Introduction
The DeFi Safety and Open Cover teams manage Staking Pool 8.
The DeFi Safety and Open Cover teams completed this questionnaire, which members can review to learn more about their teams, their staking pool, how they manage their pool, and how they’re building on top of the Nexus Mutual V2 protocol.
Can you introduce yourself for members who may not be familiar with OpenCover and DeFi Safety?
OpenCover started as a data platform to help DeFi users discover and navigate their DeFi cover options. We’ve recently published the first comprehensive industry report summarizing key industry trends and metrics. Ultimately, our mission is to help DeFi users stay safe by protecting themselves against post-transaction risks beyond their immediate control. We’ve been building in the Ethereum ecosystem since 2017 with a focus on DeFi since 2021. We’ve experienced our fair share of DeFi security incidents since then and have helped users recover over $1,000,000 through DeFi cover to date. More recently, we’ve started to focus on distribution to make it as easy as possible for DeFi users to purchase, adjust and renew cover on their portfolios.
DeFi Safety started in May 2020 with the goal of measuring safety for DeFi investors through good software process and transparency. We have reviews on nearly 300 DeFi protocols on many different smart chains. We use a consistent public process on all our evaluations. Our results speak for themselves. Well scored protocols consistently safely hold user’s funds.
Can you describe your staking pool’s strategy in one or two sentences?
The main tenet of our strategy is to group similar risks products together favoring multiple pools with homogeneous risk (and price) vs pools with a broader risk spectrum. This ensures stakers can choose their risk exposure with high granularity while containing claim events. Our differentiator is in the risk assessment framework we employ which builds on DeFiSafety’s 3 years of experience modeling smart contract risk.
The basis is that mature, battle tested, immutable code offers the lowest risk and our initial Nexus Mutual staking pool is limited to protocols that meet that standard.
Subsequent pools will use the logic of the DeFi Safety scores, and will go deeper than our present process in the areas of upgradability, access controls and audits. We will publish our updated process and our second pool shortly.
How frequently do you review and reassess the pricing and capacity parameters for the cover products you underwrite?
We re-evaluate the parameters of staking pools every week unless there are immediate developments that could potentially affect a pool, in which case we would make adjustments in real-time.
As a pool manager, what is your approach to adding new products to your pool, whether it’s a completely new cover product or a new listing for an existing product?
At present, we are focused on assessing the risk for products already listed on Nexus Mutual and creating the associated risk homogenous pools for those that meet our criteria.
DeFi Safety is consistently reviewing new DeFi products. When we see new products with exceptionally high process and transparency standards, we could consider incorporating them into our new pool. Based on our expertise, we will limit ourselves to DeFi protocols.
Do you have any plans to develop an application or distribution network that utilizes your staking pool?
OpenCover is building an easy and affordable way for anyone to purchase, adjust and renew Nexus cover directly from L2 (from our staking pools and the broader selection). We’re opening up early access for the Nexus community, get your invite here if you’d like to join.
How and with what frequency will you provide updates to the NXM stakers that delegate to your pool?
We have a Discord channel where prospective stakers can get in touch with our teams and get their questions answered. Those who stake in one of our pools can unlock access to a private channel with direct access to our founding teams and get privileged access to our product and staking pool roadmap.
How can prospective and/or current NXM stakers communicate with you?
Any other thoughts that you’d like to share?
Our data shows there are less than 20,000 unique wallets that have purchased cover so far out of 6 million+ DeFi users — the opportunity is huge and DeFi safety is key to wider adoption. If this resonates, don’t hesitate to get in touch.