Kava Labs announced its latest project, Harvest. Harvest represents the very first cross-chain money market that enables users to earn more with their digital assets.
Harvest will enable users to borrow, lend, and earn with their assets. Such digital assets will include BTC, KAVA, BUSD, BNB, XRP, and USDX.
Harvest is the first application to make use of the price feed module, security, and cross-chain functionality of the Kava blockchain in order to offer open and decentralized financial services.
Activities and features of Harvest
Three major activities take place on Harvest: supplying, borrowing, and earning. On Harvest, you can supply your digital assets and earn interest. You can also borrow digital assets by using your own as collateral. Both suppliers and borrowers have the chance to earn the governance token of Harvest, HARD.
Built on Kava, Harvest is an application that leverages on the existing security validators on Kava. Under Kava, Harvest has access to bridges for cross-chain asset transfer and partner services. In addition, the partnership with Chainlink oracles can be leveraged on for price-reference data.
Harvest v1 has support for supply-side deposits. HARD incentives for XRP, BUSD, USDX, BTC, and BNB are also supported in the 1st version. As for version 2, there will be the addition of borrow functionality, along with borrow-side incentives for the selected assets. Also, there is an expanded functionality of HARD governance on-chain.
Still leveraging on Kava, Harvest will enjoy access to any asset available on the Kava blockchain. When the Kava-4 “Gateway” mainnet is upgraded, the BEP3 Bridge will receive an expansion to allow it to support XRP, BUSD, BTC, and others. This means that these assets will be available to be used in Harvest money markets together with KAVA, USDX, and HARD, which are native Kava assets.
Governance for Harvest money market
Having a governance token is important to improve proper decentralization and to ensure that the application continually evolves. This is also common in all decentralized money market applications available today. Active competition in the decentralized application space requires incentives that will incentivize user participation and promote liquidity.
The HARD token is to be used for incentives and decentralized governance. Primarily, its role is to give users a place in the Harvest platform. In a collective manner, holders of the HARD token have the responsibility of managing certain aspects of Harvest. Such aspects include reward distribution, asset offering, the setting of platform fees, etc.
More uses of the HARD token
With HARD tokens, early partners will be incentivized, thereby giving them a voice in the management and continuous evolution of Harvest.
Richard Galvin from Digital Asset Capital Management says, “Harvest.io is a logical addition to the DeFi ecosystem taking shape around Kava. We think the choice it brings to investors to lend and borrow assets, not well supported by existing platforms, is really exciting — as is the ability for Kava stakers to earn HARD tokens and participate in the new platform’s governance. The Kava community is one of the most active in crypto so we look forward to joining with them to support Harvest’s launch and future growth.”
On the 21st of September, the testnet of Harvest v1 took place, together with an external audit and internal testing. October 15th will see several developments. Harvest v1 will ship along with the Kava-4 “Gateway” upgrade, and the distribution of HARD tokens will begin. Also, the supply-side deposits and HARD incentives for BTC, BNB, HARD, and USDX will start.
Recently, Binance revealed the winner of its Binance Launchpad Project of the Year award. During the “Off the Charts!” virtual conference, Binance announced Kava as the best performing Launchpad project of 2020. Kava reportedly outranked the four other nominees to win the Binance Launchpad award.
