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Llama: a smart contract platform led by Founders Fund

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On November 6, the smart contract platform Llama completed a US$6 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was participated by Founders Fund, Electric Capital, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.

Author: Luccy, BlockBeats

BlockBeats News. On November 6th, Llama, an intelligent contract platform, completed a $6 million seed round of financing. This round of financing was participated by Founders Fund, Electric Capital, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, and Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave.

The smart contract application has accumulated billions of dollars in value locked and inventory holdings. However, protecting and managing these protocols remains complex. Llama, led by Founders Fund, has launched a full-stack platform aimed at making access control and governance more effective and secure, currently live on major EVM chains.

Llama: A Full-Stack Platform for On-Chain Access Control and Governance

Llama is a full-stack platform for on-chain access control and governance. It securely takes action using on-chain policies and custom execution policies. Llama has previously contributed to mainstream protocols and communities in the encryption field, such as Aave, Nouns, Lido, dYdX, and ApeCoin.

Llama aims to make blockchain protocol governance more efficient by encoding roles and permissions to execute on-chain operations such as fund transfers or changing protocol parameters. The platform aims to address some of the inefficient and security vulnerabilities that may lead to poor performance or even hacking attacks and exploitation.

Role-based Governance

Llama is designed specifically for role-based governance, which may involve network security teams updating risk parameters or operations teams urgently pausing to address liquidity issues.

A role-based workflow example includes risk parameters, protocol disbursements, and emergency updates. Among them, risk parameters refer to the ability of risk managers to optimistically update risk parameters, so changes will be delayed for a period of time unless vetoed by token holders.

Protocol funding refers to a lower approval threshold for small funding amounts, but a higher approval threshold for large funding amounts by funding reviewers. Emergency update refers to team members being able to activate emergency pauses at a higher approval threshold and immediately execute operations upon reaching that threshold.

Llama provides support for protocols through its on-chain policy engine, which sets roles for creating permissions and approving or rejecting operations. The protocol has on-chain audit tracking for its roles and permissions, providing assurance for users and investors.

Role management involves creating, editing, granting, and revoking roles in Llama strategy NFTs. Roles are of type uint8, which means they are represented as unsigned integers, and the maximum number of roles that a Llama instance can have is 255. Each Llama instance reserves 0 roles, which are assigned to each ALL HOLDERS ROLE policyholder at the time of minting and cannot be revoked before creation. Each role has two assets stored in the SupplyCheckpoints.History checkpoint and can always be used in storage.

Due to the fact that all basic methods for managing Llama policies are singular, this means that new operations must be created for each individual policy, role, and permission that a user may want to adjust. Batch processing these methods together is an expected use case, such as granting policies to a group of new users or deleting all permission IDs related to a specific policy that is being deprecated. Llama aims to solve this problem.

GovernanceScript provides an interface that allows users to batch process common policy management calls together for a better user experience. GovernanceScript must be licensed separately from basic policy management functionality because it has fundamentally different target addresses and various selectable features that can be licensed separately.

Deploy Independent Instances

Llama aims to make protocols simple to start and decentralized. Decentralization is achieved through fine-grained access control, so each governance participant is granted the minimum power necessary to perform their function. This precision is intended to help manage the complexity of instance management while preserving strong user guarantees.

Using Llama, teams can deploy independent instances that define fine-grained roles and permissions for executing transactions, referred to as "operations".

The Llama instance can adapt to constantly changing environments by gradually adding new participants and expanding the available set of operations. Operations can be any action represented by calling a smart contract function, including transferring funds, updating registries, changing protocol parameters, or activating emergency pauses.

Through Llama's native account feature, teams can set granular rules for approving and transferring tokens. They can have multiple accounts to make different capital allocation decisions, rather than setting up a large treasury for each decision. The protocol can gradually decentralize by adding new policyholders and expanding the scope of governable actions.

The Llama instance is composed of a modular system of smart contract modules with an immutable core and interchangeable peripherals.

其中，LlamaCore refers to the process of managing operations from creation to execution; LlamaPolicy refers to the ERC721 contract, where each token is non-transferable and defines role permissions held by policy holders, roles that can be granted create, approve, and disapprove operation permissions; LlamaExecutor is the single exit point of the Llama instance, where all executed operations will be sent from the Llama executor, which should be an address controlled by the llama instance system's owner or other privileged roles.

LlamaCore collaborates with LlamaPolicy to establish and enforce progress rules for actions from creation to execution. Successful operation execution will result in LlamaExecutor using agreed transaction call data to call the specified target contract. As the executor is the single exit point of the instance, ownership of external functions only needs to be set once.

Instances can also deploy any number of policies, accounts, scripts, and guards. Policy configurations have time period lengths and statutory quorum thresholds to determine how operations transition between states. Accounts are on-chain wallets that can receive, transfer, and approve tokens. Scripts are contracts that can be delegated to execute by the executor. This is useful for creating custom instance governance functions that batch multiple operations. Guards are used to add additional security checks that run before and after operation creation and execution.

Accounts can be managed on-chain by deploying contracts directly from Llama instances. Multiple accounts can be deployed by authorizing additional account logic contracts to create new types. Llama's recommended account logic contracts include functionality for managing native assets (such as ETH), ERC-20 tokens, ERC-721 tokens, ERC-1155 tokens, as well as arbitrary executable functionality that can be used to support non-standard token types and extensions.

Instances can receive native assets such as ETH or tokens such as USDC through accounts and usage policies. These tokens' permissions for approval and transfer can be set. There are separate functions for transfer and approval, as well as functions approved by ERC-721 and ERC-1155 operators. There are also other functions that can transfer tokens to multiple recipients in a single transaction.