Rebuilding Spartan Protocol

The Plan Ahead

8 min readMay 6, 2021

In keeping with the Spartan theme; we may be bloodied but we are not beaten and are very far from out of this fight.

The Spartan Community has shown steadfastness in supporting each other over the past few days, clearly showing the desire to bring a community-driven DeFi Synthetic Asset and Lending Protocol to the already vibrant Binance Smart Chain ecosystem.

As proud members of the Shield Wall, you’ll understand that there were no free lunches in Spartan Protocol, no airdrops, and no handouts. All Holders either Burned for SPARTA during the initial Token Generation Event or acquired on-market.

The development group, our good friends from many diverse Crypto projects, the early Bond participants and our loyal community members who joined the Shield Wall as Liquidity Providers and to be active in the DAO — many Spartan Protocol Community members were invested financially and mentally — everyone has felt the impact.

Let’s keep this simple and hit the ground running — as recent media has shown, SpartanProtocolV2 is right around the corner. Here is the basic plan with more detail to elaborate on the framework to come.

The Plan Ahead

1. Issue a New $SPARTA token

Yes; we all know our community social contributors were quite set on a tokenSwap *not* happening, however after a lot of deep discussions with both Binance and other helpful project teams, this has shown to be the right direction forwards.

This will be a 1-way bridge, so if you are a SPARTA holder who obtained tokens before or after the exploit, there is no need to panic. Regardless of where you hold SPARTA (Binance CEX, MetaMask, Binance Wallet or in any other wallet where you control the private keys), it will be redeemable for the equivalent new SPARTA token
1 * old SPARTA = 1 * new SPARTA
Ticker TBD, please feel free to comment in the socials with your suggestions, but keep in mind the max digits is 6 for Twitter $tickers
The creation of a new base contract allows for some extra functionality and changes that weren’t previously available as an option, such as an in-built burn() function and approveAndCall() — features that could not be added without a tokenSwap. If we are taking the steps to launch a new contract, it is the perfect time to enhance the Spartan Protocol experience.
Another feature we now have the chance to add is a safety check to block transfers of SPARTA to the token contract. As per the screenshot below, this has unfortunately seen the sad demise of 38k+ $SPARTA since our initial token distribution. With this; we close this unfortunate mistake from happening in the future.

Users affected by this (who sent SPARTA to the base contract in error) will have these SPARTA available in their claim amount as detailed below, so if you were one of those 8 people (see the ‘from’ addresses at this link) your SPARTA can be claimed.

2. New Token’s Tokenomics

Nothing really changes here; it will have a mirrored 300M max supply; same as before. We will not use this opportunity to inflate the supply or pre-mine extra tokens. Spartan Protocol will retain its previous fair distribution and initial tokenomics.

The current emitted supply of SPARTA is around ~65M, which leaves less than ~35M remaining from the initial 100M ‘Burn’ (later ‘Bond’) distribution. This will be utilised to recover some SPARTA lost by our Liquidity Providers impacted by the exploit, and the remainder will be committed to the Bond program as previously planned.
100M SPARTA was always the distribution amount as defined in the Spartan Protocol Whitepaper, so nothing has changed in regard to that figure, nor the total supply of 300M

Details/specific numbers on this process are being finalized, however, the approach will be similar to the below:

From that remaining ~35M $SPARTA, there will be an allocation created for Liquidity Pool contributors who were affected, based on a snapshot of the state of Binance Smart Chain immediately before the exploit at block height 7048833
The amount of SPARTA allocated for this will likely be the NET sum of SPARTA-depth stored in the pools prior to the attack
To be clear; this means the aim is to reimburse the equivalent unit amount of SPARTA relevant to the LP Tokens held just before the time of exploit; not the assets on the other side. They cannot be recovered through any internal techniques as those assets no longer exist within the ecosystem; only SPARTA remains
We roughly estimate the volume of SPARTA to be in the range of ~20M

The advantage is that we still have not fully released the 100M SPARTA that was always planned to be a part of the initial distribution. This means the total supply of 300M will remain unchanged, without extra inflation.

