Dear Newts,
Success demands clarity and conviction. When we set a clear, unwavering goal, we can move mountains. But confusion and indecision breed endless debates and stall progress.
This document is meant to propose Neutron’s North Star - a guiding vision that integrates our strengths, lessons, and aspirations. A direction to rely on in moments of uncertainty. A crystal clear vision that we can confidently march toward together.
For those of us with ADHD, here’s a quick TL;DR.
TLDR
- Thanks to its Integrated infrastructure, Neutron is uniquely positioned to make finance work for the people.
- Doubling down on doing DeFi better than anyone else will lead us to success.
- Here is the plan:
- Leave ICS to unlock DeFi optimizations
- Focus on assets people want (BTC, ETH, SOL, etc.)
- Build for the broader market (not just cosmos)
- Build groundbreaking shit, not Ethereum/Solana forks
- Beat the competition on liquidity efficiency and profitability with Supervaults to do more with any given amount of liquidity.
- Drive value and adoption to NTRN
- Beat the competition on performance without sacrificing decentralized robustness
- Go mobile-first
Our Vision
Beat centralized alternatives without sacrificing decentralization.
Finance is fundamental to the economy. It should empower people to manage risk, build wealth, and create new value.
Yet, traditional finance is closed, extractive, and gatekept. Decentralized finance (DeFi) has yet to outcompete centralized incumbents, leaving most crypto activity concentrated on platforms like Binance and Coinbase.
We believe in a decentralized future where open, composable, and censorship-resistant DeFi transforms global finance, providing fair and efficient markets with equal access to opportunity.
Our Thesis
TLDR: Integrated infrastructure allows us to beat everyone else on capital efficiency.
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Financial market participants optimize for execution quality (best prices), capital efficiency (maximum returns per unit of capital), and user experience (UX).
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Optimally delivering on these requires an integrated approach that combines application-specific infrastructure, high performance, ****and synchronous composability.
As the first network to offer all three properties, Neutron is uniquely positioned to drive the next generation of financial products and services.
By relentlessly pursuing execution quality, capital efficiency, and UX, we will secure a growing share of global demand for trading, investments, and savings, empowering our ecosystem and community to thrive.
Our Plan
1. Graduate from Replicated Security, Radically Optimize for DeFi
TLDR: To deliver something truly unique and valuable, we must take control of our stack and brand.
Neutron is first to a unique vision, one that merges network effects with application-specific infrastructure. To move the needle, we must deliver groundbreaking infrastructure and products that push the boundaries of the space, not simply offer marginal improvements over incumbent networks. This means owning our stack and radically optimizing for capital efficiency, user experience, and performance.
This is what Mercury is about: Mercury: Towards the Integrated Endgame
2. Build for the Broader Market and Assets People Want
TLDR: Go beyond the Interchain, wherever the users and capital are.
Our growth strategy centers on building applications for the most resilient assets—those with the most distributed and active holder bases. Today, BTC, ETH, and SOL are at the top of this list.
Focusing on these assets will create sticky liquidity and deep user engagement—crucial for sustainable USD-denominated yield products and financial tools.
→ Structured, a new project building on Neutron, is introducing maxBTC: the highest real yield on Bitcoin. There are opportunities to add value to leading projects such as Lido, because Neutron is the best place for yield-bearing asset issuers. Help us onboard them: Neutron for Tokenized Yield Issuers
3. Prioritize Groundbreaking Products Over ETH/SOL forks
TLDR: No one cares about a marginally better DEX. Focus all efforts on building novel, 10x better products, and keep trying until you do.
The industry thrives on network effects and suffers from high onboarding friction and fleeting attention. Growth requires breakthrough products and opportunities, not incremental improvements.
→ There are exciting developments in the ecosystem: Supervaults is a new, 10x better way to provide liquidity, Structured (maxBTC) is 10x better yield on Bitcoin, Mars is the only cross-collateralized, cross-margin perpetual futures exchange in the industry, etc. We are at any builder’s disposal to brainstorm groundbreaking new designs and products.
