Welcome Butanians.
This is a pre-testnet announcement, to prepare yourself for the public testnet release.
Feedback
Feedback is super important. Please join the discord and discuss the testnet as you use it. discord.gg/butane
Please:
Wear your seat belt
Prep
Before participating in the testnet, it’s essential to prepare yourself.
Setup your wallet, use the faucet, understand what butane is.
V Continue V
Wallet Installation:
You should install one of the following Cardano wallets:
- Nami
- Begin
Eternl(waiting on bug fixes)- Flint
- Gero
- Lace
- NuFi
- Yoroi
The wallet should be ideally clean and must be set for use on the Preview test network. Both main net, preprod and testnet will fail.
Using Other CIP-30 Wallets:
You can also use any other CIP-30 wallet by typing in its ID manually. 
Faucet
You will want to use the Cardano testnet faucet in advance. The testnet faucet is your source of tAda which is a fee token necessary to use the preview testnet. If you leave it until the day of there will be contention, and you may be unable to use the testnet.
Scroll down and choose Preview Testnet as your preferred environment.
Make sure the Action setting is set to Receive test ADA.
Paste your wallet address (make sure you’ve switched to Preview Testnet in your wallet before copying the Receive address).
Solve the captcha
Click on REQUEST FUNDS to complete the transaction.
Getting Testnet Assets:
When you open the dApp for the first time, you will only be able to place positions with ada. You will be able to use our “preview faucet” to mint as much as you like of our supported testnet assets, which may then be used as funds on the app. The preview faucet are copies / fake versions of the following tokens:
Cardano Native Tokens
- SNEK
- MIN
- LENFI
- ENCS
- & BTN
Stables
- DJED
- MYUSD
- iUSD
The fake-token faucet menu is in the top right of the app next to the settings cog.
Each of these can be generated using the faucet, these are fake versions of the tokens and their presence indicate no relationship with the teams/projects behind these tokens. This list is not the finalised list of supported tokens for mainnet launch.
Exploring the Interface:
- The main interfaces are the Portfolio and Positions pages
portfolio
positions
- If you’re familiar with Ethereum, you may draw comparisons between the positions page and Aave’s “Markets” page.
- For long-time Cardano users, the “Positions” page may resemble Aada’s “Market” page, Liqwid’s “Liquidations” page, or Indigo’s “All” tab on the “CDPs” page.
Liquidation and Collateralization:
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On the positions page, you may find the opportunity to liquidate collateral positions, and claim a premium. This is a major part of the functionality of Butane and its collateralisation mechanism.
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Comparing to other protocols in the ecosystem, this feature is less like Indigo and more like Liqwid. This is because in Butane, similar to Liqwid (or LenFi V2…), anyone may execute liquidations, improving efficiency of the system.
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It is unlike indigo because any market participant may execute a liquidation and potentially profit.
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It is unlike Aada/LenFi V1 or Levvy, as those both allow only the counterparty (the lender) to execute a liquidation, in the Butane system anyone may execute a liquidation as long as they satisfy the correct obligations.
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There are minor similarities to LenFi V2 (dev team overlap) however we do not pool in butane, because of the differences between synthetics and loaning, these can’t be compared.
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It has almost no overlap with the functionality of Optim / FluidTokens (however cool those projects are)
Fees & Interest
- There are no fixed fees in Butane. This is to maximise market efficiency.
- When you have an outstanding position, you accrue interest.
- This interest can be paid either in the outstanding synthetic debt type, or the equivalent value of the BTN token can be burnt. This means BTN has utility as a universal fee token, allowing DeFi to use Butane using a single token.
- If you don’t use BTN, there is complexity in buying excess synthetics to repay interest.
- When you repay your position, you pay back all interest and also all synthetic debt.
- When you adjust a position, you must pay interest, because adjusting is just repaying and creating at the same time.
- When you liquidate, as the liquidator you pay the interest.
As a power user, you may find it beneficial to utilise BTN to pay interest across multiple synthetic types, as it is effectively the single universal fee token across Butane.
- This means if you hold BTN you won’t need to buy back extra synthetics as interest if you repay your position, which may enable savings.
- If you only want to use a single part of Butane (e.g USDB), you might not want to buy BTN if you choose to pay your interest in the synthetic.
- If you only utilise synthetics via the trading interface, you never need to utilise BTN as a fee token as you only use BTN as an alternative to paying interest on outstanding positions.
Composition Engine:
The Butane interface presents a novel “Composition Engine” which utilises the full power of UTXO to do many things in a single transaction.
- One capability that we enable is to create a CDP at the same time that you liquidate someone else. This has the effect of “taking over” a position.
- This can be used when you don’t have any synthetic assets, as long as you have alternatively BTN to pay the interest.
- Other capabilities such as adjustments (repay+create) are enabled through this feature opaquely which is part of the greatly compositional design of Butane.
- We believe this is the first powerful use-case in an advanced DeFi protocol that shows off Cardano’s EUTXO composition. (excluding the jpg.store shopping cart)
Trading Interface:
- Please note that the trading interface on the “Trade” tab is unavailable during the testnet due to API limitations from our partner.
Feedback
Feedback is super important. Please join the discord and discuss the testnet as you use it. discord.gg/butane
