Well, it’s been a minute.

Those of you who have been blocmates loyalists for a while know how much we love Maia DAO. The blocmates x Maia DAO combo is like prime Shaq & Kobe, prime Jordan & Pippen, or prime Steph & Klay. It’s basically a match made in heaven.

If you go to our website's search bar and type in “Maia,” you’ll see a library of content covering every aspect of Maia DAO and its entire product suite.

But it’s been a while since we last gave you an update on Maia DAO. So, let me clarify why that is.  

Maia DAO had a bug bounty program on ImmuneFi where anyone who could find a bug/vulnerability could win a bounty. An ethical hacker did find a bug and ended up winning a $100k in stables.

Finding this potential attack vector led to a little FUD and general concern from the community about Maia’s products. This was ultimately short-lived because the team, being the absolute chads that they are, were very quick to respond and fix the issue.

The team then did a complete protocol redeployment and patched any potential issues while increasing security measures. If you would like a detailed rundown of this debacle, check out this article

Okay, so there was a minor setback. But a minor setback is simply the backdrop for a major comeback, and that is exactly what we will be covering today.

You see, Maia DAO’s product suite remains as important as ever for the DeFi economy.

There’s a reason DeFi has been struggling against other sectors in 2024. A lot of people attribute it to the complexity of DeFi which results in nobody caring about it, but at the end of the day, it comes down to liquidity. Liquidity is always king.

In a landscape with so many different layer-1s [L1s] and layer-2s [L2], fragmentation is a major issue. Fragmentation of liquidity ultimately results in a poor user experience, which is ultimately what’s hurting most of DeFi at the moment.

When you put all the pieces of the Maia DAO puzzle together, what you get is a permissionless aggregation layer that unifies liquidity and abstracts away any technical complexities with simple on-chain interactions.

Oh, and this time, they deployed on Arbitrum.

Side note: the Maia DAO team has been working on liquidity unification and account abstraction for over two years now, way before it was the industry's trending topic.

So, without further ado, let’s quickly recap the Maia DAO product suite and then jump into what the future holds.

This is going to be a good one.

A quick recap

Before we dive into what’s coming up, it makes sense to refresh the goldfish memories that most crypto participants are blessed with.

Let’s start with the king of the castle, Maia DAO.

Maia DAO started on the Metis ecosystem as a yield product, using the popular ‘bonding’ mechanism to attract liquidity to its platform. This allowed Maia DAO to build a pretty strong treasury.

From there, we have the current state of Maia DAO. It is essentially a DAO that holds a significant stake in all the products that come under it, given that the DAO treasury was used to fund the development of this comprehensive product suite.

Beyond that, it has migrated from Metis to Arbitrum and also serves as the base layer for boosted yield strategies on some of the products within the ecosystem, but we will dive deeper into that later.

Up next is Hermes.

Hermes is an omnichain yield and liquidity marketplace. Remember when I told you Maia DAO is building the aggregation layer for DeFi? Well, Hermes is at the heart of it.

The Hermes liquidity model builds upon the popular ve(3,3) model forged by Andre Cronje, and uses something called b(3,3). This newer model replaces the locking token model with burning tokens, which ultimately creates a much smoother user experience.

If you would like a more detailed rundown, we have covered every aspect of the Hermes protocol on blocmates before.

We go over some exclusive Hermes alpha, the tri-token system, and how it creates a more efficient bribe economy. If you haven’t read these already, trust me, it’ll be worth your while.

The next piece of the puzzle is Ulysses.

Ulysses is the omnichain execution layer. Whether you want to swap tokens across chains, access liquidity from different chains, or farm yield from different chains, Ulysses is the all-in-one app that makes this entire experience seamless, using Hermes as the backbone.

It uses an elegant system of ports, routers, and branches set up across the different chains to create a smooth cross-chain experience. Of course, all of these technical details will be abstracted away for you, the end user. You can simply enjoy the one-stop shop.

