Welcome to the first DeversiFi monthly community update. In order to highlight the incredible work that is going on and improve transparency we will be publishing a monthly update that focuses on project development, KPIs and DeversiFi news. The monthly update will evolve over time so please reach out to the team if you would like to see anything else included.
It is an exciting time for DeversiFi at the moment, as we stand on our own two feet as an independent exchange with a mission to become the world’s most complete decentralised trading experience. Our mission is to bring traders the features and experience that they would expect from any existing, large exchange, but with the added control and flexibility that decentralised custody brings.
If you haven’t noticed already, an updated Nectar ($NEC) 2.0 Whitepaper has been published for community review that details a proposed new roadmap for the Nectar token. We hope you like the suggested new NEC logo!
1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – October 2019
Our aim is to become the most complete decentralised trading experience. We will measure the success of the products we build using volume and customer numbers.
As things stand, DeversiFi has proven its appeal only to a small number of niche customers, particularly doing specialised arbitrage trading. DeversiFi is still very much in the ‘pre-launch’ phase as we concentrate on bringing customers over from the old centralised Ethfinex platform and releasing first cohort of planned new features and platform updates. Over the next several months as we make product changes to appeal to a wider audience, we will be publishing monthly volume, customer numbers, average order size as well as other KPIs that are important to us in measuring performance such as customer satisfaction data.
2. Short Term Plans
October has included simultaneously closing the old Ethfinex centralised exchange, whilst setting up the infrastructure that a new crypto company needs to operate. This ranged from bank accounts, legal structure, staff contracts, infrastructure and funding – and everything in between. Whilst Ethfinex was incubated by Bitfinex, we enjoyed a range of shared services that we now need to provide for ourselves as a fully independent company.
On the technology side, the focus has been split into three areas. 1) Performance improvements and splitting out the core trading engine 2) Scaling technologies, including our first-to-market StarkWare integration 3) New features along with the Nectar token roadmap
Performance Improvements
Some of you may remember that DeversiFi started life as ‘Ethfinex Trustless’. Ethfinex Trustless was the first ‘hybrid’ exchange that offered decentralised custody whilst also providing a mix of decentralised and centralised orders, allowing for liquid trading.
Ethfinex Trustless was (and still is) experimental cutting edge technology and the codebase has changed significantly as it evolved into DeversiFi over the past year. We are now taking the opportunity to refactor and upgrade the codebase as this will give us the nimble and responsive base from which we can scale. We expect this work to take another few weeks, after which point you will see a number of improvements, including:
- Faster response & trading times – especially for advanced API traders
- Partial orders will not be cancelled and partial order handling will behave as expected
- Locked balances will update faster, fixing bugs where balances are sometimes slow to update in certain circumstances
Until the migration work is complete we are refraining from making any drastic changes to DeversiFi, but will afterwards be able to implement upgrades and new features on a much more agile schedule.
Scaling Technologies
DeversFi was active at Devcon this year on a number of fronts. Dan (our COO) presented on the main event stage with StarkWare to announce our collaboration. StarkWare is building a Zero Knowledge scaling solution that operates in a trustless setup, bringing privacy and scalability to the Ethereum network. We are integrating with StarkWare as their technology will allow us to scale DeversiFi to the rate of trade settlement that is required with a large user base. Most importantly this will reduce costs of settlement on Ethereum, allowing us to reduce our fees to an even more competitive levels for all traders. We will be able to reveal more details over the coming weeks and months as we become the world’s first-to-market STARK powered DEX.
For a recap of all things Devcon, see the blog post here. We also partnered with Iden3 to run a prisoner’s Dilemma style game to trial their ZK proof of ID technology. Players were able to meet each other and exchange identity proofs over the Ethereum network in exchange for NEC token rewards. The level of rewards depended on the level of cooperation between the players with some players opting to play nice and some opting to betray each other at every opportunity – very crypto! As a result we welcomed over 400 people to the NEC token community and look forward to welcoming them to the DeversiFi exchange, the upcoming NecDAO and our wider ecosystem of dapps.
3. New Features & NEC
In the short term the focus has remained on adding margin trading functionality to DeversiFi as well as a new competitive fee schedule. At the same time we have been gearing up to launch two important Nectar features, namely the NecDAO and the NecBURN auction.
