BlockTalks x OpenSwap AMA Transcript!
We recently hosted an AMA with OpenSwap, on October 25th at 12PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Bruce Chau, Founder at OpenSwap So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks!
Q1. Congrats on your successful IDO a couple weeks ago, good to have you back at Gains Community! As we have new joiners here in our group, can you please introduce yourself and your team to some of the new Gains community members?
Ans — It is a pleasure to be back here in this great community! For those who don’t know me, I’m Bruce, a key member and founder of the OpenSwap project, a recovering enterprise dev, enlightened by blockchain in 2018 and never looked back.
At the core, our team’s strength is technology, however, we’ve been aiming to build up a community of talent that crosses boundaries of technology, finance, marketing, and more through the many partnerships we have developed and continue to build. We hope to attract more developers and contributors to our team through participation events such as hackathons that ultimately build up the DeFi community.
Q2. Now that OpenSwap’s IDO is done and dusted, can we finally get to know who are your investors and partners contributing to this project alongside the core team?
Ans — Alongside the core team, we work closely with many partners in the DeFi domain. The OpenSwap team received a technology contribution from IJS Technologies, an award-winning technology firm that received grant support from one of the older DeFi teams — OAX Foundation in 2020.
Our contracts are reviewed by CertiK and Beosin, and we are also working closely with partners who share the same value and goals as us, such as the likes of Coin98 and Impossible Finance, whom the latter OpenSwap is also part of the first cohort with their launchpad release.
The OpenSwap project is backed by many reputable partners such as NGC Ventures, Coin98 Ventures, BR Capital, Legos Capital, Double Peak Group, Prime Block Capital, Illusionist Group, Muhabbit Capital, All In Ventures, as well as angel investors such as Curve Finance’s Julien Bouteloup, Leo Cheng from CREAM Finance, Mark Borsten, and Ravindra Kumar — Founder of Frontier.xyz, just to name a few.
For our full list of backers, community members are encouraged and should be able to do their own research quite easily as OpenSwap had been mentioned in publications from Coindesk, Coinspeaker, and many other crypto-targeted media around the world.
Q3. Again, for those who are new to our community, how did this project come about and what are the pain points OpenSwap is aiming to address?
Ans. — On-chain trading and liquidity lack the flexibility and choice found in centralized options. This is a problem that we at OpenSwap aim to solve by introducing new technologies and concepts such as Liquidity Queues, Hybrid Smart Router, and Open Interchain Protocol. We present this to the community through partnerships with other projects and with our own DeFi hub, where we will be able to offer the best on-chain pricing and multi-chain arbitrage opportunities.
Q4. Since we last spoke, many new projects and changes were brought about to the DeFi space, are there any new OpenSwap offerings as solutions to new or on-going pain points?
Ans — As the DeFi universe continues to expand, liquidity will only be increasingly scattered across multiple chains, and the situation is poised to get worse as more new chains emerge with individual DEXs on each chain.
OpenSwap’s solution to this is to become a comprehensive DeFi hub offering the best on-chain pricing and multi-chain arbitrage opportunities, allowing users to experience revolutionary benefits through optimizing their trades with our unique features: Liquidity Queues, Hybrid Smart Router, and Open Interchain Protocol.
Our team began working on what would become OpenSwap about a year and a half ago, during the summer of DeFi in 2020 when Uniswap was gaining huge popularity with its AMM liquidity pools. At that time, we wanted to address the two primary pain points: Slippage and Impermanent Loss. Our idea was to provide on-chain spot-market priced swaps without slippage, in the form of OpenSwap Liquidity Queues — which is also the first core technology we are rolling out next week!
Going back to pain points in the DeFi space, at OpenSwap we firmly believe that DeFi users should have the choices and the freedom to swap with any liquidity source. Instead of competing for liquidity with other AMM DEXs, we want to support them and let the users make informed decisions on the optimal swap for their situation.
Q5. What are the core features listed offered in your dApp, could you give us an overview of Liquidity Queues, Hybrid Smart Router, and Open Interchain Protocol?
