With 2022 coming to a close, we take this opportunity to look back at the achievements and strides SaucerSwap and the Hedera DeFi ecosystem have made, and we outline how this momentum will be carried into the New Year.
Hedera was comparatively late in entering the world of decentralized finance, having only recently pivoted from a solely enterprise-focused strategy with the launch of a new initiative — the HBAR Foundation. This funding mechanism, coupled with the network’s high performance; aBFT-grade security; and low, predictable fees; makes the subsequent influx of new developers and users of little surprise.
Q1 of 2022 marked the launch of Smart Contracts 2.0. Prior to this, smart contract applications were not practically feasible. This upgrade made smart contracts more robust and able to be integrated with the Hedera Token Service. The first protocol to launch following this upgrade was Stader Labs — a multi-chain liquid staking protocol (aggregate TVL = $88MM).
Following Stader’s success, SaucerSwap began developing a constant product AMM protocol, collaborating with the Hedera core team to pioneer a heavily-modified Uniswap v2 fork wherein HSCS upgrades allow smart contracts to use HTS through EVM precompiles. During this time, the SaucerSwap team held a successful funding round and TGE, raising 10MM HBAR. In July of 2022, the HBAR Foundation announced its support and partnership with SaucerSwap, which was realized as a 20MM HBAR grant distributed to users as liquidity mining incentives. Finally, after undergoing a comprehensive audit (9.7/10) and conducting a public beta on testnet, SaucerSwap launched in early August.
The launch of SaucerSwap marked the beginning of an interconnected DeFi ecosystem on Hedera. HTS tokens could now be swapped in a permissionless manner without counterparty risk, and users could earn passive income while retaining custody of their assets. As expected, the number of smart contract transactions increased significantly, as shown in the Messari State of Hedera Q3 2022 report.
The services with the largest gains were the Account Management / Crypto Service, the Smart Contract Service, and the Token Service. The increases were primarily due to the launch of the first decentralized exchange, SaucerSwap. [SaucerSwap] used the combination of these services to power the entire application.
SaucerSwap quickly reached $15MM in TVL within one week of launch, with a significant portion of this attributed to cross-chain assets bridged through hashport. Despite the price of HBAR having decreased by ~50% since then, TVL continued rising to a high of $22MM in December. Additionally, SaucerSwap has facilitated nearly half a million unique swaps, amounting to over $80MM in total trade volume — this has generated nearly a quarter million dollars in revenue for liquidity providers and the DAO treasury. SaucerSwap also introduced a value capture mechanism for SAUCE token holders. All 158MM HBAR in the WHBAR contract are staked to a node, and the accrued rewards are used to buyback SAUCE and distribute it to stakers.
2022 Retrospective
In 2022, SaucerSwap accomplished these milestones:
- Planck Epoch NFT sale and SAUCE TGE
- Audit of all smart contracts by Hacken
- HBAR Foundation partnership and grant
- Committed to a bi-weekly AMA schedule
- Launch of AMM protocol and yield farms
- Open-sourced core & farm contracts
- Integrated price feed for HTS tokens in HashPack
- Analytics for tokens and pools
- Improvements to front- and back-end infrastructure
- Powered in-wallet swaps for HashPack
- CEX listing on MEXC Global
- SAUCE bridgeable to Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, and Avalanche
- SAUCE as a method of payment on Hedera Sentient marketplace & launchpad
- Strategic partnerships and formation of the HDA
- Implementation of the Sentinel program with HeadStarter
- Listed on data aggregators (DefiLlama, CoinGecko, CMC, DappRadar)
- Migration to WHBAR v2 to leverage native staking
- Launch of SAUCE single-sided staking and xSAUCE token
- Grew community to +25k members across socials
- Streamlined token listing process and classification system
- Expanded the team
- Migration to LedgerWorks Sentinel
- DEX integration on CoinGecko
2023 Prospective
Now that these items have been delivered, the following core goals will inform development in the new year:
- Expand moat within Hedera and cross-chain
- Further transparency and autonomy through a governance process
- Adapt tokenomics to current DeFi narratives
- Increase / diversify revenue streams
- Optimize capital efficiency
- Rework UX to onboard new users
- Provide more insight and functionalities to users
- Maximize cross-chain market exposure
While it is too early to announce our primary focus for 2023, we do have the following items on our roadmap:
- MetaMask integration [Q1]
- Front-end bridge integration [Q1]
- Website redesign, including charts and user-tailored data [Q1]
- Governance
- Community Pools
- Farm v2
- Partnerships / collaborations with cross-chain protocols
- Additional CEX listings
The SaucerSwap team would like to express our gratitude to everyone who has supported the protocol’s development and growth in 2022. Happy New Year!
