Soully’s Rewind 2022
Hello, DeFi Spirits! I hope you’re all doing well! This is the final article of the year, and as is customary, we must take a look back at Soully’s journey. In this article, we will discuss what SpiritSwap had planned for this year: the milestones we’ve reached, the obstacles we encountered, and the challenges we overcame, with all the ups and downs! And, of course, we’ll discuss what the future holds for SpiritSwap and Soully. If you’re up for it, let’s take a trip down memory lane for this year! Let’s get started!
We can look back at SpiritSwap and say that this year was very different from 2021. First and foremost, we can see that our website looks very different from last year, and this is because we have officially released our V2! V2 was released in August 2022, after months of work, initial testing, bug-fixing, and mod-testing! We can say that we are proud of what we have accomplished with our V2, and that the work never stops. Many changes have already been made to SpiritSwap V2, ranging from bug fixes to new features such as the dTWAP developed by the ORBS team. We will continue to hone our skills in order to improve SpiritSwap on both Fantom and other platforms, beginning with Canto.
We also completed the transition to a DAO in 2022, and SpiritSwap is not independent of any team but is now a collective of multiple development teams working together to fix bugs, deploy new features (like dTWAP by ORBS) and expanding to new chains, with Upper Octave leading the Canto expansion in early 2023. SpiritSwap set a goal of reaching full decentralization by the end of 2021, and we can confidently say that we have taken the necessary steps this year. The first step was the establishment of a multi-sig at the beginning of the year (which was also voted on by the community), and as time passed, the decentralization and number of different voices that are the driving factor in SpiritSwap increased. When we look back at the end of the year, we see that SpiritSwap does not have a single team as the owners but rather a number of teams who contribute to it. It does not have a single decision-making team but rather a community that votes with their voting power (a.k.a. inSPIRITs). In fact, 22 proposals were voted on during the year 2022, and some of them would serve as the foundation for 2023, as we will discuss later in the article. At the end of the year we also applied for the Fantom Foundation’s Gitcoin Grants. Today was the end of the matching period and the preliminary results look really promising. In fact, SpiritSwap is currently sitting at top 10 in the unique donations leaderboards. Even in the midst of a bear market, the community did not let us down. They have expressed their support for SpiritSwap. As a result, we’d like to thank our community once more for their ongoing support and faith in SpiritSwap.
SpiritSwap was especially active in the last three months of 2022, with many proposals being voted on. To summarize briefly:
- The ORBS integration proposal, which would allow dTWAP orders in SpiritSwap, was approved with 126 million votes in favor.
- AdminGuru received operational duties for SpiritSwap after receiving 105 million “Approve” votes.
- The proposal to open up SpiritSwap’s front-end to the public was approved with 131 million votes of confidence.
- The proposal to expand onto Canto and go multi-chain was approved with 126 million votes in favor.
All of the items listed above are critical, so let’s go over them one by one!
The dTWAP ORBS integration now allows DCAing (dollar-cost-averaging) on SpiritSwap, and would bring many CeFi options to DeFi in SpiritSwap. During the deployment of the TWAP feature, the ORBS team and we were in constant contact with the mods, providing feedback to the ORBS team when testing the final product. This was to ensure our community were given a solid, well-oiled product upon deployment. It all happened in two months, so we want to thank the ORBS team for their attention during that time. They have exemplified professionalism and are everything we could have hoped for in a partner. Congratulations once more!
AdminGuru receiving operational duties didn’t change much because they were already running the operations de facto prior to the proposal, but with 105 M “Approve” votes, it was made official that AdminGuru received the operational duties of SpiritSwap. These responsibilities include managing the social media accounts, the Discord server, marketing initiatives (such as Fireside with Soully, AMAs, Medium articles, and so on) along with business development.
Another event to enhance decentralization and increase the number of teams contributing to the DAO is making SpiritSwap’s front end public. By making the front-end public, we’ve opened the door to any team or individual who wants to contribute to SpiritSwap’s codebase. This integration will allow awesome teams like ORBS access to the Spirit DAO codebase, enabling virtually anyone the ability to contribute to the DAO.
Then there’s the Canto Chain expansion, which would allow SpiritSwap to go multichain and expand in order to find more revenue streams for the DAO and treasury to stay active. We will discuss this in the second part of our article because development will begin in 2023, so let’s get started!
SpiritSwap’s motto is “consistently building and improving,” and we feel the essence of this motto has been captured in this year’s deployments. SpiritSwap was present, whether it was by remaining active on social media, hosting events on Discord, incorporating partnerships into our protocol, or thinking of new ways to improve. The market conditions haven’t changed that much, and while we’d like to see the market improve, it won’t change our approach to 2023. Every day, we would strive to improve and build. And we have a big task ahead of us: expanding onto Canto!
We’ve already written an article about how the expansion will work, and there’s a transcript of the AMA with the UpperOctave team. So, if you want to read a more detailed analysis of that proposal and its potential outcomes, follow this link! To summarize, Canto is a new chain that SpiritSwap is expanding into! SpiritSwap would be present on Canto Chain in 2023 to find more revenue streams for the DAO, return value to inSPIRIT users (who will receive 50% of the lock-airdrop from the SOUL tokens), use Canto’s 25% gas rebate system, and contribute to an already exciting young chain. The development will begin in January 2023, and we will be kept up to date on our Discord server by the UpperOctave team. As a result, the process would be transparent, and our users’ inquiries would be addressed.
It is critical to understand that this is an expansion, not a migration. SpiritSwap on Fantom will continue to operate and the Fantom Opera will stay as our home base. It would be safe to assume that with the Canto expansion, we are attempting to restore value to our Fantom and inSPIRIT users. The new token that will be used in Canto, SOUL, will be lock-dropped to inSPIRIT holders at a 50% compensation rate, the highest of any party involved. We are steadfast in our belief that inSPIRIT holders are always our top priority, and that will not change in 2023. Those who have locked their SPIRIT, joined the DAO, and voted for the proposals will be prioritized, and because they have the right to vote, they will be able to make critical decisions in 2023.
The expansion onto Canto Chain would be a monumental step for SpiritSwap, allowing us to test a variety of ideas to see if they would be successful. We will try new partnerships and strategies, and we welcome all DAO members to join us on our journey through the Canto Chain.
Community engagement is important to us. Offering an experience like no other, on top of our core product is part of the vibe we like to set. As such, In 2023, you can also expect more fun Discord events like the Halloween and World Cup events we held in the last two months! Our users have clearly enjoyed our most recent event, and we intend to hold more events where our users can participate in giveaways, compete amongst themselves with their DeFi/SpiritSwap knowledge, and have fun! We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from users about how much fun those events are, so we’re going to keep doing them!
SpiritSwap will also continue publishing Medium articles, Weekly Digests, daily tweets, news from partners and much more! We place a high value on educating, informing, and engaging our community. With its strong community relationships, SpiritSwap has been a pioneer in the Fantom Opera chain, and we will continue to provide the best experience for our members in every social.
A lot of things became clear to us after the year 2022. We realised that in this very young DeFi industry, you must have a strong desire to be here or you will perish. We have seen that you must always be hungry and want to improve, or you will become stagnant. We’ve seen that having the best community is essential; otherwise, you’ll be forgotten. We’ve seen that you should concentrate on what you can control and build, or you’ll lose sight of everything else.
In 2023, we will do what we do best: improve and build more and more until there is enough (P.S.: It never will be.). Soully had a memorable year, and we are grateful to be on this journey with her. We hope to see you in 2023, stay safe, and have a happy new year!