Ans — Our primary goal is to revolutionize on-chain liquidity with a series of tools culminating in helping reduce friction with cross-chain swaps.
It all starts with our DEX aggregator offering users the choice to fulfill their swap with any liquidity source on any chain. OpenSwap Liquidity Queues will be one of these sources of liquidity that provides more attractive prices by bringing spot-market priced swaps on-chain without any slippage.
Then Hybrid Smart Router will allow OpenSwap to utilize existing liquidity in AMM pools in conjunction with OpenSwap Liquidity Queues to execute swaps in the most efficient manner providing the most return for the user’s swaps.
All these are critical pieces that will be linked up to our Open Interchain Protocol, a new cross-chain bridging solution that will offer more efficient inter-blockchain swapping of chain-native digital assets through the usage of single-asset bridge vaults and decentralized mechanisms.
Q6. Can you please explain in depth, what exactly are Liquidity Queues, and how does it guarantee Zero Slippage? It would be nice if you can elaborate using real-life use-cases as examples.
Ans — The first initial iteration of Liquidity Queues scheduled to be released this week is our Spot Price Queues.
Spot Price Queues will enable users to execute on-chain swaps at spot-market prices with no slippage. Prices are obtained from decentralized oracles, and the queue uses a secure adaptor protocol that guards against many of the shortcomings of using oracles. The protocol includes a series of customizable circuit breakers that ensure that liquidity providers are protected against any kind of exploits, trades that fail any of the circuit breakers will not be carried out.
For an average user who wishes to perform a swap, OpenSwap will show various options from DEXs including OpenSwap’s own Liquidity Queues. We expect that the spot-market price of Liquidity Queues will offer the most attractive pricing due to zero slippage compared to AMM pools.
There are two sub-types of the Spot Price Queues category, and they are Spot Priority Queue and Spot Range Queue, both of which are scheduled to be released next week.
Spot Priority Queues are designed for traders seeking to exit out of a position quickly, and at the spot market price. Priority can be achieved through staking a quantity of $OSWAP tokens. The order with the highest amount of OSWAP tokens staked will be sold first. Users can also set an ‘expiry date’ for their orders so that no more will be sold after a certain time if not already sold.
Spot Range Queues will provide the ability for liquidity providers to set price brackets, on which to make their liquidity available for sale. Trading DApps tapping into the liquidity queues can initiate trades using the liquidity as long as the market price is within the range set by the liquidity provider. The transaction price will be based on the existing spot market price.
In both types of Spot Price Queues, liquidity providers joining the queues have the option of canceling or withdrawing their liquidity as long as it hasn’t been swapped against yet.
Q7. I believe projects such as 1inch are also routing their user’s swaps, how does OpenSwap’s Hybrid Smart Router compare to similar existing offerings as such?
Ans — The Hybrid Smart Router analyzes the best path across different DEXes to maximize your return on each swap. It acts as a router across different DEXes so that you may execute the trade against a deep pool on an AMM into an intermediary token to minimize slippage and then route the next hop on a completely different DEX with a deep pool for the pair with your desired token.
For example, if you wanted to swap $DOT to $BUSD, the hybrid smart router would detect that the pool is too shallow for the trade size resulting in slippage. It would then route the swap through the PancakeSwap DOT-BNB pair with the deeper pool and then use OpenSwap Spot Liquidity Queue with no slippage to get BNB to BUSD. Other aggregators provide different strategies such as split trades to ensure the trade size is within slippage limits that may result in more swaps to get the desired return on long tail tokens with shallow pools.
Q8. As mentioned in our previous AMA, cross-chain bridging is a core component to OpenSwap’s end game, so how do you see Open Interchain Protocol (OpenSwap’s Bridge) being a better solution than other cross-chain bridges existing in the market now?
Ans — There are currently two ways to move tokens across different chains:
- Lock and mint synthetic on target chain
- Utilizing a cross chain AMM pool
The lock and mint approach is much easier to implement, but it requires users to recognize the synthetic on the target chain as the “official” token or users would have to take another step to exchange the synthetic into the “official” token they way.
