About

Offshift provides a private derivates platform where users can mint zero knowledge synthetic assets which are pegged to their token or commodity counterparts. The project aims to eliminate the tradeoff between participating in defi ecosystems and retaining personal privacy, allowing users to anonymize their portfolios. At launch Offshift plans to offer synthetics for ETH, BTC, USD, gold, and its own XFT token.

History

With an official launch scheduled for the first half of 2022, Offshift aims to bring personal privacy to defi through the use of zero knowledge proofs to anonymize asset ownership. Using a proprietary shifting platform Offshift will enable users access to zero knowledge synthetics pegged to digital or physical assets. Along with the benefit of privacy Offshift's platform will offer zero slippage, margin requirements, or liquidations. These guarantees are built in through a burn and mint mechanism enabling an elastic token supply, as well as real time price data via Chainlink oracles. Offshift is building this platform on both Ethereum and Moonbeam's Polkadot parachain.

Offshift's ethos is complete privacy, which applies almost entirely to the team as well as the project. The only doxxed member of the team is CSO Alex Shipp, who also works for web 3 infrastructure company Elastos as a writer. While the rest of the team is anonymous they do interact with the community through Offshift's Telegram and Discord channels, as well as monthly community calls. Citing an emphasis on ensuring integrity of the project, Offshift declined institutional investor participation in their October 2020 private and seed round token sales, and capped individual investments at $5,000. The team instituted a gradual and lengthy vesting schedule for XFT tokens allocated to marketing, development, team compensation, and staking rewards to limit inflation throughout the project lifecycle.

Offshift initially planned to launch their mainnet in April 2021, utilizing Aztec Protocol's on-chain privacy solution, but encountered implementation issues and a lack of support from Aztec. In March Offshift decided to build their own solution instead, announcing a partnership with Las Vegas based blockchain engineering studio Zokyo.io to assist with development and security. As for the technology behind Offshift's zkAsset trading platform, the team has opted not to release their open source GitHub repository until mainnet launch has taken place. Offshift does provide a detailed yellowpaper outlining the algorithic process behind the zero knowledge proof techniques that power the platform, and publishes bi-weekly updating on the state of the project's development. On December 31, 2021 Offshift launched a pilot version of the application, allowing the community to explore the first iteration of their MVP. Since proving the viability of the tech behind their zkAsset platform Offshift announced a Q1 2022 mainnet launch, but has missed the mark as of early April. In the most recent development update published 4/1/2022 the team stated that development would be wrapping up within a week, followed by an audit process that is expected to last several weeks before the mainnet launch can take place.