Puffer News — February 1
Puffer News — February 1
Greetings, Puffer community! We hope your 2025 is off to a fantastic start! I think we can all agree that 2024 was a landmark year for the Puffer ecosystem, defined by significant progress on all fronts, with several key milestones ticked off on our decentralized roadmap.
The momentum from 2024 has certainly carried over into 2025, and while we’re just one month into the New Year, we’ve already made some major waves across the Web3 landscape.
Introducing the CARROT Token & PUFFER Season 2!
As reported by CoinDesk and The Defiant, we recently unveiled a new points distribution method as part of our updated Season 2 airdrop campaign, which leverages community governance and tokenized Puffer Points to deliver a more decentralized and sustainable incentive model.
To build on the success of Season 1, we aggregated community feedback to deliver an enhanced, transparent rewards structure aimed at encouraging long-term commitment and deeper levels of user engagement.
With that in mind, Season 2 Update introduces tokenized incentives with the new CARROT token, replacing off-chain points with on-chain rewards. Users can earn CARROT through activities like staking PUFFER, governance voting, and liquidity provisioning — reflecting our commitment to full on-chain governance and enhanced transparency while eliminating points dilution. As an ERC20 token, CARROT tokens will convert to PUFFER at the conclusion of Season 2.
Following the conclusion of our “Crunchy Carrot Campaign” — which included a token generation event (TGE) snapshot on October 5th — this new phase brings community-driven rewards to the forefront as well as new methods and tools to accelerate our mission to uphold the highest standards of decentralization. Along with the Season 2 updates, our governance mechanism has been adjusted, introducing a more dynamic and participatory model.
For more information on Season 2, check out our medium post from January here.
First Voting Epoch Has Closed
The first voting epoch — the set time period where token holders vote to allocate rewards — for the updated Season 2 started on January 23rd, and was closed on January 30th. A new Voting Epoch begins every other Thursday at 12am UTC, and holders are subject to a 3-day warm-up period before voting. To join an epoch, interested parties can stake their $PUFFER tokens at: vote.puffer.fi/plugins/stake
The updated Season 2 governance structure introduces a tokenized points system to enhance community-driven decision making, incentivizing participation in governance.
As part of Season 2, we have also introduced a bespoke gauge mechanism, which serves as a “rewards bucket” assigned to a specific protocol or liquidity pool. For anyone contributing value to the Puffer ecosystem — whether through providing liquidity, building integrations, or creating content — a gauge allows them to receive rewards based on community support. Gauges will be locked for the duration of each epoch, enabling consistent distribution cycles and will be categorized as follows: Liquidity Provisioning, Concentrated Liquidity Provisioning, and Protocol Integration. Moving forward, Puffer Governance Gauges will determine how incentives are directed to various protocols, DeFi integrations, or pools where on-chain CARROT tokens can be earned.
Unveiling unifiBTC & unifiUSD Vaults
We also recently introduced the unifiBTC and unifiUSD Vaults, signalling a major expansion of the Puffer ecosystem beyond ETH, while unlocking fresh yield opportunities for the wider crypto community. These vaults represent a significant step forward, offering competitive yields driven by Nucleus DeFi strategies and boosted by $CARROT rewards, while seamlessly combining sustainable returns with active participation in $PUFFER Season 2 governance. Whether you’re depositing BTC or stablecoins, these vaults are optimized to maximize returns while furthering Puffer’s mission of creating a more decentralized and inclusive ecosystem.
Here is the asset-specific breakdown for both vaults:
unifiBTC Vault
• Assets: wBTC, LBTC, cbBTC, pumpBTC, solvBTC
unifiUSD Vault
• Assets: USDC, USDT, lvlUSD, slvlUSD
Additionally, $CARROT incentives are coming soon! Keep an eye on our official social channels for more updates.
Collaboration with Merkl
To ensure a seamless, secure and scalable rewards distribution process for Season 2, we have partnered with leading incentive distribution platform Merkl. Since July 2023, Merkl has managed to distribute $80 million in rewards across over 10 thousand campaigns, and counting.
Merkl’s platform ensures seamless, transparent, and scalable rewards distribution across LRT, UniFi, and AVS — aligning incentives with our decentralized mission.
As the leading reward and incentivization platform backed by a16z, We’re delighted to have them on board for Season 2!
New UniFi Partnerships
In addition to our collaboration with Merkl, we recently announced two new partnerships with Limechain and Gattaca, as part of our mission to set a new standard for Ethereum scalability. Meticulously designed to be low-cost and capable of sub-second transactions, UniFi addresses Ethereum’s longstanding scalability challenges while maintaining compatibility with its robust L1 ecosystem.
LimeChain have been innovating in the blockchain space since 2017, and their team has extensive expertise in vanilla based rollups and preconfirmations. They will be helping us advance UniFi’s mission of Unifying Ethereum, one block at a time, ahead of our Public Testnet.
Fellow leaders in building Ethereum infrastructure, Gattaca, is a research-driven crypto technology company based in London, with experience across the transaction supply chain; primarily focused on building trading and MEV related infrastructure and services. We’re also looking forward to working with their team on advancing decentralization, scalability, and building a better future for Ethereum, as we prepare for the upcoming public testnet for UniFi!
OXK Wallet Campaign: 714K $PUFFER Rewards Up For Grabs!
As part of the recent OXK wallet campaign, we announced that we’re giving out a 714,000 PUFFER bonus pool for all users who deposit ETH, stETH or wstETH to Puffer Finance.
The OXK wallet campaign underscores our commitment to incentivizing user engagement and expanding our ecosystem. By rewarding users who deposit ETH, stETH, or wstETH on Puffer, we want to encourage liquidity growth and strengthen overall community participation with a significant token pool. Users can simply deposit ETH, stETH, or wstETH on Ethereum to take part.
The campaign ends on March 27th, and interested parties can start staking here:https://t.co/ktI2N6WpXWhttps://bit.ly/3ZZtguC
Thanks for reading! The ongoing support of the Puffer community is what keeps us going! As always, be sure to check out our X, Discord, and Telegram to stay updated on the latest developments!
About Puffer Finance
Puffer Finance is a leading innovator in Ethereum infrastructure, focusing on next-generation rollups supported by liquid restaking (LRT) and preconfirmation as an AVS. With products like Puffer UniFi and Puffer UniFi AVS on EigenLayer, we are dedicated to enhancing Ethereum’s decentralization. Visit puffer.fi for more information.