Greetings Puffer community! The past few weeks have been an absolute whirlwind of activity, and our amazing team has been working tirelessly to execute a number of key milestones on our decentralized roadmap. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so we’d like to recap some of the major developments and updates in this latest installment of our newsletter!

$PUFFER TGE & CEX Listings

This week we announced the highly anticipated launch of our $PUFFER governance token, securing listings on top exchanges such as Kraken, KuCoin, Bybit, Bitget, Gate.io MEXC, Hashkey and more, with the PUFFER/USDT trading pair. The announcement was covered in CoinDesk, Crypto News and a range of other Web3 media outlets.

As mentioned in our previous tokenomics medium post, $PUFFER will play a crucial role across our expanding suite of solutions, enabling holders to vote on key decisions that shape the future of our ecosystem, such as protocol upgrades, fee adjustments, and new feature proposals for UniFi AVS, UniFi Rollup, and Puffer Liquid Restaking Token (LRT). It’s important to note that all three of these signature Puffer products will generate treasury rewards, which future $PUFFER holders will be responsible for managing, driving long-term sustainability.

As a quick tokenomics refresher, the Total Supply of $PUFFER will be 1,000,000,000, with an initial Supply of 102,300,000. Our distribution plan is underpinned by a firm commitment to the company’s core values of decentralization, inclusivity, and sustainable growth, with the following allocations planned: Ecosystem and Community (40%), Crunchy Carrot Quest Airdrop Season 1 (7.5%), Airdrop Season 2 (5.5%), Investors (26%), and Early Contributors & Advisors (20%).

Additionally, 1% of the total $PUFFER supply will support Ethereum core development, vested over a 4-year period — as part of our Protocol Guild Pledge. As UniFi operates directly on the Ethereum Mainnet, this contribution is geared towards strengthening the security and scalability of Ethereum, benefiting the broader ecosystem.

UniFi Staking & Withdrawals Are Now Live

UniFi Staking

Users can now stake their pufETH in the Puffer UniFi Vault to earn boosted Puffer Points for Season 2 and help address Ethereum’s fragmentation issues! While staking, users will also receive UnifiETH, which will be usable as a native yield gas token once UniFi Mainnet launches.

Stake now at: http://quest.puffer.fi/unifi — Rewards Base: 45pts/pufETH + ETH native yield.

PufETH Withdrawals

For PufETH withdrawals, we’ve introduced two flexible withdrawal options:

One-Step: Instant ETH redemption with a small fee, which is burned for the benefit of all pufETH holders.
Two-Step: Fee-free withdrawals for larger amounts, with a processing time of up to 14–21 days, designed for maximum cost efficiency.

This two-pronged approach is geared toward enhancing protocol security and boosting DeFi composability. Our friend DeFi Dad put together a short video tutorial on how to claim and stake $PUFFER, which you can check out here.

UniFi AVS Surges — Accelerating Ethereum’s Transaction Processing

As you know, we recently launched UniFi AVS, a pioneering solution built on EigenLayer that significantly improves Ethereum’s transaction processing by providing fast, secure, and neutral pre-confirmations for based rollups — unlocking a future where blockchain scalability and speed no longer conflict with trust and decentralization. Designed to complement our based rollup stack, UniFi AVS fortifies the ecosystem in alignment with its new decentralized infrastructure roadmap. In the past 2 weeks, UniFi AVS has experienced a surge in activity, with 1.05 million ETH ($2.4 Billion) staked, and counting!

PARTNERSHIPS & COMMUNITY GROWTH

Building Puffer Governance with Aragon

We are also delighted to introduce vePUFFER, a novel governance mechanism, with the help of our partners Aragon. The launch will kickstart Puffer DAO, empowering the community to shape the protocol’s future — check out the forum here. This ERC-721 implementation of a vote escrow token model aligns with our long-term goal of fostering value-aligned and committed participants, bringing decentralized governance to Puffer. Aragon’s veToken implementation builds on learnings from protocols like Curve and Prisma, with the following key innovations:

- Users stake PUFFER tokens to mint vePUFFER NFTs.

- vePUFFER doesn’t require specifying a lockup duration. Users can unstake their PUFFER at any time.

- Voting power accrues over time as long as PUFFER remains staked.

- Unstaking resets the accrued voting power, incentivizing long-term participation while maintaining flexibility.

Partnership with Commit-Boost

We’re recently announced that we will be integrating Commit-Boost into UniFi AVS, marking a significant stride towards standardization and efficiency in the rapidly evolving landscape of Ethereum proposer commitments. Commit-Boost is an open-source, public good software component designed to streamline and standardize proposer commitment protocols, and we look forward to working with their team moving forward.

Collaboration with Owlto

We recently announced a collaboration with intent-centric interoperability protocol Owlto around UniFi, to drive innovations in LRT. This collaboration is geared towards addressing longstanding issues in the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly Ethereum’s fragmentation problem, while maximizing efficiency and scalability.

Puffer Korean Community is Growing

The recent launch of our Korean X account signifies a strategic move to engage MORE directly with the Korean market, one of the most active in crypto. By doing so, we want to help nurture and build our Korean community — a localized approach geared towards boosting $PUFFER adoption, trust, and participation within the Korean-speaking user base. Help us expand and make Puffer even bigger in Korea!

Twitter: https://x.com/pufferfi_KR

Telegram: https://t.me/PufferfinanceKR | https://t.me/PufferKRchat

Fast Path Rewards

Earlier this month, we also introduced Fast Path Rewards (FPR), a new funding mechanism for permissionless validators on our Liquid Restaking protocol. FPR allows home validators to withdraw their Consensus Layer rewards quickly and with minimal gas fees on Base. This compares very favorably to claiming on Eigenlayer, where up to 30% of rewards will be lost to gas fees. By doing so, we are significantly improving the process of claiming rewards, enhancing both the end-user experience and profitability for our Staking Node Operators (SNOs).

FPR addresses key inefficiencies in the current reward distribution system, offering a more streamlined and cost-effective method for validators to access their earnings. By enabling faster and less expensive reward claims, FPR aims to optimize the validator experience on the Puffer network.

Thanks for reading! As always, keep an eye on our Twitter, Discord, and Telegram to stay updated on the latest developments! Your ongoing support is greatly appreciated!