Aquarius Progress Update
Technical updates from behind the scenes and how they’ve fast-tracked the Aquarius project.
💫 Airdrop & 🛄 Claimable Balances
What a first few months we have had here at Aquarius, both in front and behind the scenes! If you’ve followed our progress, you’ll know AQUA has started to be distributed and are now in circulation on the open market.
To achieve this, we used our innovative airdrop campaign. Over 150,000 users have taken part — a phenomenal response from the Stellar community. At its core, the Initial Airdrop used a new operation on the network, claimable balances.
Using claimable balances for an airdrop was a network first, enabling us to expand our reach across the ecosystem. With their use, we sent payments to 272,980 wallets, allowing them to claim AQUA. So far, 918,332,136 ♒️ AQUA have been claimed and are held across more than 32,000 Stellar wallets.
To power this process, we built back & front end software which we are making open-source through our GitHub. Access is already available for the front end of the airdrop checker, with repositories on how to take a Stellar network snapshot & the distribution reward engine made available shortly.
Anyone thinking of creating airdrops on Stellar can use the Aquarius codebase to help kickstart these initiatives. As the project progresses, more valuable tools will be added to GitHub to be taken advantage of by the Stellar ecosystem.
The airdrop continues for another three months, with information for the even bigger second airdrop to be released very soon.
While we may have been quiet on social channels, it has been a very different story behind the scenes at Aquarius. The team has worked flat out, building core elements of the Aquarius protocol, with our prototype almost near completion.
💎 Aquarius & SDEX Rewards
There’s an impressive amount of progress to show, with many core elements to be delivered over the next few weeks. We built the Rewards Engine & Voting Tool, which combined enable our mission to increase liquidity on the Stellar DEX.
This combination activates the Aquarius Protocol, incentivizing market makers and liquidity providers, creating a decentralized liquidity management solution powered by the community. We need to ensure the Rewards Engine operates correctly, so we’ve started testing it already with liquidity rewards for SDEX market makers launching later this month.
In this MVP release, we will manually enable rewards for various market pairs across the network. We will publish the list of selected pairs before launch, so you know which pairs to contribute towards to receive rewards. Although this phase is experimental, we believe it will positively increase liquidity for the chosen pairs.
After a short test period, Aquarius will hand over the reins for choosing market pairs to the community. They will do this through the Voting Tool mentioned previously. Once activated, the manually selected test markets will be disabled, creating a blank slate for the community. From this point, it will be up to the community to decide where liquidity incentives are needed most.
🗳 The Voting Tool
The test phase will be short due to the progress we’ve already made with the Voting Tool. It allows voting directly on the Stellar network, creating an immutable, verifiable system for the AQUA community to use. Once initiated, users can interact with our user-friendly interface to vote for market pairs where they would like to improve liquidity and increase the chance of enabling AQUA rewards for these pairs.
We are pleased to inform we are at the final stages of completing our Voting platform. Here’s a sneak preview:
AQUA tokens are essential to allow a user to vote with Aquarius.
Any Stellar wallet application with WalletConnect enabled, like the recently announced integration with LOBSTR, can access this interface quickly. Once inside, users explore and allocate AQUA to SDEX market pairs they want to support while also choosing a vote period to lock their votes in for. After selecting and confirming, AQUA tokens are sent to Voting Wallets as claimable balances. The Aquarius Protocol then scans Voting Wallets daily to know which markets the community wants to reward.
Essentially this temporary stakes AQUA tokens, taking them out of circulation. During this process, users keep ownership of their tokens, with them available to be reclaimed once a voting period ends. Users who vote will receive an AQUA Voting Reward for participating, incentivizing holders to take part.
A technical article will be released soon, exploring the Voting Tool in-depth to explain how it works. We hope this allows projects to think about how they can integrate voting into their creations.
As soon as voting is enabled, we will combine the Rewards Engine & Voting Tool, creating v0.2 of the Aquarius Protocol.
This first actual instance will bring together decentralized community voting and the automatic rewards engine, with AQUA holders controlling how rewards function and the Aquarius Protocol adhering to community requests.
💱 Connecting AMMs + SDEX + Voting
Many already know that protocol 18 can be activated by validators early in November 2021, bringing Automatic Market Makers (AMMs) to the Stellar network. Many teams across the Stellar ecosystem took part in the fast-forwarding process, creating their interfaces ready to launch on day 1.
To further incentivize the use of AMM liquidity pools, the Aquarius Protocol will incorporate them into the voting process. We hope to achieve this implementation before the end of November.
Once done, rewards will be earned by:
- AQUA holders voting for SDEX market pairs & AMM liquidity pools
- A user providing liquidity to voted SDEX market pairs
- A user providing liquidity through voted AMM Liquidity Pools
These combined create earning opportunities for AQUA across the entire SDEX.
We may have been quiet, but our dedication to creating a working, thriving product for users has been at the front of our minds. Those with eagle eyes and a great memory may remember our roadmap, found on our website aqua.network.
Initially, we wanted to achieve these goals by the end of Q1 2022. Still, with the team’s hard work, we are excited to be bringing version v0.2 of the roadmap forward by an entire quarter!
🌐 Community Channels & Website Updates
As such, we will be updating our website over the next few weeks with our new roadmap, Voting Platform, and more up-to-date details of the project.
As we mentioned in our initial article — our end goal is to build a thriving, reliable and decentralized ecosystem around Aquarius and AQUA tokens. That’s why we need you, the community, to help us make important decisions to kickstart the decentralized nature of Aquarius. As the project grows, the need for social channels where the community and team can work together will increase, creating a truly diverse project.
You can now get involved with our beta Discord server, where together, we can build a thriving social space to make Aquarius even more productive. Also, the second Telegram channel — Aquarius Discussions, will be launched next week to enable everyone to discuss all things Aquarius.
✌ ️Thank you
We want to say a massive thank you to the community for coming with us on this journey of supporting liquidity across the SDEX.
Without you, this project and the Stellar network would not work as intended. There will be even more updates coming from us here at Aquarius and more exciting upgrades and use cases throughout the Stellar Ecosystem.
Let’s see where Stellar, Aquarius, and the rest of the ecosystem will take us.
Discover Aquarius & our social channels below.
- Website
- Airdrop #1 Checker
- Medium
- GitHub
- Discord
- Telegram — Aquarius news
- Telegram — Aquarius discussions (coming soon)