The remaining ~15M will be released into Bond programs to help inject additional TVL into the V2 pools
If the 2.5M Bond allocations remain at their current size, there will be another 5-6 bond allocations; plenty of opportunities for new Spartans to join in

3. Deflationary Ideas

Whilst the above will not impact the max supply at all; it will certainly boost up the circulating supply in the short term. This was however going to happen straight after V2 launch with aggressive Bond+Mint programs planned until the full 100M initial distribution was reached. As our Shield Wall is aware, a DAO vote for a new Bond round was imminent before the DAO was closed in preparation for the V2 dApp.

This decision is not taken lightly.

The new base token contract opens up an opportunity to create some deflationary aspects to the protocol to help offset this. For instance; one idea that has been committed to the ‘RebuildSparta’ branch already on GitHub suggests a small percentage of all SPARTA token transfers be burnt during the transaction.

Scaling up linearly from 0% to 1%; 0% being no circulating supply; 1% being 300M (which is not possible to reach) This scenario would see ~0.03% unit-value of all SPARTA transfers being burnt from the total supply based on the expected token distribution position at the launch of V2

Whilst just an idea at this stage; it should represent some of the new types of thinking that can come into play now that the base contract can be redeployed.

4. The Snapshot

A snapshot of all LP token holders & members whether in-wallet or locked in the DAO or locked in Bond+Mint will be taken.

From the snapshot, we will have the SPARTA depth of every pool & each LP token’s total supply, allowing us to identify every wallet’s claim to SPARTA and calculating a weight/percentage of the total claim.
A claim/bridge DApp is to be built, during the code review period in preparation for tokenSwap.
This DApp will handle the simple process of exchanging SPARTA holders existing SPARTA into the new SPARTA token
It will also handle claims for those wallets affected by the attacks. Using the above snapshot; the wallets affected will be able to claim a portion of that 20M SPARTA proportionate to their LPs SPARTA value-weight from before the attack

5. CEX holders

For those of us holding $SPARTA on Binance CEX or BKEX/MXC; the process will likely be easy too as no timestamps or defined cutoffs are involved.

We will work in tandem with the Binance team to make this as easy as possible. We envision a situation where Binance converts all old SPARTA for new SPARTA for their users so that there is no effort required on the user’s part and will confirm this in upcoming communication.
Similar processes expected for MXC & BKEX but as above, please await details.

6. CodeArena Code Review — Spartan Protocol V2

Despite code review being an especially large focus in recent months in relation to the upcoming V2 contract deployment, this exploit ensures that we are laser-focused on validating the security and penetrability of all the interlinked Spartan Protocol smart contracts, no matter how battle-tested they may be. As mentioned previously, this exploit was on a codebase that was reviewed and audited a long time before work commenced on V2 contracts.

Being a community project; there is no defined team allocation or treasury allocation that can be accessed for audits directly. However, as you’re aware, the community wallet received a sum of BNB from the Binance BUIDL program recently which was slated to be given out as grants for the community to tools and features interacting with Spartan Protocol.
The BNB in this wallet will now be used instead as a bounty for a codeArena code review of the Spartan Protocol smart contract suite.
We believe that with many clever security-minded individuals picking apart the code and reviewing/approaching security and efficiency from different angles; the better V2 will be
There has also been a show of hands of contributors from the community who would like to be more involved in the weekly code review processes which is great to see. After all, the goal has always been ‘community BUIDL’ — By Us, For Us.

Thank you for spending your time to review our next steps — we appreciate all the amazing feedback and support of both our Shield Wall and our fellow Binance Smart Chain project community — we will continue to support each other and deliver our promised goals; this is the plan ahead.

Community Contribution

Spartan Protocol is at its core, a community-driven and led project. In this vein, the more contributors the better. There is a great opportunity for community members to contribute by making LP reward analysis tools, etc.

Recently, community members have been graciously funnelling in to contribute to explainer articles, ideas and even $SPARTA donations to support the growth of the platform.