The cross chain AMM pool solves the issue of taking another step to exchange the synthetic by providing the desired token on the target chain. However, it often requires an intermediary token to facilitate the cross-chain swap. As with all AMM systems, liquidity providers are subject to impermanent loss.
The Open Interchain Protocol leverages existing liquidity on the target chain by routing the swap through DEXes and liquidity queues to maximize the return on swapping tokens across different chains. Each chain would have single asset bridge vaults where liquidity providers do not suffer impermanent loss and receive a portion of the bridge fees. The bridge vaults are managed by a network of validators called bridge trolls where there is enough bond staked in $OSWAP to cover the size of the interchain swap requested by the user. The bridges troll will leverage the OpenSwap Hybrid Smart Router to route the swap through the top DEXes on the target chain and OpenSwap Liquidity Queues to provide an optimized return for each swap.
Q9. We saw that OpenSwap recently announced a community driven NFT initiative called “Troll Camp’’, what exactly is this? Does it mean OpenSwap users get to play a part in the Open Interchain Protocol?
Ans — On our rapid march towards our core technology rollout, we have also recently announced an upcoming launch of the OpenSwap Troll Camp, which will be a fun and community-focused initiative to allow OpenSwap users to stake $OSWAP and be rewarded with:
- Troll Camp rewards in OSWAP tokens
- Rewards Boost for future OSWAP staking campaigns
- Flash Sale participation on OpenSwap Restricted Group Queues upon release
- Exclusive Bridge Troll NFT
- And sustainable rewards program on participating as a Node Validator in the Open Interchain Protocol
Every Bridge Troll NFT will be unique and represents a stake, and it will entitle the user to unique-to-OpenSwap benefits as listed above.
These Bridge Troll NFTs are transferable, but the user will need it to get back the OSWAP tokens staked as the user will need to burn the NFT. Every time a Bridge Troll NFT is burned, the user will receive back the OSWAP staked, and it would also open up a free slot in the OpenSwap Troll Camp for someone else.
For those who’d want to participate in becoming a Bridge Troll (Node Validator) on the Open Interchain Protocol, they would need to hold a Bridge Troll NFT. The NFT will represent the brand for their node, and the user can build up the reputation and sell their NFT as they deem fit.
Q10. Any specific features you are most excited about? How does these exciting features tie back to the pain points OpenSwap aims to relieve for the DeFi community?
Ans — In the short term, we are most excited about the release of our Liquidity Queues as it allows a variety of purpose-defined liquidity options to the user. We are starting off with Spot Liquidity Queues that will always offer spot-market prices without any slippage. With amazing feedback from our community, we continue to add various types of Liquidity Queues including a way to target your liquidity to a specific group of users. The community keeps coming up with new ways to use these Restricted Group Liquidity Queues including flash sales for membership groups and guaranteed buyback options for IDOs.
The long term excitement is focused on the Open Interchain Protocol as OpenSwap will begin to fulfill its mission of reducing friction of moving tokens across different chains. Our team has made good progress this month as we implemented an NFT into the bridge troll network as an additional access layer for participants in the network.
Q11. Again, for GAINS’ new community members, can you tell us a bit about OSWAP token, when and where did this token launch?
Ans — The OpenSwap protocol issued a governance token called OSWAP as part of the protocol’s release. OSWAP is an ERC-20 token with a hard-capped total token supply of 1B tokens. There are currently 26.4M tokens in circulation, with 20M locked in the governance contract to support transparent governance.
The token launch date was the end of August 2021 and was conducted on the Impossible Finance Launchpad. The staking subscription period for $OSWAP on Impossible Finance was completed successfully and with record-breaking committed staked capital.
Q12. Going in-depth, what will be some of the utilities of the OSWAP token?
Ans — The main purposes of the OSWAP token are to:
- Incentivize usage of the OpenSwap platform
- Encourage users to get involved in the governance of the protocol
- Enable platform privileges such as the ‘priority’ features when using the OpenSwap Spot Priority Queue
- Staking to become a Bridge Troll (node validator) on the Open Interchain Protocol. The stake becomes a bond to determine the transaction size the Bridge Troll is allowed to validate.
