2025 Roadmap proposition & discussion

General
1

Hi, I’ll like to propose a roadmap which is a result of compiling thoughts and a wishlist across the entire team, now finally I’d like to invite everyone to comment here and share their views.

2025: A Crucial Year for PWN DAO

2025 marks a pivotal phase for the evolution of PWN DAO and its product suite. In Q4 2024, we achieved strong product-market fit (PMF) by offering liquidity leverage opportunities on LP tokens (via Swaap) at competitive rates, notably 12% APR on WETH across Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum. Additionally, December 2024 saw the launch of PWN DAO governance, accompanied by the initial token distribution to early supporters.

In the spirit of Ethereum’s open community ethos, we aim to incentivize and align 100 business development (BD) teams. However, in the short term, we must significantly enhance our business development and marketing capabilities.

For 2025, two key objectives should guide our efforts:

  1. Increase protocol throughput to achieve $100M TVL
  2. Expand PWN DAO governance token distribution to 1,000 participants (holders)

These goals align with four high-level verticals:

  • A) Product
  • B) Business (TBD @Pierre)
  • C) Community & Communications (TBD @Jiri)
  • D) Experiments

A - Product

Key targets:

  1. Achieve 100% reliability.
  2. Enhance the incentives system to boost engagement and TVL.
  3. Simplify liquidity entry points by abstracting perceived complexity. (Measured in user interviews)
  4. Enable protocol integrations to allow more teams to build PWN-based products in parallel. (Having at least 1 team building their own product on PWN by the end of 2025)

Q1:

  • Improve reliability of web2/platform components to support the full scope of PWN Protocol v1.3.

    • Target - user reported: (Measured by user support tickets or issues in the internal #bugs channel):
      • Basic flows Maximum of 1 user bug per month :
        • create / repay / claim loan
        • bundle / unbundle assets
        • from Rabby / Frame / Safe wallets
      • Advanced features / flows (max 1 user bug per week):

  • Establish a robust user testing routine (reward testers with reputation points).

    • Target: Conduct 10 full user interviews per month (2–3 per week).

  • Open Lending Strategies Editor to all users.

    • Improves operational efficiency by enabling direct strategy management without consuming BD resources.

  • Release PWN on UniChain & Ink (potentially Starknet mainnet).

Rationale:

In Q3 and Q4 2024, we implemented major features such as Strategies and PoolHooks, alongside new DAO-related interfaces. However, dependencies and niche user pathways (e.g., native Safe wallet support) revealed suboptimal user experiences. Ensuring a seamless experience is mission-critical, supported by rigorous testing.

Q2:

  • Implement a Referral & Future fee-share system.
    • Target: 30% of deals to include a referral address.
  • Release PWN SDK for integration into wallet interfaces and DeFi yield aggregators.
  • Deploy a unified liquidity entry-point solution (leveraging PoolHooks and featured strategies).
  • Release the PWN Protocol V2 Whitepaper.
  • Explore additional features (to validate with users):
    • Counterparty selection (e.g., optional KYC).
    • Perpetually available liquidity through dynamic commitments or commitment pools.
    • Enhanced integrations for complex DeFi assets, including:
      • In-app liquidation and unwrapping into underlying assets.
      • Parametrized filtering on the platform.
      • Stateful proposals for Uniswap v3 and v4 LP tokens.

Rationale:
To scale our PMF success, we must create additional incentives for market participants to choose PWN. Building on traction in the LP segment, we aim to broaden our offerings, especially targeting Uniswap LP users. Additionally, PWN’s universality is a competitive advantage - enabling wallets and DeFi interfaces to offer in-app lending/borrowing for full portfolios fosters additional fee-sharing opportunities.

Q3:

  • Improving UX by integrating convenience features, such as automatic in-app asset swaps
  • Aggregated loans (executing/repaying a multitude of loans in 1 transaction)
  • Explore additional features (to validate with users):
    • new loan types such as optional liquidation mechanisms
    • privacy layer integrations
    • cross-chain loan creation

Rationale:
There are some clear UX low-hanging fruits which are in the pipeline based on earlier user-feedback, yet don’t have the highest priority - realistically those are achievable within 6-9 months as backlog projects.

Q4:

  • Launch PWN V2 on all chains
  • Infrastructure decentralization :
    • alternative hosting for UI (IPFS,…)
    • alternative intent storage solutions
  • Validate:
    • SDK - wallet integration & 3rd party UIs oriented functionalities
    • White-label products for institutional use.

Rationale:

Achieving network effects requires expanding beyond current “whale” participants. PWN V2 enables new revenue opportunities for market participants, such as solvers and bridge liquidity providers.

B - Business

This section will still be improved on, but sharing here a very brief high-level outlook.

Focus on quality partnerships (e.g., Uniswap, Ink, market makers).

Q1:

  • Lock in new opportunities in the PMF segment (e.g., unchain market-making, DEX LPing).

Q2:

  • Drive adoption among crypto-native institutions (e.g., Stakehouse, Re7).

Q3:

  • Enable wallet integrations.
  • Pursue TradFi institutional adoption (e.g., Bitcoin Suisse incorporating PWN into their product suite).

Q4:

  • Expand TradFi institutional adoption.

C - Community & Communications

Objective:

Maintain a continuous presence in the ecosystem and ensure active participation in digital marketing. Incentivize contributors with:

  • 250 tokens for hosting a Twitter Space.
  • 500 tokens for delivering a Meetup talk.
  • 1,000 tokens for recognized conference talks.
  • 100–1,000 tokens for published articles, based on views (1k+, 10k+, 100k+).
  • KPI: CEO participation in 1 conference and 1 podcast per month.