4. Make Liquidity Provisioning Efficient and Profitable
TLDR: Liquidity costs money. We don’t currently have the most money, so we need to win by spending it the most efficiently.
Neutron has faced liquidity scarcity and high capital costs. To outperform competitors, we must offer cheaper, more sustainable liquidity solutions.
By leveraging Neutron’s infrastructure and our ecosystem of powerful applications—Mars, Duality, and others—we will make liquidity provisioning both capital-efficient and profitable.
→ Early results show Supervaults might result in a massive unlock for the ecosystem: with as little as $650 of liquidity, they’ve facilitated more than $2.6M of volume over the last few weeks.
5. Drive NTRN and Local Token Adoption
TLDR: Make numba go up for all tokens that launch on Neutron.
While top assets originate outside Neutron, building around them is costly and friction-heavy. Local assets like NTRN scale with network success and offer more accessible opportunities.
We must drive utility and adoption for local tokens, encourage projects to launch within Neutron, and support their success. Over time, this will reinforce our network effects and create unique opportunities within our ecosystem.
Success requires engaging both on-chain and off-chain players—investors, hedge funds, market makers, centralized exchanges, custodians, and more. As a community, we must secure their support to strengthen our ecosystem.
→ Mercury introduces Neutron staking and liquid staking while maintaining the NTRN burn and fixed supply. This will open the door to new use cases for NTRN throughout the ecosystem.
6. Achieve Centralized Efficiency Without Sacrificing Decentralized Resilience
TLDR: Performance is not sufficient to win, but it’s required. Let’s make Neutron VERY fast.
Crypto’s strength is its resilience in worst-case scenarios. Losing that means losing everything. However, without matching centralized efficiency and UX, mainstream adoption remains elusive.
Our solution: systems that default to centralized efficiency but seamlessly fall back to robust, fully decentralized operations when necessary.
→ Mercury should already improve blocktime significantly. Hadron Labs will focus on getting sub 100ms in the second half of this year. This will make everything faster and cheaper for everyone.
7. Solve UX with a Mobile-First Strategy
TLDR: You should be able to use Neutron apps on a phone, anywhere, anytime.
Almost everyone has a smartphone, but far fewer have access to traditional financial services.
To deliver on the original promise of DeFi, we must simplify and refine our product experience, prioritizing mobile access and intuitive user interfaces.
→ Duality and the Neutron Portal app are getting an overhaul, going mobile, and improving functionality. Ecosystem-wide Privy support will make it much easier to interact with Neutron dApps on mobile. BvB and Neve are providing simpler experiences and becoming more and more mobile friendly.
Our Competitive Edge
Neutron’s integrated approach gives us a unique advantage:
Shaping our network empowers us to build the impossible. We may freely integrate critical infrastructure to benefit the ecosystem. This empowers us to minimize trust assumptions, costs, and risks and to deliver groundbreaking products.
Tight coordination makes our ecosystem uniquely cohesive and efficient. Where many ecosystems foster independent applications, we emphasize intentional composability— actively shaping how applications interact to optimize capital efficiency, execution quality, and user experience.
We must be both non-consensus and right to win in a competitive market. Neutron can emerge as a groundbreaking ecosystem by taking a strategic approach to integration and innovation.
Conclusion
Executing this vision successfully will build a truly impactful defi ecosystem — something we can all be proud of. We will leverage our expertise to create robust, scalable, and user-friendly on-chain protocols. We will learn from the industry and past mistakes to refine our approach. Most importantly, we will bring together a global community of talented individuals who share our mission.
Neutron’s future is bright, and we are just getting started.
Shoutout to @PossibltyResult, @zion_schum, @fluffy_trex, Somethingelse, @luisqagt and @Rebel_Defi for their thoughts, input and review.