This past month, Fusion initiated a series of successful DeFi (decentralized finance) community engagement and growth campaigns — including the Sept. 27 launch of our ‘Fusion Time-lock Bounty Campaigns’ that rewards participants for test-driving Fusion’s innovative functionality and amplifying their social communities.

Uptake was amazing. Particularly DeFi Bounty #6 which involved using Fusion’s front-end time lock features to loan out FSN tokens. Incredibly, more than one million FSN tokens were loaned within 10 minutes of the campaign going live!

Fusion community members leapt at the opportunity to earn 20% annualized returns from lending their locked-in stable coins (USDC, USDT), and more than 30% annualized returns from FSN lending. The network is shaping to look like the DeFi ecosystem that was originally envisioned in our whitepaper, we look forward to driving more adoption in the coming months and years.

It’s gratifying to see theory move into practice and we continue looking for new ways to ‘Put the Time-Value of Money Where Our Mouth Is’ and helping the DeFi market extract time value as efficiently as Wall Street has with derivatives.

Moving Past a Challenging Wallet Theft

In the wake of significant usage and awareness growth, Fusion became a target for bad actors that resulted in the theft of private keys to one of the Foundation’s FSN reserve wallet on the 28th of September.

Whilst certainly a disruptive situation, it’s important to emphasize that: 1) Fusion’s network protocol was never compromised and remains secure; 2) Fusion’s working capital was not affected; 3) there are solid remediation solutions to repair the damage; and 4) through collaboration with exchanges and authorities, Fusion has limited further illegal monetization of the stolen FSN tokens by the perpetrator of this theft.

Fusion is working quickly to recover from this situation with strong support from our community and partners. Additional information and ongoing updates regarding this incident can be found on Fusion’s Medium page.

DCRM — Connecting Blockchain Islands to Create a Minimum Viable Network.

The majority of Fusion’s team has continued to operate as usual despite the events above, preparing for the beta release of Fusion’s highly anticipated DCRM protocol. DCRM provides an industry-first, two-in-one interoperability and custody solution. But before we deep-dive into DCRM, we must answer two important questions: what is interoperability and does it even matter?

Much of blockchain’s promise of revolutionizing the world hinges on one important concept: the ability for assets and information to be exchanged across networks. That ability, is known as Interoperability. Due to pressures of proving their technology, the majority of blockchain projects are racing head long to build prototypes and addressing near term demands to generate revenue. While these projects are finding success in pursuing this path, they are unfortunately solving problems only within their own “island of value” — that is, their own chain.

Let me provide a real example of the problem this creates: imagine a global supply chain solution wherein the electronic bill-of-lading that serves as the trigger asset for various automated financial transactions downstream across global participants, does not transfer from one regional trading hub to another and payments made in one digital currency is not recognized by another.

That example (which I have seen firsthand) looks like the exact fragmented and centralized landscape that blockchain is meant to avoid.

Luckily, Fusion and a few other projects and alliances (such as the Convergence Alliance) are taking on the burden of enabling proactive interoperability. These interoperability solutions can be classified into 2 types: 1) compatibility standards where certain data is exchanged (e.g., Cosmos, Liquid); and 2) true interoperability between assets where no exogenous standards are imposed onto a chain.

Fusion’s solution, DCRM, is the latter: full asset interoperability that operates at the encryption level. DCRM creates custodian accounts directly on the heterogenous chains. These custodian accounts are owned by the Fusion blockchain itself — not the foundation, not an entity, but the collective blockchain — and control assets solely under the direction of their respective owners. That is why Fusion functions as both an interoperable solution, and a decentralized custody solution. This combination enables possibilities for DeFi and custodian networks, which Fusion will share in the coming months.

Fusion’s eye is fixed on launching DCRM beta in Q4 and we look forward to helping the blockchain industry avoid Blockchain Balkanization — a problem beautifully described by Everett and Mally over at Consensys research.

Asset Gateway Expansion

This month, Fusion enabled lock-in and lock-out of several prominent cryptocurrencies and project tokens — Ethereum (ETH), BAT (Basic Attention Token), MKR (Maker), OMG (OmiseGO) and ZRX (0x) — on Fusion’s network. Watch this space as Fusion’s goal of an all-in-one token ecosystem for is becoming a reality!

FUSION IN THE NEWS

Fusion Foundation and YAD Capital Featured in Markets Media

On September 27, Fusion and YAD Capital are Featured in Markets Media article, “YAD Capital Dips Toe in Tokenized Assets, Markets Media,” by Rob Daly.

Putting the Time Value of Money Where Our Mouth Is (TabbFORUM)

Chief Product Officer John Liu’s insight was featured in TabbFORUM in September. In the article, “Putting the Time Value of Money Where Our Mouth Is,” he states that by simply including time as part of the digitization process, it’s possible to create multiple instruments from one digital asset by time-slicing the underlying asset. READ MORE

Live AMA: Credits, Electroneum & Fusion: Blockchain Technology for Social Impact

Chief Product Officer John Liu participated in a Sept. 20 video interview alongside blockchain platform Credits and mobile-based payments solution Electroneum, where he answers questions about whether blockchain technology is capable of becoming a driver of change for people, and what segments of society it can affect.

PARTNER ROUNDUP

This month, we welcomed five new partner firms among the 40+ projects, corporations, banks, and governments that are using the Fusion protocol.

(Sept. 26) YAD Capital

YAD and Fusion partner to use financial acumen and technology innovation to create funding for underserved SMEs while offering 12%+ investment opportunities in a low-interest rate environment.

(Sept. 19) Hortis

Fusion announced it is partnering with technology consultant Hortis to fast-track adoption of the Fusion blockchain.

(Sept. 13) Stockup

Fusion is joining forces with Stockup to integrate its digitization workflows for company shares with the Fusion blockchain.

(Sept. 3) University of Geneva

Fusion will serve as the sandbox for hands-on practical training in the University of Geneva’s new Advanced Studies on Blockchain and DLT program.