The token was established as an ERC-20 token, and was also bridged to the Binance Smart Chain to enable the governance of the BSC version of OpenSwap during the initial launch.
Q13. Aside from traditional staking programs that most DeFi projects are already doing, will OpenSwap offer any unique reward programs specifically for the OpenSwap community?
Ans — Yes, as mentioned earlier — we will be introducing an OpenSwap community-focused initiative called the Troll Camp, where OSWAP holders can stake their OSWAP and obtain these Bridge Troll NFTs which will enable them to enjoy a lot of unique-to-OpenSwap benefits, and also would allow them to participate in the Open Interchain Protocol as a Bridge Troll (upon feature release).
Becoming a Bridge Troll on the Open Interchain Protocol essentially means that they will become a Node Validator for the transactions. And Bridge Trolls will be rewarded for the “work done”, meaning they would get rewarded a portion of the Bridge Fees as assets crosses the OpenSwap Bridge!
Q14. What do you think of introducing farming to OpenSwap? Is farming in your pipeline?
Ans — OpenSwap farming will be introduced in the near future. We have conducted and will continue to do staking campaigns periodically. Community members can follow us across our socials for the latest updates on upcoming staking campaigns.
Q15. Who do you think are your competitors? Do you see any competitors in this space?
Ans — We believe in a co-opetition model, especially in our case where our solution and focus areas span across different areas such as AMM swapping, farming, DEX aggregation, cross-chain bridging, and etc.
Our key focus here at OpenSwap is to introduce novel concepts and technologies such as our Liquidity QUeues and Hybrid Smart Router that will strengthen the industry as a whole.
Q16. How do you intend to compete for liquidity with existing protocols in the DeFi space?
Ans — OpenSwap Liquidity Queues sit in between the AMM DEXs such as Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and the order book-based CEXs. Spot Price Queues always execute at spot-market prices, removing the possibility of sandwich attacked by frontrunning and back running given that trades do not affect the reference price.
Our Limit Offer Queues (to be introduced later in this year) will not expose the order book to limit front-running opportunities. OpenSwap Liquidity Queues offer an alternative way to buy and sell tokens without causing any slippage.
Q17. Uniswap V3 has a list of features that focuses on solving the current problems on liquidity, how do OpenSwap’s features stand again Uniswap V3?
Ans — Uniswap provides one of the best solutions for AMM pools. Instead of fighting for this liquidity, OpenSwap prefers to leverage its liquidity to fulfill swaps through our Hybrid Smart Router and user Liquidity Queues when it offers better returns on the swaps.
In order for our interchain swaps to be successful, we would need to use existing liquidity available in AMM pools when Liquidity Queues do not have sufficient liquidity.
Q18. How does Open Interchain Protocol compare to more popular bridging methods such as ‘Lock & Mint Synthetic’ and ‘Cross-chain Liquidity Pair Pool’ models?
Ans — The two most commonly used bridging mechanisms in the current DeFi space are the ‘Lock & Mint’ and the ‘Cross-Chain Liquidity Pool’ models. Both varieties are moderately acceptable cross-chain options, but at the same time, a lot can be improved on because the current solutions incur irritating drawbacks such as slow speed, high costs, involving the use of synthetics, and high complexity on the actual execution.
We believe that current bridges are more of ‘interim solutions’ that don’t actually provide the seamless and cost-efficient cross-chain experience that the DeFi space would want to see in the longer run. We believe that most DeFi users are just waiting for something better to emerge in the market, and to that, we present Open Interchain Protocol.
The Open Interchain Protocol will be doing things a bit differently than conventional bridges in the current DeFi space. The Open Interchain Protocol will adopt the single-asset vault model and will also incorporate in-house innovations such as Liquidity Queues and Hybrid Smart Router to provide DeFi users a highly transparent and more capital efficient end-to-end interchain swapping experience.
Q19. Assuming Interchain Bridging is OpenSwap’s end game, which will happen early next year (according to your docs), what should users expect after that?
