Magpie Discord AMA Recap
Hello to the Magpie community! Welcome to our AMA recap. If you missed out on the Discord AMA we held last week, or wanted a recap to share, we’ve got your beak, er, back! Here, we will paraphrase the conversation for the sake of length, covering the big questions and answers that we prepared to update the community on what’s going on with Magpie, as well as all of the questions from the community!
What is Magpie?
Magpie is a liquidity aggregator and we allow users to execute any asset to any asset swaps across all of the chains we support. We allow people to swap assets from one chain to the other in a one-click swap experience with near instant finality with the idea of simplifying movement of assets from one chain to the other. That’s what Magpie is all about, simplifying movement of assets, trading, borrowing, lending, and doing everything DeFi and this multi-chain DeFi world that we now live in needs.
How important do you think UX is in crypto?
I think with any disruptive technology in the nascent stages, early adopters are users that are willing to overlook UX related limitations, viewing it as a trade-off to unlock the underlying value of the technology. Let’s take Web2 as an example — before, we had Google or Yahoo as popular search engines that existed as website directories and indexes, which sorted web sources by topic. In fact, the earliest web search engines were essentially directories of websites curated by people.
It was not user friendly to access information and as you’d expect, the usage was on the lower end. But with a search engine like Google or Yahoo, and more particularly the power of its algorithm, things improve drastically for end consumers. That’s just an example of how improved accessibility can drive growth and interest, especially if the underlying tech is powerful.
I think we all can agree it’s true as far as blockchain and crypto is concerned as well. Improved usability of DeFi native products is essential to drive adoption and retention of users. The exciting thing about where we’re at right now as an industry is that we’re entering that phase, where teams and builders across the board are striving to improve overall UX to help drive this adoption and retention of users. We’ve seen the theme of interoperability, about onboarding next billion users, but in the past, it’s been less practical to actually be able to do that because there were key pieces of infrastructure that were missing.
But we’re at a stage now where we can actually have a Web2-esque experience within Web3. You can have that security, and the sort of experience of almost like using a website or using a centralized exchange, but you’re still actually using a decentralized exchange. At Magpie, we’re driven by the same mission, and to that end, we’re building both infrastructure and consumer products to help improve overall usability of this rapidly growing multi-chain DeFi ecosystem. To reiterate, as a liquidity aggregator, we’re able to provide users with the ability to seamlessly swap any assets to any assets across anything. Now that’s the core functionality, what that actually enables you to do in terms of tertiary functions is that you can have a one-click staking experience.
You might have your favorite newly launched token on Base chain, or Arbitrum, or another chain, and they have a staking contract available. You can actually be on Ethereum and still stake this coin that just launched on Base in a single click. While cross-chain swaps are the key function as a core offering that we provide that actually enables you to lend, protect your lending positions, allows you to stake, and allows you to chase different yields. We think, as a whole, that that’s a valuable offering where you want a cohesive experience for users, especially when you have so many different Layer 2s coming out. I think as far as UX, I feel like for blockchain and for the crypto industry as a whole, it’s just one of the key things. Having better accessibility is really going to be the defining thing that makes a difference between driving a lot of adoption or a protocol or a project being left in the dust. So we take that seriously and that’s why we focused a lot and we will continue to focus on improving the overall experience for users.
What are the new updates and features in Magpie?
We’ve added Base as a new chain and we will be adding several new chains every few weeks or so. Base is one of the new chains that we’ve added that had been requested by the community for a while.
In terms of the UX changes, we’ve added a new sidebar which features a wallet section, so now you will be able to see multi-chain balances at a glance where before users have to change their network, see how much they have on BNB, or how much money or what kind of assets they have on Avalanche. Now you can actually visualize all of that in a single sidebar page where you can see multi-chain balances, so you can see how much money you have on Arbitrum, on ETH, on Avalanche, or whichever chain that we support. More than that, you can also have the ability to easily buy or sell these assets if you choose to, with a ‘Buy’ and Sell’ button when hovering over the asset.
Beyond that, we have a history section where you can see all of your past trades, pending transactions, incomplete transactions, and transactions that were completed. So anytime you interact with Magpie, you’ll be able to see all of your past transactions and any pending transactions.
We also have a My NFT section. This is more related to our NFT collection called the Magpie Mafia, which is our loyalty program. Anytime the user’s trade on Magpie, they earn XP, and this XP gets added to that Magpie Mafia XP, and the more XP you have, your NFT evolves, and there’s more incentives and rewards that you earn over time. Users will be able to see that and even be able to claim the NFT if they haven’t already.
There is a referral section that is not live yet, but users will be able to refer other users to the platform, and again, earn certain incentives through the people that they onboard onto the app.
Beyond that, we have improved notifications, so now whenever you initiate a trade, you will be able to see what’s going on easily. You will actually be able to see your pending transactions, ongoing transactions, and if any action is needed, right on the landing page of the application. We think that’s a cool feature. Again, one of the things users had requested.
A lot of the features that we have are really based on the feedback that we received over the last few months and we’ve tried our best to incorporate them so we can cater to the communities needs.
Finally, there’s new liquidity sources. We’ve added more than 90 additional liquidity sources, so now Magpie aggregates over $35 billion of liquidity. We’re doing the best that we can to give you the best price as possible across all of DeFi.
Finally, this is more related to developers and businesses. We’ve finally launched our Swagger interface, which is basically an interface for businesses and developers to integrate our API. Now Magpie will be available to other meta aggregators and other protocols that need to have this one click swap experience across all the different chains.
