Motivations and Principles

Trusting your money in the custody of other humans is inherently risky. This glaring flaw in traditional financial instruments is a primary motivation for developing WISE. The WISE contract aims to ensure that a user can always be in full custody and control of their WISE tokens, even during the course of various economic activities.

The initial minting of WISE, earning referral bonuses, opening and closing stakes, receiving interest, and even selling WISE for ETH or other tokens can all be done end-to-end without the user's WISE tokens ever being under the control of another person or system. Compare this to the world of banks you can('t) trust and traditional money managers that (don't) have your best interests at heart.

One very important aspect of owning cryptocurrencies is having a place to safely, easily, and quickly trade them when the need arises. We believe Uniswap, a popular and highly regarded decentralized exchange (DEX) smart contract on Ethereum, is such a place. Following the fifty day Liquidity Transformer Epoch, the WISE contract will automatically, trustlessly, and irrevocably bootstrap its own initial liquidity pool on Uniswap. At least 90% of all ETH sent by users to the WISE contract during the LT Epoch will in turn be automatically transferred to Uniswap by the WISE contract, along with an amount of minted WISE in equal value.

In exchange for and simultaneous to this liquidity pool deposit, Uniswap transfers to the WISE contract an appropriate amount of UNI liquidity tokens, which carry the sole power to later withdraw that liquidity pool. The WISE contract will automatically, immediately, and provably destroy these UNI tokens by transferring them to a known burn address. In doing so, the WISE contract ensures that this initial ETH/WISE liquidity pool cannot be withdrawn from Uniswap by any person, party, contract, or entity — for all eternity.

The WISE contract also allows users to earn interest on WISE token time deposits called stakes, which are most similar to bonds, but more flexible. A stake earns interest like a bond, but with the added feature of allowing interest withdrawals at any time during the life of the stake; not something bonds allow. These bond-like interest-bearing stakes in WISE are always fully in the custody of the user and their wallet, never held, influenced, or able to be confiscated by any third party.