Margin Trading
We have been working with our friends at BZX Network to integrate their innovative margin exposure tokens into DeversiFi. Work has mainly focused on the DeversiFi UI and UX to ensure that traders can keep track of their profits (or losses) as well as understand all the key elements of the BZX pTokens (exposure tokens). The only remaining dependency is the codebase migration (mentioned above), after which we will be able to bring high speed, decentralised margin trading to DeversiFi.
Fee Schedule Changes
Soon we will be launching a new and improved fee schedule for DeversiFi that reflects both the needs of traders and the unique architecture of a DEX. More details are available in the Nectar 2.0 Whitepaper but essentially traders will enjoy fee discounts depending on their 30d DeversiFi trading volume, order size and the amount of NEC held in their private wallet.
This will be the first stage of our fee schedule plan, with a second fee reduction planned in 2020 once we have upgraded our settlement infrastructure.
necDAO
We are launching the world’s largest DAO, that will have control over the circa 17k ETH that was pledged to Nectar token holders from the previous (now closed) Ethfinex exchange. Learn more in the Nectar 2.0 Whitepaper.
Nectar holders will be able to submit and vote on proposals which benefit the NEC ecosphere. We are using DAOstack technology that we have trialled with a test DAO over the past few months. We will be launching a security bug bounty program soon and expect to invite Nectar holders to participate in the DAO for the first time in December or January, with a series of educational events being organised in the run up..
necBURN
DeversiFi has pledged to use up to 50% of exchange trading fee revenues to purchase and then destroy Nectar tokens from the open market, in one of the largest burning programs in the exchange landscape. We wouldn’t be here without the support of Nectar token holders and want to give as much back to the community as possible, whilst still making sure that we can operate the exchange as a nimble startup.
As part of this planned burning program we encountered some novel design problems that are largely only applicable to DEXs. As DEXs have to pay gas for every transaction, what we did not want was to end up in a situation where the exchange was using its trading fee revenue to buy back Nec tokens in very small and frequent amounts. On top of not providing Nectar token holders best value for money (as gas costs go to miners instead of token holders), we also did not want to add to Ethereum network congestion or be at risk of directly moving the market in a non-transparent way. Therefore we will be running a weekly auction where Nectar holders can sell their NEC in exchange for ETH. Not only will this solve the design problems mentioned above, but it will also be an exciting weekly event that the Nectar community can engage with. More details will be available on this soon but a sneak peak is below:
Nectar Community Traderboard
We have also put to work funds in our test DAO to create an advanced trader leaderboard for DeversiFi. This traderboard will bring a number of benefits to DeversiFi:
- Offers rewards and gamified incentives helping to enhance the experience/benefits for existing traders whilst attracting new ones
- Many exchanges in the space have utilised trader leaderboards. We will objectively have one of the most advanced leaderboards in the space and be the first decentralised exchange to do so
- This leaderboard allows us to confidently host periodic competitions, further rewarding existing traders and again, attracting new users to the platform
An interesting point to make is that the development work for the traderboard has been commissioned through our test DAO – a DAO we launched to familiarise ourselves with the DAO process and Alchemy in preparation for the aforementioned necDAO. Below you can see the proposal written by Ben Wilson and ChainAirSoft, detailing requirements followed by a shot of the proposal as it looks in Alchemy.
As you can see, the proposal received 4 positive votes and eventually passed within around 14 days of submission, with the requested ETH being sent directly to the submitters wallet address. The traderboard itself is extremely close to completion and we will be announcing it when ready on our social media channels below. We will also introduce deep dives, how to guides, FAQs and much more educational content to help you get to grips with the new necDAO, so stay tuned for that!
Outro
We are thrilled to bring back our monthly community updates. This serves as the first in a recurring series highlighting and deep diving all DeversiFi happenings over the past month, so that you are always in the know as we build out the decentralised future, together. You are invited to join our community, the conversation and the dots (of DeFi!) over at Telegram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Youtube.
We work around the ⏰ on the development of DeversiFi as the home of decentralised token trading, offering the most innovative solutions putting our users in control of their trading experience without sacrificing on speed, liquidity, choice or trust.
Get involved with, play your role and join us together as we fan the flames of the financial evolution.