Thous would be repriced on-the-go.

Q1:

  • Tailor campaigns for the Uniswap LP community.
  • Onboard a dedicated community manager to host regular Spaces.
  • Launch a reputation boost program to incentivize social media engagement.

Q2:

  • Partner with a marketing agency budget of: $25–50k.
  • Achieve milestones:
    • 50k Twitter followers.
    • 5,000 Discord users.
    • Appearances in major media and podcasts.

Q3:

  • Expand to 75k X followers and 5k Forecaster/BlueSky followers.

Q4:

  • Reach 100k X followers, 10k Forecaster/BlueSky followers, and 10k Discord users.

D - Seed Planting & Experimentation

  • Showcase undercollateralized loan products on World & Base.
  • Support PWN protocol forks for institutional or compliance domains (e.g., Project Deuss).
  • Foster DeFi mortgage use cases built on PWN (e.g., via hackathon bounties).

Looking forward for the discussion, once finalized I’d pose a completed version up for a vote by the PWN DAO.

3 Likes
2

Regarding the community and communications

The marketing team has yet to have a proper meeting to define goals and objectives for 2025. These are my initial comments that might change next week based on those meetings.

I suggest we stick to incentivizing the community using Reps, not directly $PWN token. Two reasons for this:

  1. We have already started lining up the concept and comms for the incentives program in Reps.
  2. Reps and their distribution is easier to manage while the incentives programs are going and the points stay offchain.
    Then, when all rep farming concludes, we will proportionally (and all at once) distribute the tokens based on Reps to the individual community members.

With that being said, a few comments on the values below:

  • 250 tokens for hosting a Twitter Space.

There has to be a set of rules in place that will assess quality of a given space, otherwise we risk ending up with tens or hundreds of zero quality spaces farming airdrop. (This is up to the marketing team, just noting)

  • 500 tokens for delivering a Meetup talk.

If you mean speaking on a PWN organized event, then yes, I agree.

  • 1,000 tokens for recognized conference talks.

Same as above I suppose. Does the talk have to be solely about PWN? Or just a mention? (This is a detail to be refined in the incentives program)

  • 100–1,000 tokens for published articles, based on views (1k+, 10k+, 100k+).

Fair.

  • KPI: CEO participation in 1 conference and 1 podcast per month.

Can you clarify what exactly do you mean by this. Do you mean PWN CEO? Podcast should be made by PWN, or mediated?

Quarters

Q1 – no comment so far, mostly agree.

Q2 – On top of that, I also propose we start using Kaito Mindshare as a key metric. Their product is basically an AI scanning the whole of twitter and showing terms and projects and how they are perceived by the ct community. Frankly, that should be our highest non-financial KPI, to constantly increase our mindshare and be talked about.

Q3 – Hard disagree on BlueSky, from my perspective nobody uses that and our marketing team is not big enough to spread thin across platforms with minimal impact.

Q4 – Same

2 Likes
3

Hey, all good points. Thanks!

Regarding “appearance” incentives - this is more targeted towards PWN DAO Foundation - so this would be decided on the PDF level as it would be touching on core-contributors on the payroll - take it as an idea draft that can be applied to core-contributors but also to community contributors (in Reps). The whole point here is that we need more district appearance - including the ED/CEO (I admit I’m mixing in the ‘ceo’ as a generic labe, but what I generally mean is the PDF ed & board)

4

Hello. I would like to elaborate on the product key targets to better reflect reality and achieve more measurable results.

When we discussed plans for 2025 with the team, we concluded that creating an open-source SDK with extensive automated testing should help us achieve higher reliability and align more closely with the ecosystem.

Considering existing bugs, we’ve already taken measures to address the recent avalanche of issues. Regardless, I think the metrics you suggest are realistic, and we’ve already started working on gathering existing data to address this metric.

    • Target: Conduct 10 full user interviews per month (2–3 per week).

The Dev team would like to organize 7 external testing sessions to help the community to get familiar with the platform to bring more attention to reputation gaining via QA.

Updated version for Q1 from my side would be:

  • Maximum of 1 bug discovered per month in PWN SDK:**
  • Basic flows Maximum of 1 user bug per month :
    * create / repay / claim loan
    * bundle / unbundle assets
    * from Rabby / Frame / Safe wallets
  • Maximum of 1 new issue on average discovered by Sentry
  • 85% of code in PWN SDK is publicly available and covered with tests
  • Establish a robust user testing routine (reward testers with reputation points).
  • Target: Conduct 10 full user interviews per month (2–3 per week).
  • Target: Organize 7 external testing sessions.

Regarding Q2, I agree with the overall direction, but I’d like to dive into the details at the end of Q1.

2 Likes
5

Hello, thanks for sharing the roadmap, few comments on the Product side:

A) Q1, Open Lending Strategies Editor to all users:
This will possibly increase the noise on the platform, shall we also come up with some whitelisting solution?

B) Q2, 30% of deals to include a referral address:
What are the benefits of referrers? It is better to be defined to check the achievability of the 30% target.

C) Q2, Deploy a unified liquidity entry-point solution:
Supported the idea for a long time :smiley: I guess this would need more effort on r&d, moving it to Q3 seems to be more realistic imho.

D) Q3, new loan types:
I’d say let’s define the new loan types based on user interviews/reviews/feedback, not putting much effort into some loan types, and then figure out there is not much attraction to them.

General comment: Would be great to have prioritized goals for each quarter.