SpiritSwap AMA transcript.
On April the 25th 2022, the @SpiritSwap team joined [@besyuzuncutaki1 [Usanko] for a long awaited AMA !
For those that wish to listen to the full recording, it is available here.
If you prefer reading, or need this audio transcribed into text for the sake of translation for non native speakers, one of our dedicated community members has prepared a transcribed summary of the subject matter and subsequent discussions. Credit to @JacksWiths for your transcription efforts.
The AMA:
1. Talk about yourselves
At the beginning, everyone was working on everything, then there were too many cooks in the kitchen. The team had to become more streamlined and efficient as such they ironed out dedicated roles to ensure they maximize their skill sets and everyone keeps to their lane.
@Deg3ntrades : Operation manager
Started as a mod and admin, and finally got a full-time job in the team. He is the only core team member who is not an original co-founder of SpiritSwap.
Day to day: Each day varies a lot, going from partnership talks / business development to weekly debriefs with the community management team.In between, keeping the flow of communication with the team to ensure that there are no gaps, community engagement, business development, bribe management, campaign briefs, treasury management, organizing internal team meetings, production testing … The team and community consider him as the oil in the @SpiritSwap machine.
DEVIN: Co-founder Marketing manager, one of the 5 core co-founders on april 24 2021
Day to day: Dabbling in different pieces of the marketing, focusing on HR (hiring) and twitter management. Now I have more time to think about how @SpiritSwap wants to market things, working on teaser videos and future marketing. Added a new scope with the educational content. Looking for new skills in devs, mods, UX designers, graphic designers. Following up what’s on the discord to be sure @SpiritSwap moves in the right direction. Lots of negotiation around pay and hiring to relieve the weight from other guys.
@neir_rob: Co-founder / acting Project Manager
Day to day : Mostly PM stuff. When someone is blocked on something, connect people to find a solution. When waking up, going through DM’s and making sure to respond to the crucial ones, Monitoring the developer channels making sure things are answered and tasks worked on. Trying to figure out how much each dev can take on (even if always pushing too much). Looking for new features that may be implemented, now focusing on V2 ones. Prioritizing what has to be done, while learning how to master #Jira.
@_Heesh: Co-founder / Director of DeFi
Day to day: Key focus on DeFi research and strategy along with partnership talks. Currently has tunnel vision, testing Solidly contracts for SpiritSwap V2 as SpiritSwap aims to improve on a lot of these broken mechanics. Making the way through audit test cases to ensure double coverage on new V2 contracts. Always too lowkey and humble. Became a solidity developer before anyone could see it coming.
@acrylicfiddle: Co-founder / CTO
Day to day : Handling the high level technical topics, managing the tasks with the devs, bring partnerships for the team, finding new contracts, in general oversees all high level technical implementation of SpiritSwap development
Comment from team:
We have been degens hiding away in our coding cave plugging away at V2, we are so sorry for being aloof recently over the last few months however V2 development has consumed us, so we really appreciate being here and clearing our schedule so we can have more time with you!
2. What have you planned for the anniversary ?
Originally we had other plans than releasing an fNFT for the anniversary, we initially tried to delay this for after V2(.5) But we have seen a lot of questions and requests from the community for this functionality, so we decided lets give the people what they want!
Launching fNFT first (before new applications) we realized is actually a good thing because it’ll complement some of the upcoming V2 mechanisms.
This is also a great option to give to users in addition to the seven existing wrappers, We just want to give people as much choice as possible. The fNFT now allows people to sell their position by going on @paint_swap.
We want to extend our gratitude and thank @RevestFinance and @NFTGarage__ for their hard work ! We have to do an AMA with them.
3. How would you describe @SpiritSwap ?
SpiritSwap is more than just a DEX, its a DeFi HUB, Our unique selling point stems from the fact that we have taken the best bits of defi and curated these products and functions into a mega hub of all things DeFi.By combining core defi solutions such as Yield Farming, Liquidity provision, Lending and Borrowing, Swaps functionality , Cross chain bridging, veTokennomics, Protocol rewards, Leverage Trading, Limit orders and combining them into one mega hub whilst building an incentive driven ecosystem around these products, is what I believe makes SpiritSwap a catalyst to be the number 1 DEX not just on fantom, but DeFi as a whole.
In terms of where I see us as in 6 months, I would like a greater level of decentralization and more participation from winSPIRIT protocols and community. If you look at our GitBook, after V2.5 full OCG (on chain governance) will be a focus for us. This will enable ANYONE to code changes or upgrades for the SpiritSwap DAO to consider, propose these changes to the community while submitting a pull request to the contract, then, if this is approved by the community, the upgrade is automatically adopted by virtue of smart contract execution.
