An update on our North Star

General Ideas
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Introduction

On March 27, I published Neutron’s North Star: 7 concrete initiatives to beat centralized alternatives on capital efficiency, execution quality, and UX. This update reports our execution against those initiatives and provides some insight into what’s next for Neutron.

Ecosystem Metrics

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Executing on our North Star

I’ll first provide an update on our progress with the 7 key initiatives I had proposed, before discussing our most recent learnings and how we are using them to refine our where to play and how to win choices for the network.

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1. Leave ICS, Optimize for DeFi [:white_check_mark: Completed]

TLDR: Neutron is stronger as a sovereign network—faster, more reliable, free to set its own agenda and brand.

On the 10th of April, Neutron successfully upgraded to Mercury, exited restaking and became a fully sovereign network. Led by @pr0n00gler, this massive technical feat delivered:

  • Block time: ~2.5s → 1s

  • Oracle sign rate: 85% → 99.9%

  • Block sign rate: 95% → 99.9%

  • Upgrade time: 12 hours → 5 minutes

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The Cosmos Hub community returned ~3% of the total supply to the Neutron DAO Treasury. An additional ~1% of the supply was earmarked for joint projects / incentives such as Bitcoin Summer.

Finally, thanks to the support and funding of the Interchain Foundation, Hadron Labs took over the responsibility of maintaining CosmWasm, Neutron’s virtual machine, securing a core dependency to Neutron’s roadmap.

2. Focus on Assets People Actually Want [:green_circle: Progressing well]

TLDR: Prioritizing Bitcoin brings better partners and customers. Bitcoin Summer is nearly live to make Neutron the home of BTC Finance.

Neutron’s focus shifted from Interchain assets (ATOM, TIA) to BTC—the asset with the deepest, most active demand.

With @citrusmimosa and @PossibltyResult, we:

  • Announced and nearly delivered Bitcoin Summer.

  • Rallied leading BTC teams (BitGlobal, Babylon, Lombard, Etherfi, Solv, Bedrock, others).

  • Secured >$200M in soft TVL commitments.

In parallel, @StructuredFi ran a $5M private deposit for maxBTC—a liquid asset designed to deliver sustainable BTC yields—exited stealth, and is approaching mainnet.

3 & 4. Build Novel Products, Not Forks, & Win on Liquidity Efficiency [:green_circle: Progressing well]

TLDR: Supervaults now clear Astroport’s volume with 18x less liquidity. Daily Supervault volume is up 10x since North Star. Next: concentrated liquidity and isolated lending.

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Supervaults are now live and with that, no more intern haikus.

The Duality team shipped new pairs, raised liquidity, and launched Dynamic Spread Invariants (s/o @NicholasEvans14) so vaults could adapt spreads to stay balanced while maximizing efficiency. Volume dipped briefly on rollout due to wider spreads, then recovered as we fine-tuned the parameters.

What’s coming to amplify the flywheel:

  • @Magmavaults bringing concentrated liquidity on Duality for tighter prices and deeper books.

  • @Mars_protocol may be launching a new, hyper-efficient isolated lending/borrowing marketplace for Bitcoin :eyes:

5. Drive NTRN and Local Token Adoption [:yellow_circle: Can improve]

TLDR: Drop successfully introduced dNTRN but DeFi adoption has been slow so far. Bitcoin Summer introduces new long-term value drivers to the NTRN token.

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While we’ve seen less activity with dNTRN than we had initially hoped, we are confident that our long-term thesis is playing out:

As more “web2” capital enters, valuations are normalizing around products with revenue. If Bitcoin Summer succeeds, Neutron can capture transaction/priority fees, spot/perp trading fees, liquidations, management fees, and more—hard value meant to accrue to the NTRN token.

We also engaged @studiokoto to refresh the brand to match our values: radical focus, empowerment, excellence.

6. Match Centralized Performance [:orange_circle: Considering approaches]

TLDR: We cut block time from 2.5s to 1s. Before pushing toward 100ms, we can outplay on fair ordering so our market makers effectively “time travel.”

Better performance isn’t just better UX, it’s also better liquidity: low jitter / low latency markets reward better traders, which tightens markets for everyone. But raw performance is extremely crowded / competitive.

Instead of competing head on, we can instead change the rules of the game. Leverage Neutron’s infrastructure to build market makers that simply … time travel.

This is possible with fair network ordering and processing rules. It guarantees best prices to traders and that LPs never take a bad trade. As a result, Supervaults and Mars’ counterparty vaults become insanely competitive out of the box.

A POC of this feature, which we call “Last look”, has already been implemented and could be proposed to launch on the network soon.

7. Go Mobile-First [:yellow_circle: Can improve]

TLDR: The app runs on mobile and keeps gaining features, but needs polish and unified authentication.

The Neutron app started as a “one stop shop” to facilitate common actions like bridging to the network. Over time though, our vision has evolved, and we intend to turn the Neutron app into a fully fleshed-out, mobile-first DeFi super-app.

Over the last 4 months we’ve been adding features (Earn, Supervaults, Orderbook, Balance, Staking) and creating/refining flows to simplify onboarding to Neutron. For example, we replaced an unstable third-party bridge/swap with our own, leveraging Skip API and Skip Go Fast routes to facilitate onboarding in less than 30s.

Looking ahead, we are working with Para and Privy to skip the need for wallet extensions and empower mobile users to easily log in / transact, and doubling down on native integrations so that you may soon trade, lend/borrow, earn and more straight from the app.

What we’ve learned and how we intend to win

  • There’s real demand for BTC real yield. LPs want to earn on BTC; funds want yield to attract LPs; ecosystems want yield to attract capital and activity.

  • Leverage looping dominates DeFi, driven by isolated lending that lists tail assets with aggressive params.

  • Through Bitcoin Summer, Neutron is uniquely positioned to first unlock and dominate the leverage looping trade for BTC.

  • We’re exploring ways to sponsor liquidity on Neutron by exporting Neutron-based positions as yield-bearing products into other ecosystems. To support this, we’re doubling down on what drives risk-adjusted returns in Supervaults and strengthening our BD to secure distribution at scale.

  • In parallel, we’re trialing Bitfrost to bring Supervault execution to native Bitcoin swaps and capture market share from Thorchain/Maya. If successful, this could unlock a major new stream of organic flow, potentially 3–10x’ing DEX volume and Supervault APRs.

What’s next

  • Bitcoin Summer Launch - Liquidity and Lending Supply for Bitcoin DeFi

  • MaxBTC Vaults Launch - Real Yield on Bitcoin

  • [Redacted] Launch - Isolated Lending Launch for Capital Efficient Leverage Looping

  • Magma Launch - Concentrated Liquidity for Better Prices Across More Pools

  • Last Look Launch - Godmode for Supervaults and Mars Perps

  • And hopefully: a bunch more organic volume and TVL on top of all that if our native swap / positions exports bets come through!

Closing

The integrated thesis is working: over the last 2 years, we have been compounding innovations that drive capital efficiency, execution quality and better UX. This places Neutron into a position of strength, especially when bringing these benefits to the most desirable assets in the space.

The foundations are set, and the focus is clear: the next few quarters are when we make Neutron the leading DeFi ecosystem for Bitcoin.

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