PROJECT OVERVIEW: WHAT IS SIENNA?
Sienna is a privacy-first decentralized finance protocol built on Secret Network that enables trustless financial instruments, such as trading and lending with complete privacy with cross-chain support for Ethereum and soon Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Monero, and interoperability with all Cosmos blockchains via IBC.
The first product, Sienna Swap, is a privacy-first front-running resistant AMM (Automated Market Maker) that allows you to swap tokens with complete privacy, thereby mitigating front-running. This means no one is able to see your trades and pending transactions.
Privacy is an essential factor to the Sienna platform that leverages Secret Network, which allows for private smart contracts and private tokens similar to Monero and Zcash while having all the programmability of ERC20 tokens.
Due to the inherent scalability of Secret Network, the blockchain Sienna is built on, gas fees are minimal and transactions instant.
Users can also earn SIENNA via liquidity mining and other incentivization purposes.
Upcoming products include a direct fiat gateway to buying SIENNA, a privacy-first lending protocol, tokenization of assets, and much more.
The protocol is governed by the Sienna Token (SIENNA), which is a private SNIP-20 token running on Secret Network. Sienna also has a wrapped ERC20 token (wSIENNA) and will also have wrapped token versions for the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem, Polkadot, and more.
GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY
The market for privacy focused solutions is increasing rapidly these years. Sienna is targeting the market for privacy oriented DeFi applications by launching an AMM that is not only privacy preserving but also prevents front-running and is scalable, which means it has low gas fees. These three features are amongst the most requested features in the DeFi community.
Sienna is doing two IDOs, which will build significant awareness about Sienna and the community.
Awareness is amplified through a strong community and PR efforts. Partnering with KOLs is also an important factor for building awareness and engagement for Sienna.
Users of Sienna are rewarded for using the protocol and can earn SIENNA that will enable them to vote for new proposals. This engagement of the users and community is important to secure a sense of ownership and relationship with Sienna as a platform.
Partnerships
While Sienna can exist as a stand alone platform, it is important to build partnerships with other players in the crypto community but also systemic players such as institutional investors and FinTech partners. Due to the privacy-preserving nature, Sienna is in a position to become the go-to-market platform for institutional players.
Partnerships can include implementation to Card Payment Providers, Investment Banks, FIAT Gateways, Clearing Houses for Tokenized Assets (shares, bonds, etc), and much more.
IBC - Inter Blockchain Communication - is an important factor for building partnerships in the crypto community, and will enable Sienna to provide additional value to the Cosmos ecosystem, which include Binance Wallet, Cosmos, Keplr, and much more.
PRODUCT VIABILITY
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has seen immense growth in the last few years and shows no signs of slowing down. Wonderful use cases have already emerged and it has become apparent DeFi is here to disrupt Wall Street and beyond.
Still, immediate problems need to be addressed in order for DeFi to truly flourish into trillions of dollars. Sienna realized some major problems that they wanted to tackle heads on in order to take DeFi to the next level.
Aside from understanding, existing DeFi protocols are fundamentally flawed. Transactions are not private. Future trades can be seen by everyone prior to execution. Execution priority on Ethereum is driven by transaction fees. A transaction can be preempted by simply introducing a transaction and paying a higher transaction fee. This is known as front running and is illegal in the regulated financial system for good reasons. This exploitation has been in its prominence ever since DeFi surfaced.
Programmable privacy allows feeding verifiable sensitive data into a decentralized world without revealing said data. Decentralized identities, credit scores, under-collateralized loans, privacy for institutions are a few to mention. Sienna is already in talks with major institutions about using Sienna as their platform of choice for DeFi.
Sienna is aiming to become the de facto standard for privacy-first DeFi across multiple blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Cosmos blockchains, and other chains in the future.
Money should be private but also compliant so users are able to document their transactions if needed.
Its focus is also on user experience and compliance to drive institutional adoption and partnerships with systemic FinTech players. Distributed IDs are crucial to obtain institutional compliance as they need to document a network of KYC-checked players.
