Introduction

Quasar is a decentralized app-chain built for interchain asset management

What Is Quasar?

Quasar (pronounced QWAY-ZAR) is a decentralized appchain enabling interchain digital asset management. A digital asset can be anything from digital certificates, authentication codes, to fungible or non-fungible tokens. Management can be anything one would like to do with the digital asset such as save, co-manage, crowdsource, or crowdlend. Quasar offers a transparent, secure, and governable platform to build general purpose management containers (vaults).

Decentralized asset management (DAM) through interchain vaults

DAM encompasses the use of permissionless, transparent, and composable tools and infrastructure — made available by blockchain technology and DeFi — for asset management services. It is pushed forward by the belief that liquidity providers should have greater agency in determining how their assets are handled while still being able to delegate some important decision-making to others, such as the expertise of an asset manager or of a community. Opportunities presented by DAM include:

Greater visibility and control, for investors, over their assets and how they are deployed
Expanded access to sophisticated asset management strategies such as automated cross-chain yield farming
Permissionless tools for building actively managed portfolios and custom strategies
Moving beyond the format of traditional asset manager relationships by emphasizing collaboration
Mechanisms for information sharing and collective decision-making
Access to a wider variety of assets and types of assets

The features of decentralized blockchains make them highly suited for facilitating a DAM platform. These features include trustless consensus security, censorship resistance, publicly traceable and verifiable transactions, permissionless access, and trustless smart contracts.

Why an appchain for DAM?

DeFi projects are already finding interesting ways to aggregate and deploy funds — DAM is already here, however it is not optimized. Additionally, the advent of the interchain- where many independent blockchains are able to communicate with each other- bekons for redesigning of DAM applications and infrastructure.

Quasar believes that an appchain focused supported DAM applications will be able to unlock the full potential for DAM in the current and future eras of DeFi. Appchains being application-specific blockchains can offer a higher level of sovereignty for the hosted applications compared to general-purpose blockchains. Developers of applications can more directly influence the evolution of the chain without competing with other non DAM related applications. Moreover, appchains allow the evolution of the chain to react more dynamically and adapt quickly to the needs of end-users because the governance layers are much less than general-purpose blockchains.

Vaults as serviced infrastructure

Quasar utilizes smart contracts called Vaults as the primary vehicle for aggregating and deploying capital. Vaults dynamically carry out asset deployment by flexibly integrating Strategies, separate smart contracts which handle execution logic. Vaults are customizable and self-governing and thus their trajectory is determined by their own members.

Quasar is best understood as a platform for DAM infrastructure. Quasar's primary role is providing and maintaing the tools and infrastructure needed for generating and operating Vaults and Strategies. Quasar may occasionally develop Vaults open for the community to participate in, though this will not be our core focus. Quasar is more interested in providing the resources to support others to build their dream DAM solution.

Use Cases

Composable smart contracts for vaults allow for a broad range of use cases. DeFi legos can be bundled and recombined in countless ways within vaults. Here are some potential use cases:

Diversified Portfolio: Create unique collections of diversified assets all in one place, without having constantly interface with multiple individual chains
ETF Index: Different metrics such as market cap or TVL can be used to create several flavors of simple indexes for IBC enabled chains within the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond. Quasar's own Q-Index will be an example of an ETF index.
Actively Managed Index: Develop a basket of goods representative of an index, then carry out strategies (e.g. staking) with the underlying assets
Autocompounding: Automatically and remotely reinvest yield generated from a single or multiple AMM pools back into the same, or different, pools.
Automated LPing: enter and exit liquidity positions automatically based on specified logic responsive to changing market conditions

Protocol, Application Interface, Labs

To begin, we should make clear the distinctions between the different areas of "Quasar", some of which may confuse new users.

Quasar Labs: The company which developed the Quasar Protocol, along with the interface for the smart contracts.
The Quasar Protocol (App-Chain): A PoS blockchain with smart contracts to together create IBC-enabled Vaults, a protocol that enables independent digital asset management across blockchains.
The Quasar Application: A web interface that allows for easy interaction with the Quasar protocol. The interface is only one of many ways one may interact with the Quasar protocol.
Quasar Governance: A governance system for governing the Quasar Protocol, enabled by the QSR token.

If you want to know more about Quasar, read here

Osmosis - Quasar Launch Analysis