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Mars Ecosystem

The Mars Ecosystem consists of six primary components:

  1. Mars Hub: is a Cosmos SDK blockchain providing governance and security to the entire Mars Ecosystem. On Mars Hub, $MARS holders stake, vote and delegate their $MARS in the Martian Council and use $MARS to securely build and validate the Mars blockchain. Through Mars Hub, the Martian Council approves Outposts, governs any and all adjustable parameters of the Mars smart contracts on each Outpost, whitelists other DeFi protocols for interaction with each Outpost, receives fees from Outposts, and distributes fees to the Martian Council.
  2. Outposts: Each Outpost is an independent or 'third-party' blockchain system where: (a) an instance of the Mars Protocol has been deployed as a specific set of smart contracts with unique addresses on that blockchain (a Red Bank and a Credit Manager/Rovers); and (b) the Martial Council has endorsed such smart contracts as part of Mars by approving their connection to and governance by the Mars Hub via an interchain messaging protocol or bridge.
  3. Red Banks: Each Red Bank is a peer-to-peer, decentralized, autonomous token lending/borrowing smart contract deployed to a particular Outpost. Red Banks support two types of token lending/borrowing: p2p collateralized loans between or among Red Bank users and lending by the Red Bank's depositors (through the Red Bank) to C2C Borrowers.
  4. C2C Borrowers: C2C Borrowers are smart contract systems on an Outpost that have been approved by the Martian Council to 'borrow' tokens from that Outpost's Red Bank on a contract-to-contract ("C2C") basis. Unlike human Red Bank borrowers, C2C Borrowers do not need to overcollateralize their loans from the Red Bank with matching deposits into the Red Bank. Instead, due to pre-programmed compatibility between the Red Bank and a liquidation engine for the borrowing smart contract system, the Red Bank holds an indirect, virtual 'smart lien' on the borrowed tokens such that the borrowed tokens can be liquidated from the C2C Borrower and the proceeds of that liquidation paid to the Red Bank to maintain the Red Bank's solvency.
  5. Credit Managers/Rovers: Each Credit Manager is a smart contract deployed to a particular Outpost, and enables users to create personalized, tokenized credit accounts called "Rovers" on that Outpost. In effect, Rovers are general-purpose C2C Borrowers. Through Rovers, users can interact with other DeFi smart contract systems on a multi-asset, cross-collateralized basis with a single liquidation health factor. Users can fund their Rovers with their own tokens and borrow additional tokens from the Red Bank on a leveraged (partially collateralized) basis (i.e., the Red Bank loan is partially secured by the value of the user's deposited tokens). The deposited and borrowed tokens can then be deposited through the Rover into other DeFi smart contract systems that have been approved for C2C by the Martian Council. A minimum loan-to-value ratio ("LTV") must be maintained; otherwise, a liquidation will be triggered within Rover and the proceeds of that liquidation will be used to pay down the Rover's debt to the Red Bank.
  6. Vaults: "Vaults" are independent or 'third-party' smart contracts serving as intermediaries between the Red Bank and Rovers, on the one side, and other DeFi smart contract systems (such as AMM protocol pools serving as the ultimate C2C token 'borrowers'). Vaults encode pre-programmed interaction patterns (sometimes referred to as "strategies") for interacting with a particular smart contract system that is borrowing tokens on a C2C basis from the Red Bank and Rovers. For example, a Vault may perform 'auto-compounding' by automatically re-depositing governance token rewards back into the borrowing smart contract to increase the Rover's deposit size, a process that is sometimes described as "yield farming". Vaults must be whitelisted in advance by the Martian Council after being evaluated under the Mars Risk Framework.