That’s all of the features and functions we’ve incorporated in a nutshell. I am probably biased, but I love what we’ve done with the app and I would love for you guys to take a look and see what you think.
Community Questions
Ali took the time to answer community questions from the Discord and we’ve highlighted some of them below for everyone to check out!
Aditya: Do you guys have plans to add refuel in the dApp? Also, is it going to be possible to do multi-token swaps?
Ali: That’s an amazing question, I’ve obsessed over providing a gas or gasless transactions and providing multi-token swap.
So one token to multiple tokens or multiple tokens to a single token. That’s something, for me, something that has excited me. We’ve deferred adding this feature so long because it’s not a feature that most people request, but as a power DeFi user, I see the value in it. So the simple answer is yes, there will be the ability for people to add gas to any chain. Let’s say, for context, people who don’t understand what we’re talking about, if you are moving to a new chain, let’s say Base and you have no access on Base, but you need something for gas, there is a function called refuel or a destination gas function where, within the app, you can receive the gas token, so you can execute any transaction that you would like on a new chain, which you’ve never used before. We intend to have this feature so that if you move to any new chain that we support, EVM or non-EVM, you will have the native gas token available so you can execute further transactions on that particular chain. We will have that, and there will be multi-token swaps in a single transaction as well. In fact, we’ve been working on something that leverages account abstraction, and so there’s a lot more than just that that we’ll be able to do, and we most certainly will be adding some of these features in the near future.
Hey guys, I see my good progress in the dApp over the last year. When do we expect the IPO and where we can learn more about flight token utility and its role?
So FLY token utility, the way that we’ve structured it, there is a token economic model and document that we have prepared so far that is not publicly available just yet, but just to give you an idea of the utility and how it works, we focus on creating a circular economy where the value that the protocol accrues is driven back to the token holders. The key thing for us as far as the token economics work for the FLY token, which will eventually go live, is that the token will accrue the entire value of the protocol directly. We think that’s the optimal way to go. We have taken a GMX inspired approach. When will this document be available? I would expect probably in the next few months. That’s the best that I can tell you in terms of when, because there’s just a lot more logistics for us to take care of.
What do you think you did well over the last year and where do you think you could have done better? Also, do you think there are some areas where you over-performed and under-performed?
Over the last year, I think one of the key things that we’ve done well that I’m pretty proud of is surrounding ourselves with extremely talented people. We’ve got an excellent roster of people who are really good at their job.
I’m good at certain things, but you wouldn’t want me to be developing things and you wouldn’t want Ikram to do marketing or other things. We’ve surrounded ourselves with very talented people who believe in the mission, who believe in what we’re doing and who believe that we’re on the right path to achieve some great things, that is one of the key things that I would say that we’ve done well. Beyond that, we’ve built an extremely sophisticated and stable infrastructure that we’re extremely proud of.
The capabilities of that will actually be more apparent over the next few months to one year. It’s been a slow process because the technical design decisions that we’ve taken were more designed towards how we think the space will play out, and we’re happy with the choices that we’ve made.
In terms of what we could have done better, to be honest, that’s a very difficult question to answer because there’s so many things that you could always do better.
Good is just never good enough, so it’s a question that’s almost impossible to answer.
Are you planning to get the contract audited and do you have any plans to put the platform back on ImmuneFi?
Yes, sir. The contract has been audited.
Many auditors and I believe that getting a code audit report is not enough. Most of the biggest DeFi hacks that you’ve seen over the last three to four years were audited by tier one auditing firms, and still, they got hacked.
We value the security of our users and the security of our protocol and to that end, we run bug bounties on ImmuneFi and we intend to run bug bounties on other platforms. We plan on putting Magpie back on ImmuneFi and other bug bounty platforms. Issues get reported, we fix them, and then we move forward.
Does Magpie plan on partnering with any on-boarding companies to make it easier to get into DeFi? The ability to pay directly from a debit or credit card to add funds to your wallet?
Most certainly. At the end of the day, for us, we’re adding features based on what we think are the highest value features for users, so adding new changes is certainly a priority, adding new liquidity sources so that we can improve the pricing is a priority. Beyond that, offering insurance over assets that you swap across different chains is important so that people have that sort of sense of security that when they’re trading tens of thousands of dollars that these are not subject to any sort of an exploit or a hack. The ability to buy assets in fiat, be it credit cards or debit cards is something that we’re most certainly interested in and people can expect that that will be available. We will do anything that we can to improve the overall usability of the app so that Magpie can be your go-to destination to trade, buy assets, or to swap them.
To take that a step further, you can even expect something like perps for people to trade because that’s something that people are interested in.
We want to make sure that we can offer any feature and function that users need in order for Magpie to be the place to go for them to access multi-chain DeFi.
Closing Thoughts
We’re really excited about the next couple of months. We’re happy with the update that we pushed out but we will always rely on your feedback. You find issues, let us know. If you have feature requests, let us know. We’ll prioritize them and we’ll make sure that you have what you desire from the app. There’s a lot of new changes that are coming up. There’s a lot of new functions and features that we’re working on as well. I think I speak for the rest of the Magpie team as well, that we’re really excited about the things that we’ve been working on and the things that are yet to be released. Thanks again for joining in. 🙏
I’m excited to speak to you guys again next month. We’ll be back with some more updates and I hope that you guys can participate in the campaigns that we have lined up for you guys. Thanks again for joining in and let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or feedback. That’s what we’re here for. 🐦
