas are categories which are *event-heavy* (i.e deal with multiple events at a frequent rate). Most projects/dApps in such industries are familiar with problems in their workflow and are looking for better solutions. ### 1. DeFi/NFTs Exchanges and platforms are big beneficiaries of the technology we're building. DeFi/NFT markets are low-latency and high volume categories. DeFi/NFT dApps need to work with multiple on-chain events at any given point. DeFi/NFT exchanges and platforms can benefit in two ways using Raid: 1. Integrate us into their backend - DeFi platforms need to perform a lot of event-based actions on-chain. These include things like automated rebalancing, AMM position calls, ETH trades, APY maximisation.etc Right now, they build their internal infrastructure for doing these things. But this is a distraction from their core product and consumes a lot of engineering resources. We can be a plug-n-play resource for them to build such automated actions. They can use token prices, lending pool ratios, APY.etc as triggers and automatically adjust trades using Raid. 2. Build utility for users - A lot of DeFi platforms want to offer features like limit orders, liquidity prevention, gas optimisations.etc for their users. We're a simple plug-n-play resource for DeFi platforms to build these features for users without heavy backends. ### 2. Web3 Gaming & Social This is a large and growing market which lacks a lot of infrastructure. Games and social apps are using the blockchain as a backend. And because of the nature of these apps, they deal with a lot of events. For eg: A user starts playing a game —> game contract is notified —> game contract calls another contract to create a user registration —> user level increases —> game contract updates the level state —> game contract calls another contract to issue new in-game assets as NFTs for that level —> IPFS calls are made to reflect changes in the game frontend. This is an example. Games have several contracts, several states and several assets interacting with each other at the same time. Game developers usually build a lot of in-house infrastructure to monitor user events and update states, dispatch assets and trigger other contracts. Handling these on-chain operations is a big pain. Building in-house infrastructure consumes resources and lacks reliability. Developers need to ensure they have strong relayers, gas optimisations, retry mechanisms.etc for executing these on-chain operations. Raid lets them build a workflow for these operations much faster and handles all the infrastructure necessary to ensure reliability and uptime. ### 3. Developer utility Developers are used to building in-house bots to perform oracle updates, run CRON jobs for calling contracts, manage dApp wallets.etc Raid is a simple solution for such use cases. It's simple for developers to automate such actions using Raid and get a streamlined dashboard to view/manage all actions that have been taken. They don't need to worry about hosting/uptime and can save all the time spent building in-house bots. ### Broad overview of where we want to go We want to build out **the best tooling for crafting on-chain execution workflows.** After numerous customer conversations and research, we have found that this is a big pain point for teams that lacks a reliable solution. Other projects like Gelato/Keepers are largely time-based rather than being event-based. They’re significantly more expensive and lack the customisability most customers need. Our product is built as a framework that can be generalised for all kinds of on-chain use cases in the future. To start with, we want to **focus** on working closely with customers that fall into the use case categories mentioned above. Focusing on these use cases will help us learn more about the market and get the usage we’re aiming for. ### Market Size Number of transactions in 2017 were 44,000, which pumped up to 1.2M transactions per day in 2021. Our automation infrastructure is essentially playing a role in improving the transaction execution workflow for use cases like DeFi. Estimating a minimum 80% of transactions on Mainnet come from DeFi, we have a large market that's actively growing. There are 1000+ strong DeFi projects on the mainnet, with several hundred more on Polygon, Avalanche and Fantom. Our target is to capture 30-40% of outgoing DeFi transaction volume for dApps that we work with. While DeFi seems to be the first/largest market for such infra, we're seeing similar interest/growth in our other focus areas like gaming for the future. ### The big vision If we're able to become a **dApp's server-less backend for on-chain actions**, we can permanently embed ourselves in the web3 tech stack. If a bulk of on-chain actions for dApps are being triggered via Raid's engine, we have significant financial and strategic upside. We can monetise based on the size/value/scale of the transactions that go through us. We also get a lot of data regarding a dApp's on-chain activity that we can use to find patterns and insights. Not only will this data be valuable for dApp's, but would also enable us to create a lot of interesting products in the future. ### Early traction We're working closely with 6-7 mid-large sized customers right now ([Market.xyz](https://market.xyz/), Socket, Superteam). The intention is to work with some of the customers, sharpen our product UX and open public access in October. In the past few weeks, we've locked-in some large partnerships for our early traction/GTM. We're doing a partnership with Biconomy to serve automation infra to all the developers that use their relayers. We're closing a similar partnership with Quicknode which will be public next month. We’re in early talks for a partnership with InstaDapp to build out automation infrastructure for DeFi use cases. We're also exploring similar partnerships with Ankr, Algorand and Blockdaemon. We'll be leveraging these partnerships to get to our first large spike of developers for our launch in October. We also have co-marketing partnerships with infra projects like Zetachain, EVMOS and Helius.xyz to support our growth. ### Key KPIs KPIs for the next phase of growth/next few months. - Partnerships: Partnerships/Integrations with infrastructure projects and dev ecosystems is a strong GTM channel for us. We already have some big names and a strong pipeline of potential partnerships which we want to double down on. - LTV/Recurring usage: Because we have a strong B2B play, we're closely focusing on monthly recurring usage and expansion in usage over time. - Developer community: This is a strong focus for us after launch. We want to focus on building an ecosystem of developers around our product. Number of apps deployed, total SDK downloads.etc will be key metrics for this KPI.