Market Update
Hedera has experienced explosive growth in the first month of 2023. Not only has there been an uptick in network tps due to Avery Dennison’s atma.io use case going live, but we have also seen respectable growth in DeFi metrics, such as TVL and volume. As of Jan 22nd, there is $133M in TVL on Hedera, which includes Stader liquid staking but excludes PoS staking. Of this total, SaucerSwap has a 23% dominance, with $30.6M TVL. This marks a +57.72% monthly growth and +30.09% weekly growth in TVL, attributed mainly to the market rebound. In terms of volume, SaucerSwap has facilitated 530k trades, which amount to nearly $100M. The protocol’s volume is up +81.54% this past week alone as traders capitalize on recent volatility and ample arbitrage opportunities. Finally, SaucerSwap has recently ascended into the top 50 largest dexes by TVL, according to DefiLlama.
SaucerSwap volume has ramped up in 2023. Source: DeFiLlama
Roadmap Update
The SaucerSwap team published a retrospective at the end of 2022, reflecting on the milestones achieved post-August launch and what the community can look forward to in the New Year. In this article, several core goals were stated:
- Expand moat within Hedera and cross-chain
- Further transparency and autonomy through a governance process
- Adapt tokenomics to current DeFi narratives
- Optimize capital efficiency and transition to real yield incentives
- Rework UX to onboard new users
- Provide more insight and functionalities to users
- Maximize cross-chain market exposure
This article highlights several ways these goals will be accomplished in Q1 this year and beyond.
SaucerSwap v2
In the last AMA, it was announced that the team is working on a concentrated liquidity market maker (CLMM) as a means to increase capital efficiency. This upgrade paves the way for more profitable and risk-capped liquidity provision, along with low-slippage trade execution, and will reduce the protocol’s reliance on inflation-driven yields. The SaucerSwap community can expect feature parity with leading dexes on more established chains. Regarding this upgraded protocol, our core contributors have swap, mint, and burn functions working on the Hedera testnet, and the pool contract is nearly complete. The team will continue to provide updates as progress is made.
SaucerSwap v2 is still a ways out; however, another major release is just around the corner. This will include: MetaMask integration, front-end bridge integration, user analytics, and a website redesign.
MetaMask & Bridge
MetaMask and bridge integrations achieve a common goal: onboard new users. As it currently stands, cross-chain users must create a new wallet to participate in Hedera DeFi. The ability to switch networks within MetaMask removes this pain point. Friction is further reduced by the fact that MetaMask users can then bridge assets directly to Hedera within SaucerSwap’s web app.
A significant portion of the $60B+ in DeFi is interacted with via MetaMask wallets (with over 30M MAUs, comprising 80–90% of all web3 users). Therefore, there is enormous value in seamlessly onboarding these users into the Hedera ecosystem. Given SaucerSwap’s clear benefits (e.g., fast txs w/ finality, predictable fees, no frontrunning, attractive yields, Larry), it stands to reason that the protocol will experience an influx of new users and liquidity as a direct consequence of these new front-end features.
Website Redesign
One of SaucerSwap’s core philosophies is good UI/UX. As such, the MetaMask & bridge integrations will coincide with a full reimagining of the website. This will include a top performers section on the landing page; real-time charts and statistics on the swap and liquidity pages; user-specific charts (e.g., account value), transactions, positions (e.g., tokens, pools, farms), and more on the portfolio page; various performance optimizations; and a revamped look. This breadth and granularity of data will streamline accounting and empower users who take trading and liquidity provision seriously.
Insights & Notifications
In true SaucerSwap fashion, this user-tailored data will be taken a step further and introduce configurable insights and notifications. Here the power of Ledger Works’ Sentinel will be harnessed, granting users the ability to subscribe to topics and allowing for the easy creation of notification streams. These notifications are customizable and can range from trading signals to security alerts, all in-app. These advanced features will be entirely optional, likely via a subscription-based model. Here, the subscription fee would be paid in SAUCE, which can then be redistributed to active participants of the protocol, thereby giving further utility to the token. Please note that insights and notifications are further down the pipeline and may not be included in the upcoming release.
Conclusion
As mentioned in our last update, this release will occur once Hedera’s JSON-RPC relay is production-ready, which is currently slated for Q1. In the meantime, we will continue to develop and test the features discussed in this article. Concurrently, our Solidity team is working on SaucerSwap v2 and will be joined by our full-stack team once the front-end features are in production.