The final piece of the puzzle is TALOS

TALOS stands for transparent automated liquidity optimization strategies. As the name suggests, it creates automated strategies for concentrated liquidity positions.

So what does this mean?

Say you want to provide liquidity on Hermes and benefit from the plethora of opportunities that the omnichain DEX offers. However, you do not want to spend hours upon hours finding the most profitable yield sources, followed by constant monitoring and rebalancing of positions.

TALOS is the solution for you.

You can deposit your funds into various strategies, and the TALOS contracts will automatically execute the strategy in a completely decentralized and autonomous fashion.

So you can earn yield from the omnichain products without having to deal with any of the headache that comes with it.

As you can see, each product perfectly complements one another to ultimately create the perfect recipe to fix crypto's fragmentation issues. Beyond solving liquidity fragmentation, the team also always prioritizes user experience and capital efficiency.

But this is just the background.

Maia DAO is coming back in a big way, and we’re going to go over how they are doing so and how you can benefit from it.

Maia DAO

Maia DAO sits atop this aggregation and liquidity unification layer, which is the Maian ecosystem.

This position of power has resulted in the Maia DAO treasury accumulating a significant amount of bHERMES. Now, there are a lot of nuances to owning bHERMES, but for the sake of this article, only one thing is important — boosted yield.

Maia DAO uses its power to create enhanced, boosted yield strategies on TALOS. Although these boosted strategies are not currently live, they will be very soon and there will be a bunch to choose from. But in general, providing liquidity through TALOS entitles a user to significantly higher returns.

MAIA holders also benefit from these boosted strategies.

A fee from the boosted Hermes rewards is captured by Maia and burnt. It is burnt and added to vMAIA which ensures that the amount of bHERMES each vMAIA controls will keep increasing.

This benefits MAIA lockers while also growing the platform's liquidity in a sustainable manner.

Hermes

Hermes is the backbone of this unification layer.

The key features of Hermes can be broken down into three different categories:

• Concentrated and unified omnichain liquidity
• Renting liquidity
• Yield marketplace

Hermes, as a DEX, adopts the concentrated liquidity mechanism due to its efficiency. Liquidity is unified across chains on this one protocol. So whether you want to make swaps or provide liquidity across chains, Hermes is the place for you to do it in a simple and efficient manner.

To accompany this is a very efficient bribe system. It makes it very easy for users to earn bribes and very cheap for protocols to rent liquidity from a unified source. Ultimately, the user experience for everyone is enhanced.

To top things off, there will also be a yield marketplace coming soon where users can buy and sell rights to yield. This essentially just offers users more flexibility and customisability over strategy and asset management.

But this is just the crux of it. Hermes is leveling up now.

They have integrated with Balancer and Uniswap V3 to enhance the omnichain experience.  

The team built a wrapper on top of Balancer composable stable pools that can be used on Uniswap V3 for very quick and easy liquidity renting. Essentially, if you have any liquidity on Uniswap, it can be used to access omnichain liquidity/yield through Hermes.

In addition to this, Hermes will keep adding more gauges to the protocol. They have been taking community requests for gauges, and the most popular ones that are not malicious in any way tend to get added.

But all of this is just protocol-focused stuff. They have some cool community programs and a fun launch mechanism to tie the whole thing together.

If you would like the detailed breakdown, check this article, but I’ll give you the quick rundown as always.

First is the Hermes accelerator program, which rewards users for simply being active members of the community. By helping boost social growth, users can get boosted rewards on the Hermes platform itself.

This is where HERMES emissions have been increased to attract more liquidity.

Then, prior to the launch, there is the opening ceremony. In the opening ceremony, voting power is allocated to various partner protocols to lower the barrier to entry for voting within the ecosystem, ultimately setting the stage for the ‘Hermes Games.’

The Hermes Games is essentially a gamified launch where partners can participate in ‘sports.’ These sports include bribing gauges, accumulating tokens, or creating tooling. Essentially anything that drives active participation from all partners towards the ecosystem.

