On the crest of Waves / Monthly digest / February 2021
By: Waves Tech
Tags: Digest, Neutrino Protocol, Wavesplatform, February, Swopfi

Hi Waves community,

We are excited to introduce the February issue of our monthly digest, from which you’ll learn about the Waves ecosystem’s major news and updates.

In this issue, we’ll pay special attention to DeFi. Five years ago, when Waves was created, it was hard to predict in what directions the blockchain industry would go. Decentralized finance (DeFi), as we know it today, was still in formative stages, and many DeFi tools were not yet even invented, let alone widely used.

However, Wave’s approach towards developing its blockchain has always been focused on high throughput and low fees. And now, as DeFi apps are super-hot, these advantages of the Waves protocol have come in extremely handy.

Based on the Waves blockchain with its low fees and high transaction speed, the ecosystem’s DeFi products and projects are enjoying an inflow of new users, while other chains, including Ethereum, are hitting a road bump due to enormous fees and throughput issues. Due to its gateways to Ethereum and BSC, Waves is offering a scalable solution for users of other blockchains, as well!

In addition, the Waves blockchain offers a very high security level: so far, not a single DeFi application in the Waves ecosystem has been hacked.

Below, you’ll read about recent successes of the Neutrino stablecoin protocol and Swop.fi, one of the youngest projects in the Waves ecosystem, which, however, is quickly gaining traction in the DeFi space.

At Waves Tech, we truly believe that DeFi apps are set to boost mass adoption of blockchain solutions and we are doing everything possible to make open finance attractive for regular users on a day-to-day basis.

And now — to the latest news and updates!

Pushing the boundaries

Staying true to its mission of building innovative blockchain solutions for mass users, Waves Tech is working hard on updating and developing its blockchain protocol. That, coupled with growing interest in the ecosystem’s various projects and products, has resulted in a steady increase in the value of our native token, WAVES.

In late February, we reached another major milestone, as WAVES’ market capitalization for the first time hit the $1 billion mark on CointMarketCap.

Meanwhile, as part of our integration with Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network that provides reliable, tamper-proof inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain, WAVES performance metrics are now available on Chainlink Market.

Set to conquer the world

The Neutrino stablecoin protocol has lately been expanding operations on a global scale.

In a bid to attract users to Neutrino and its tokens, several top international crypto exchanges recently announced airdrops of Neutrino Token (NSBT), the protocol’s governance token, to their users.

A total of 5,000 NSBT will be allocated for distribution and available to be claimed by OKEx users. The same amount of NSBT will be available to be claimed by Bithumb Korea users. Meanwhile, users of Huobi Global have already collected 5,000 ERC-20-standard NSBT.

As users across the globe are learning about the advantages of NSBT, which, by the way, has considerably grown in value over the last few weeks, a USDN/WETH pair has been launched on the popular service SushiSwap.

Meanwhile, Crypto.com, one of the world’s fastest growing crypto exchanges, recently added a USDC/WAVES trading pair.

New staking options have arrived on Waves.Exchange, enabling users to stake their BTC, ETH, UCDC and USDT, earning an APY of up to 48%.

At this point, it is quite clear that the future of the DeFi segment is in interoperability. As soon as DeFi apps can be operable on any chain, as opposed to those on which they were built, the DeFi space’s attractiveness to regular users will grow, as they will be able to avoid exorbitant fees and other issues that some blockchains are currently facing.

In the Waves ecosystem, the Gravity protocol is in charge of interoperability solutions. Recently, it announced plans for the first half of 2021.

The main highlights are:

Integration with the Avalanche Blockchain

The integration process of Gravity and Avalanche, an open-source platform for launching highly decentralized applications, will involve several stages. At the initial stage, a wrapped version of AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, will be released on Waves and, subsequently, Avalanche-based versions of WAVES, USDN and NSBT will be launched.

ERC-20 gateways in the Waves blockchain

Based on research data and the existing codebase of Binance Smart Chain, full-fledged mainnet ERC-20 SuSy gateways to Ethereum will be launched.

Integration between Gravity and Polkadot

The primary aim of integration with Polkadot, an open-source sharding multichain protocol that facilitates data and asset cross-chain transfer, is to develop and deploy gateways between Polkadot and Ethereum into Waves/Ethereum for DOT as wrapped tokens.

Other plans include an NSBT ERC-20 gateway that will be able to stake locked NSBT and accrue rewards in WAVES and USDN tokens and a delegation gateway that enables signing transactions in Waves from an Ethereum account, as well as possible integration with Fantom and Optimistic Rollups.

