Dec 21, 2020

6 min read

DXdao: A Month in Review | November — December 2020

Swapr

Swapr Alpha is now live! REP holders passed a proposal on December 19, which resolved Swapr.eth to the content hash of the alpha release of the Swapr dApp and officially launched Swapr, a governance-enabled automated market maker (AMM) that features liquidity pools with adjustable fees.

This is a huge step forward for DXdao as Swapr is the first product where DXdao governs the underlying smart contracts. In fact, Swapr is the first DeFi protocol to be launched by a DAO. Just as DXdao pioneered decentralized product governance through its ENS resolver proposal process, DXdao is also leading the way in DAO ops at the smart contract level. John K has a great DAOtalk post on this, “How DAOs Deploy” and also wrote another post about issues encountered in the Swapr deployment process.

Swapr Alpha is only the first step of the Swapr rollout. Swapr Beta (coming in January) will feature liquidity from the DXdao treasury and a targeted liquidity mining campaign, while Swapr v1.0 (mid Q1) will have full governance capabilities for LPs.

Even before the proposal passed, Swapr was already seeing activity. Over the past 7 days, there was $140k of volume on Swapr and there is already $275k of liquidity deposited across 12 trade pairs. These stats and all Swapr analytics will soon be available on DXstats.eth as long as this proposal passes. Here’s a sneak peek:

Most exciting for DXD holders, Swapr’s protocol fee (1/10th of swap fee) will provide consistent revenue in the form of Swapr LP tokens, which can be converted to ETH and sent to the bonding curve. Fees are already accumulating. Check out the Fee Receiver contract to track Swapr’s on-chain revenue.

Other things in Swapr land:

Omen

Omen’s most widely traded market — Will Joe Biden win the 2020 United States Presidential election? — closed on December 20 and is now being resolved. It should be an interesting test for Omen and the decentralized partners it relies on for crowdsourcing truth (Reality.ETH) and arbitration (Kleros).

The answer “Yes” has been staked with 42 ETH on Reality.ETH. To contest this and apply for arbitration an address needs to stake 41 ETH and then it would be up to Kleros jurors to determine the market’s outcome. There is a movement to crowdfund the 41 ETH needed for arbitration.

Recent popular markets on Omen include:

Will Ethereum 2.0’s Genesis event occur on Dec 1, 2020 [Outcome: YES]
Who will win the chess match between @VitalikButerin and @alexandravbotez [Outcome: @alexandravbotez]

There are also some interesting governance experiments using Omen through the newly launched Gnosis Impact app. It uses Omen markets to predict how the governance proposal will affect a token’s price. There is one to determine how the price of UNI would do if Uniswap restarted its liquidity mining program and someone created one for DXD on an upcoming proposal.

Mesa

Over the last 30 days, Mesa saw $42m in total volume — its best month ever. Much of this was from the API3 IDO, which raised $23m distributing 20m tokens. There were some issues with the first batch of orders, although no funds were ever at risk. Read Gnosis’s post mortem on the incident.

The community is discussing Mesa’s positioning going forward, with Martin Krung leading the product development efforts. Although it was conceived as a general decentralized exchange, Mesa has found a product-market-fit around new token offerings or IDOs, and the community is deciding whether Mesa’s mindset is an IDO or DEX?

The discussion has sparked further exploration with Gnosis on creating an IDO-specific version of Mesa (EasyAuction). Community member Federico is already exploring how to build on the idea and create a new version with sealed bid auctions for initial offerings.

For more, check out the Mesa Roadmap, the latest stats on Dune and this article on “How Mesa Works” from API3’s Sasa Milic.

Rails

Rails released v1.1 this month, which adds several features on wallet integrations (see more on Status Partnership below), better meta tagging and social media sharing and now automatically redirecting to HTTPs.

There have also been exciting developments on Loopring, which released a v3.6 of its zkrollup protocol last month. This new version can run AMMs and Loopring has announced one of the first Layer 2 AMM Liquidity Mining campaigns.

The community is exploring how Rails can take advantage of these developments and grow with the underlying Loopring protocol. One of the most promising ideas is to trade wrapped Omen outcome tokens gasless on Rails.

Governance

DXdao governance is as active as ever. While most efforts are focused on day-to-day approval of worker proposals and product updates, the community is researching major changes to the DXdao governance system. In November, REP holders approved the creation of a “Governance 2.0 Working Group” aimed at aligning the long-term interests of REP and DXD holders.

So far there have been four meetings that have identified the shortcomings in the current system, discerned the primitives and minimum requirements for a new system, and now are exploring technical solutions. For more information, check out the Gov 2.0 Midway Check-in forum post and a spreadsheet comparing the solutions presented at the last meeting, along with videos (Part 1 and Part 2)

The community is also discussing voter engagement, thanks to a forum post, Decentralizing DXdao’s Voting Power about which REP holders are voting on proposals. How can proposals be crafted to engage the large swath of REP holders not following the daily minutiae of governance?

Selected Governance Proposals over last month

Funding for Omen Squad 0.1 (33 ETH) — forum thread and vote [completed Nov 25] — result 3.01% FOR and 0.00% AGAINST
Burn 0.5% of Pre-Minted DXD — forum thread and vote [completed Dec 3] — result 2.76% FOR & 13.00% AGAINST
Immediately halt the bonding curve — forum thread and vote [ongoing] currently 8.62% FOR and 4.36% AGAINST — also check out DXgov[2020–12–16] video of community’s discussion.

Other Governance items:

DXdao Onboarding Refresh/Update (Keenan)
DXdao Governance Refunds Round #2
Breakdown of DXdao ETH & REP expenses from August — November
Agenda & notes for DXdao governance discussion on Nov25, Dec 2, Dec 9, Dec 16

Community

Status Partnership Announcement — Status is a mobile-first crypto wallet. DXdao will work with Status on making mobile versions of its products more accessible, particularly for ENS domains.
DeFi Community Awards — DXdao has teamed up with Panvala league once again for the DeFi Community Awards through the Gitcoin Grant program. Over 15 contributors donated Dai or PAN, which will be awarded the winner.
Resource Coordination — a new effort to work more efficiently and better allocate resources across DXdao products and initiatives. ‘Squads’ could create better accountability and communication to the community. Check out the forum thread, meeting video and deck. Also see DXdao Fractalization — DX squads forum thread.

Bits and Pieces

Want to contribute?

Check out the Bounty billboard
We’re hiring full-time DXdao contributors! Check out positions here.

About DXdao: DXdao is a decentralized collective that builds and governs DeFi products. DXdao was spawned in May 2019 through a collaboration between Gnosis and DAOstack. Reputation (REP) is voting power in DXdao, and DXD is the financial token with a claim on revenue from DXdao products.

DXdao products include Omen (prediction markets), Mesa (batch auction DEX), Swapr (governance-enabled AMM), and Rails (L2 payment app).
DXdao believes in governance and decentralization.

Connect with us: Official Telegram, Keybase Chat, DXdao Twitter, DAOtalk Forum