This will ultimately serve as a solid background for Hermes to grow and reach Valhalla and beyond.

I say that because going into 2025, they have exciting things in the pipeline, like partner-boosted strategies, where Hermes’ partners can develop custom strategies. There will also be faster cross-chain hops to improve the omnichain execution. Lastly, the yield and liquidity marketplace will expand significantly through BD efforts to really set Hermes apart from the rest.

I’m telling you, the devs are really cooking here.

But that’s not all.

Ulysses

As mentioned earlier, Ulysses fosters liquidity and execution interoperability across all the major EVM chains.

Ulysses plays a very important role in shaping the overall user experience of the Maian ecosystem because it’s the layer that allows for completely permissionless omnichain messaging.

It operates as a separate cross-chain execution layer from the liquidity, which makes it easy for any user or protocol to interact with the platform.

Things like cross-domain MEV are eliminated in this setup, and cross-chain/layerzero gas fees are not cut. Protocols have much more flexibility in choosing their liquidity structure and venue since they are all available on one simple and unified UI.

TALOS

The final piece of the puzzle is TALOS.

TALOS is the platform's liquidity management solution, making it easy for anyone to provide liquidity and earn yield. On top of this, strategy creators can also make handsome rewards depending on the usage of their strategies.

The TALOS product will be rolled out slowly and controlled. Liquidity management contracts have many variables, especially in an omnichain environment. Therefore, the team will ensure that the products are rolled out slowly to avoid any security vulnerabilities.

Currently, the only strategies on offer are static strategies.

Static strategies are essentially simple rebalancing strategies. They look a little like this:

Say you provide liquidity to a MAIA/ETH position on Uniswap V3. For doing so, you will receive a V3 NFT that represents this liquidity position.

All you have to do is wrap this NFT in one of the TALOS vaults, and from there, the vault will automatically rebalance your position to maintain the 50/50 ratio.

However, more dynamic strategies are coming soon.

This means strategies where the vault can re-range your concentrated liquidity position such that the ratio and price range the position is in are always optimal.

In addition, they will be introducing custom strategy optimizer creation. This essentially allows users to set custom ranges outside of the presets that are usually on these vaults.

Another feature rolled out will be custom strategy manager creation. This essentially allows users to create custom dynamic strategies that can be rebalanced and re-ranged by the TALOS contracts.

Some pretty exciting stuff coming for all the yield enjoyooors.

Tying it together

Okay, so let’s bring the whole thing together.

Ultimately, what you have here when all the products are put together is a top-tier liquidity unification and chain abstraction solution.

Everyone is well aware that liquidity and user experience issues have been plaguing DeFi for a long time. While solutions have existed, they have either been sub-par products or highly centralized products masquerading as decentralized products.

The Maian ecosystem is a truly permissionless and decentralized aggregation layer set to take DeFi liquidity and UX to the next level with Arbitrum as its home base.

This solution ultimately benefits all the key stakeholders in DeFi.

Traders gain access to liquidity from all chains under a single user interface. Traders can perform simple swaps or use advanced tools to perform more sophisticated asset management strategies.

For protocols, it reduces their costs of renting liquidity in a massive way. All protocols need liquidity to be successful, but attracting liquidity is expensive and often unsustainable. The Maia ecosystem fixes this as protocols can rent liquidity from a unified pool of liquidity.

In essence, their liquidity can scale with their needs if they use Maia products.

Lastly, we have liquidity providers.

LPs can benefit from a synchronous trading environment. While unifying liquidity and making it easy to earn yield across multiple chains from one venue is a major benefit, cross-domain MEV often dissuades LPs from this setup.

This is essentially getting exposed to price deviations across chains, which ultimately eats into LP profits. By using Arbitrum and ensuring all trades are settled sequentially, the risk of asynchronous price discovery across networks is eliminated.

So, if there was ever a product that would spark a DeFi resurgence, look no further than Maia DAO. Big things are coming, anon.