Ans — The OpenSwap ecosystem including Liquidity Queues, Hybrid Smart Router, and Open Interchain Protocol are designed to not only be decentralized but also extendable to new chains at the same time.
OpenSwap Liquidity Queues will be launched on BSC, adding new types of Liquidity Queues to offer users more choices, and expanding Liquidity QUeues onto other EVM compatible chains including L2 ETH such as Arbitrum, Optimism. Our Bridge Troll protocol will enable interchain swaps leveraging our Hybrid Smart Router and Liquidity Queues deployed on the different chains. Longer team plans are to expand to other chains such as SOL, DOT, AVAX, as well as other popular chains to support.
In addition, as DeFi users would surely understand, new chains are emerging in that space all the time, OpenSwap aims to spearhead (or at least stay relevant in) this space for a long while, and to do that — our bridging mechanism would need to be easily extendable and highly adaptable to new chains. Our bridge enables additional chains to be quickly added to Open Interchain Protocol by simply deploying the set of contracts on new chains.
At these initial stages of the OpenSwap project, our protocol will support Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum, but the core team here envision that the Open Interchain Protocol will soon support other EVM compatible chains.
Q20. We understand that you will be releasing Spot Priority Queue and Spot Range Queue very soon, assuming liquidity needs to be injected into the queues, how are your liquidity partnerships coming along?
Ans — OpenSwap has a headstart on the partnerships due to our strategic round prior to the IDO. This provided us with an initial set of partners who will be participating in our early bird liquidity providers programme for our liquidity queues. We are always looking to grow our number of partners and the early bird liquidity providers programme is a great opportunity for parties who missed out on the strategic round to support the project.
Q21. Last but not least, for BlockTalks community members who aren’t already in the OpenSwap community, where should they go for project updates?
Ans — We always encourage DeFi community members to actively participate in discussions to help make the OpenSwap ecosystem a better place for all stakeholders.
Aside from following and engaging OpenSwap across social media, new community members can also learn more about us by reading our docs on Gitbook. We will be periodically updating our docs with new project information as we develop. Please visit: doc.openswap.xyz
We also frequently post new updates on Medium, and we have a Troll Talks series on which are actively talking in-depth about OpenSwap technologies to anticipate as well as how our core technology works. Please visit: openswapdex.medium.com
Questions Asked on Twitter For OpenSwap Team!
Q1. In an article on Medium you comment that among the basic concepts that all OpenSwap users should familiarize themselves with is the troll selection algorithm. What exactly is this algorithm and what role does it play within your platform?
Ans — The troll selection process uses a fuzzy round robin based on a gap of at least x number of transactions before they can be a transaction creator again. For example if the number of super trolls is 10, the x number may be set to 8 to enforce a type of fuzzy round robin.
The troll selection process happens over a specified cycle (eg. 30 minutes) where the super trolls carry out an internal election to identify a new “lead troll”. Only trolls available during the election will be eligible to become a lead troll. The responsibility of the lead trolls is to monitor other chains for new interchain swap requests involving the chain that the troll is carrying “lead” responsibilities for.
Q2. As a complement to AMM exchanges, OpenSwap features Liquidity Queues. Can you explain in detail what is the function of these Liquidity Queues? How this model will help spot market trades based on your Secure Adapter Protocol to be verified at trade time?
Ans — Liquidity Queues operate based on oracle price adapters in the OpenSwap ecosystem. This adapters may be developed by anyone. However, they must be proposed and voted in by our governance to accept the adapter as a source of price feeds. This provides OpenSwap with the flexibility to upgrade adapters in the future to provide more secure and more accurate pricing strategies.
The price adapter must follow our Secure Adapter protocol which offers a framework for developers to incorporate circuit breakers to protect users. These circuit breakers may include trade size limits, price deviation from alternate trusted price feeds, minimum security score of adapter smart contract, etc.
Q3. The first product they will launch on the market is the spot price queue. So how does this product work and what are its benefits to the market? There are two subtypes of Spot Price Queues: Spot Priority Queue and Spot Range Queue, how do they work and what are their differences?