We consider what we are building is the next iteration of @solidlyexchange. Andre released really good ideas, but some contracts were very busy, so we based our V2 development around improving these models. We revamped our fee structure, and took into account incentivizing protocols to bring liquidity to @SpiritSwap and have users use the products. It will benefit the whole ecosystem.
4. Market conditions are very different now than when spiritswap was first launched and a lot of AMMs are having a rough time. What new trends in investor behavior have you recognized lately and how has it influenced the additional capabilities you’re working into the product?
This is a good question as it touches on what we have been trying to address in our V2 updates. Defi by nature is inherently fickle and fast moving. One of the frustrations we have seen in developing V2, is that this space moves so quickly that when you finally finish developing a product or support mechanism, by the time you finish developing it, its defunct or irrelevant. This makes staying ahead of the curve so to speak, very difficult. Three major trends I have personally noticed with the evolution of the market is as follows
1. Lack of funding / limited strategies for protocols to build their treasury and accumulate POL
2. Resistance towards the ve locking model (as users have identified how fast moving DeFi is and want liquid assets)
3. With the introduction various pool types across new and emerging AMM’s there is hesitancy to participate in the classic X*y=K model or 50/50 LP models.
Without spilling the beans, V2 addresses these behaviors in response to market conditions.
Its a “chicken and egg” situation. I will speak metaphorically here, as I like metaphors. Right now we need a solid foundation (V2), in order to build a solid house (2.1 upgrades). Once the foundations are in place and battle tested, we will then be in a far better position to quickly and effectively build this type of added functionality that the community appears to want. Once V2 is established, requests for this kind of added functionality will then be possible.
Devin commented: That you can’t focus on the trends, but have to follow a long term vision to stay grounded and to not get distracted by the details. Too many things are happening in this space, you have to put those aside. Focusing on that longer term goal will also give you kind of a cloak so competitors don’t really know what you’re working on, which is an advantage.
Better be the trend than follow it.
5. What’s next step in v2 development
We have made awesome advances on the contracts, in the last two weeks we have been working to have a 100% test coverage on every scenario that we can think of. We still have some changes to make, but not big ones, so it shouldn’t be more than a week or two before we can engage the audit phase. Then we will start integrating those new contracts in the UI (for which there are like 200 items on the checklist). Then, we should be ready for the alpha version, on which we will need a lot of testing. Although, we are not risking our neck on a date. But soon.
Once we’ve tested internally, we’ll open the beta to the community to keep testing. There is a plan in motion to engage the community. Right now we use #Jira for tasks and bug tracking. We will probably create a google form with questions like “what is the bug ?”, “Give some details”, … so beta testers can report bugs with their discord handle. It will then be posted on a google sheet to make a live tracker so everyone can see what has been reported and how many they have reported. Best bug hunters will be incentivized. It will allow us to find as many bugs as possible to streamline them internally while engaging our community in this effort at the same time, kind of a cool way to incentivize the process.
6. How will v2 be unique and compete versus other dexes ?
We have done a lot of research, analysis and internal surveys among the DeFi community. We looked at what other protocols are doing right in order to get inspiration and identify what is missing on @SpiritSwap, but mostly tried to identify gaps in the market on which we could capitalize. We also looked at what was actually working on @SpiritSwap ecosystem and even more so what is not working, so we can offer solutions and improvements in this respect.
V2 aims to solve a lot of issues, not only in the @SpiritSwap ecosystem, but also across the entire DeFi landscape. To make the best deFi hub, we had to make sure that all these intended additions would not only be useful, but also complement other mechanics we are building into V2. We aim to establish a robust foundation to pave the way for future development. This will obviously address pricing & catch more and more aggregator traffic to generate more fees. Our drive is to make the InSPIRIT ecosystem as attractive as possible.
There is also a lot of marketing material & educational content around V2 to ensure the community are well aware of the benefits our update delivers, This will drive a cannon shot of content across the ecosystem.
A big aspect of V2 is also a very new mechanism that we have not seen in DeFi yet that encourages protocols to bring their liquidity to @SpiritSwap. This is one of the benefits added on top of the @solidlyexchange model. This is one of the biggest mysteries behind V2, Heesh spent a lot of time working on this model so it complements everything else and establishes positive feedback loops for the greater benefit of the ecosystem.