In focus: Swop.fi

Launched just a few months ago, Swop.fi, an automatic market maker (AMM), is one of the most recent additions to the Waves ecosystem. However, the project has already emerged as a major player in the global DeFi space.

Swop.fi operates on the Waves protocol, which, thanks to its high throughput, offers low fees of 0.005 WAVES (roughly $0.05). The average speed of a transaction’s adding to the Waves blockchain is just 3–5 seconds. Low fees and high speed are the major components of user experience on Swop.fi, making the service more attractive than the competitors. For instance, sending a transaction on Ethereum could cost $30 and up and take a few minutes.

In early February, Swop.fi launched its governance token, SWOP, which is distributed as rewards to liquidity providers and, going forward, will allow users to vote on key protocol parameters.

1 million SWOP tokens has been reserved to be gradually released to early-bird liquidity providers on Swop.fi, while another 1 million will be distributed during the first year of operation as a farming reward.

SWOP is quickly attracting attention, as it has been listed by Coinranking, and Tidex added the USDN-SWOP pair.

One of Swop.fi’s main features are its lucrative liquidity pools. Most recently, several new pools were launched:

Swop.fi liquidity pools offer an annual percentage yield (APY) of up to 100% and sometimes more. Why is that possible? A detailed answer to this question can be found in this article. But, to explain it quickly, the income of a user who provides liquidity to one of Swop.fi pools consists of several elements, such as:

Farming rewards in SWOP tokens

LP rewards made up by 60% of accumulated swap fees, which stay in the pool to be distributed among liquidity providers, based on pool weights and users’ share in a specific pool.

Staking rewards for Neutrino assets, as most of USDN, EURN and other stablecoins issued on the Neturino protocol, are automatically staked, offering Swop.fi liquidity providers extra earnings.

The combination of the above rewards results in an attractive APY.

Swop.fi is already gaining universal appreciation, as Dapp Radar recently put the service on its list of the best DeFi apps outside the Ethereum ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Swop.fi is a totally global service, and its team is working hard on spreading the word about it across the world. In February, 10 AMM sessions on Swop.fi were held in various countries, explaining how the project operates, why it is lucrative and how to make the most of it. Answers to the most interesting and insightful questions are gathered here.

Moving forward, Swop.fi has ambitious plans for the coming months and throughout 2021.

One is custom pools, or an opportunity to launch your own pools. This will be the easiest way to make a market for your token, as there will be no hassle of creating orders on the exchange, and no special skills will be required. With just a couple of clicks, you will be able to add, for instance, pools of your token in a pair with popular cryptocurrencies, such as WAVES, USDN or BTC. All you need is to have tokens to deposit. Once created, the pools will work by themselves.

Another major goal is the Swop.fi API. Once the basic Swop.fi functionality is ready, an API will be deployed, providing data for our markets, such as liquidity, volumes, prices, etc. This data can be used in various ways, including the representation of our project on DappRadar, CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko.

Arguably, the highest point of Swop.fi’s plan for 2021 is offering users access to inter-chain liquidity. They’ll be able to add and remove liquidity directly from accounts on other blockchains. Interaction between a user’s account and the Swop.fi smart contract will be done via gateways based on the Gravity inter-chain communication protocol. This feature will turn Swop.fi into a full-fledged global service with mainstream appeal.

Spreading the word across the globe

We keep paying special attention to informing and educating users about DeFi opportunities in the Waves ecosystem.

Since yield farming is a very hot topic these days, introducing many new users to DeFi and offering more earning options, we devoted a livestream to it. We discussed all aspects of yield framing and the best ways to earn using this lucrative DeFi tool.

In addition, we compiled a comparative table for yield farming apps offered by most popular DeFi services — Curve, Swop.fi, Sushi and Pancake. Based on data from the table, users could decide for themselves, which yield farming app better suits their needs.

As Swop.fi constantly expands its operations, adding new liquidity pools, several explanatory videos have been published, guiding users through the new USDT/USDN and USDC/USDN pools.

Since the popularity of the WAVES tokens of the Ethereum network’s standard, ERC-20, is growing thanks to its attractive staking opportunities, we published a step-by-step guide on ERC-20 WAVES staking.

Further spreading the word about the advantages of the Waves ecosystem’s products and services, our speakers were recently featured on Cointelegraph and Cointelegraph China.

Still, regardless of how hard we are working, we never forget about fun stuff! Check out the best gifs from our St Valentine’s Day contest.

That’s it for now. We’ll be back with more Waves ecosystem news and updates next month. Stay tuned!