Ans — Spot Priority Queues are designed for swappers and traders seeking to quickly exit or enter a position at the Spot market price. Priority can be achieved through staking a quantity of $OSWAP tokens, and the order with the highest amount of OSWAP tokens staked will be sold first. Trades can also set an expiry date for their order so that no more will be sold after a certain timeframe, if they have not already been sold.
Spot Range Queues will provide the ability for liquidity providers to set price brackets, on which to make their liquidity available as long as the market price is within the range set by the liquidity provider. The transaction price will be based on the existing spot market price. And yes, this means it would be perfectly okay for you to set your price brackets before you go to bed 🛏. You don’t always lose when you snooze!
Q4. Some time ago they held an AMA in this community to let them know about the project and its functionalities. So what are the new OpenSwap updates? How have they positioned themselves in the market? What are the milestones you have achieved and the new goals for the coming months?
Ans — Since our last AMA, we completed our IDO with 95%+ subscription rate thanks to the wide support from our community. Thanks to the feedback from our community, we have added an NFT into our project incorporating a rewards campaign through troll camps and integrating the NFT into our Open Interchain Protocol to provide a reputation layer for the bridge trolls (validators) of the network.
On the Liquidity Queue side, we are preparing the launch this week after working with a secondary auditor on the core contracts, enhancing the security further.
The upcoming months will be exciting for us as we see the performance of the liquidity queues, introduction of restricted group queues, launching queues on other chains as the next steps towards the launch of the Open Interchain Protocol.
Q5. My questionDown pointing backhand index. I read in an article that your current bridges are average interim solutions: The commonly used ‘Lock & Mint Synthetics’ and ‘Cross-Chain Liquidity Pair Pool’ models. How quickly do these bridges move digital assets through chains and what is the cost of this?
Ans — The cost and speed really depends on how centralized the bridge is. If a bridge is a centralized one like the binance bridge, it can be very cost effective and fast. However, which would require trust in a centralized entity. For DeFi, the ideal solution would be a decentralised one and many current solutions require multiple steps from users to get their desired token on the destination chain, leading to slower speeds and higher costs to the user.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to OpenSwap Team!!
Q1. As the market changes in the fast-paced world of decentralized finance and many other competitors in the DeFi world, what is OpenSwap’s strategy to stay ahead of the rest? and what is the vision and main goal of Openswap?
Ans — The DeFi space definitely moves fast and there will always be new players. The OpenSwap strategy is to accept new players by designing the Open Interchain Protocol to be extensible an open for the community to integrate and build on top. The protocol can be deployed to any EVM compatible chain quickly, enabling us to adapt to new incumbents and provide more choice to our users.
Q2. I found it interesting that you comment that to strengthen the bond with the community the OpenSwap team has decided to issue some ‘Bridge Troll NFTs’. What will be the function of these NFTs in your platform and how will users be able to obtain them?
Ans — The purpose of the NFT is to provide access to special perks on our platform. To obtain the NFT, one must stake $OSWAP into one of our troll camps to receive the NFT. The NFT will also be a critical piece for our Open Interchain Protocol as it will be one of the requirements to become a bridge troll (node validator) in our network. Hope you will become one of our future bridge trolls!
Q3. How many months of vesting period is the team allocation??? Is there special requirements to join Spot Priority queues???
Ans — Our team is in it for the long haul with the longest vesting period of 48 months.
For Spot Priority queues, the only requirement is that you add liquidity with at least the minimum lot size. For example, the minimum lot size for BNB will be 1 and most stablecoins will be 500. If you want to increase your priority in the queue, you may stake OSWAP tokens to “jump the queue” and ensure your liquidity gets used on the next swap.’
Q4. Do you have ambassador program in your project?
Ans — Wonderful idea! We will add an ambassador program for community members in the future. Please stay tuned as we will post these opportunities on our partner platform DropsEarn
Q5. Where can I buy your tokens now. What are your current contracts, and how can I buy them and what are the benefits?
Ans — $OSWAP is available on PancakeSwap, OpenSwap AMM, IFSwap and MEXC. You may search using our token address: 0xb32ac3c79a94ac1eb258f3c830bbdbc676483c93