7. Tell us more about the V2 bribe system
Nick and Sid spent way too much time managing the bribes so far. It will now be all trustless and integrated in the @SpiritSwap platform, so anyone can come in and make a bribe. As of today, protocols can already bribe, but they don’t directly benefit from it, other than seeing their liquidity go up. We want to change that so they financially benefit from it. This will ensure that it will be lucrative for both the community and other ecosystem protocols. If we want the bribes to continue, we need the protocols to find profitability in them. At the same time, it should lead to people being more involved in the governance.
8. winSPIRIT and wrappers, their pegs are suffering, any love for them ?
Some protocols have accumulated inSPIRIT and offer bribe power with their wrappers, but there is a big concern going with the PEG, as a lot of them are under 50%. [see DefiWars ; @defiwars_ ].
In V2, there will be mechanisms in place to help protocols maintain PEG. We don’t see PEG maintenance as our responsibility but the protocols who launch it, as it benefits them directly. However we want to support these winSPIRIT protocols as much as possible so see merit in implementing the ability to assist in this respect. We also feel these winSPIRIT protocols should be taking on some of this responsibility by implementing mechanics and economics to assist, like the swap to mint function used by @beefyfinance’s $binSPIRIT. Allowing unlimited minting when below PEG isn’t a good thing, @beefyfinance did a good job mitigating this.
There will be gauges for wrapped inSPIRIT protocols moving forward. All the wrappers will be included and have boosted farms, however people won’t be able to vote on these,rather a balanced approach to emissions will take place to ensure fairness and equality among these protocols.
9. The roadmap ahead & partnerships, Anything exciting to share ?
Our focus was on V2 obviously, in order to build a strong foundation.
As partnerships, we have @AlchemixFi coming to #FTM that will bring some liquidity. We also have one lined up with @stader_ftm. If their launch is successful, $sFTMx could replace $FTM as the main liquidity on the network by bringing more security, adding value and increased capital efficiency. Heesh just had a very good meeting, if that pans out, it could potentially solve.. “STOP THERE ! STOP THERE !!” (B_…_e ?) ~ Degen almost spilled some alpha.
We have just launched our fNFT thanks to our partnership with @RevestFinance, we intend to add more functionality for this with the V2. It will have voting power, receive bribes,offer a boost on farms and facilitate the ability to participate in governance snapshots. This will strengthen our partnership with @RevestFinance and @NFTGarage__ .
10. How to prevent partnering with bad actors ?
[@besyuzuncutaki1 has been beating himself up after doing an AMA with a protocol that embezzled money (AtlasCloud ). Was a big hit for him as he feels responsible.
This is an interesting question and yes, whenever we partner or interview a protocol, part of our due diligence process is to try and identify who the team are, dox in some way shape or form.
This is what surprised me about the Atlas situation, not only did we speak the the team on several occasions, but they genuinely seemed like nice people with good intentions, all of them are doxxed, there are several AMA’s out there with their faces on camera. There was nothing in their code to suggest a “rug” by common understanding would eventuate, what happened in this case was embezzlement and I feel it’s important to differentiate between the two.
While judge of character plays a part in this scenario, had people been closely watching where protocol fees were moving, embezzlement would be an easy thing to spot (which is what eventually happened here) at which point when the team’s actions were discovered, they chose to capitulate leaving the protocol to die. Foreseeing such events is not something that can be identified by simply looking at code e.g assessing if a pertinent contract has been renounced by the team. Its an unfortunate situation, but a common occurrence in defi at the moment.
We will always do our best to mitigate the risk of our community being exposed to such activities, as they not only hurt our users but our ecosystem also, however this is where an active community is important, we can’t have eyes everywhere so we rely on the DeFi community as a collective to also keep their fingers on the pulse, and sound the alarm if they ever suspect anything is amiss.
11. Wrap-up
More to come, the team intends to hold regular weekly catch ups with the community after their V2 work is complete and they have a bit of breathing room!
We will try to do a weekly AMA, most likely Thursday afternoons (PST), where anyone could jump into the voice channel with the team.
Thanks to everyone, we’re looking forward to engaging more with you all in the near future. It has been a blessing to reconnect with you all! Thanks for sticking with us and being so patient. .
[And a big thank you to @besyuzuncutaki1 for greatly leading the talks for almost 90 minutes !!]
If you want to watch the AMA in its entirety you can tune in via the following link:
Follow SpiritSwap on Medium and other channels to keep up to date with the latest news!
Medium: spiritswap.medium.com
Discord: discord.gg/spiritswap
Twitter: twitter.com/Spirit_Swap
Telegram channel: t.me/Spirit_Swap
Telegram group: t.me/SpiritSwap
Merch: spiritswap.store
