Futureswap: Lessons learned from a 3-day alpha

Futureswap is an Ethereum-based platform for traders and yield seekers, designed from the beginning to be user-owned and governed. Futureswap offers up to 20x leverage with a system that provides a high level of efficiency and distributed incentives.

Numbers from our alpha release

On Monday, we launched an Alpha version of our platform to validate some of our assumptions and help us gain insight into how users would perceive and use this new type of product. This was a heavily tested version that we felt confident to have as a limited release.

We believed we were creating something valuable for the community, but we didn’t expect the immediate overwhelmingly positive response. Our internal projections for the first week were $50k of liquidity and $100k in trade volume. We hit those numbers within two hours.

At that point, we realized this was going to grow much faster than anticipated.

By the end of the first day, trade volume hit $2.1M with over $500k of liquidity. We reminded people to be cautious with their funds and that this was still an alpha release with no final audit.

Within three days, Futureswap’s 24hr trading volume grew to $7.1M and liquidity passed $1M.

Within three days of launch, traders made Futureswap the largest DEX by daily volume with growth trending at 130% per day. This volume translated into the outperformance of holding equal value amounts of ETH/DAI for liquidity providers of over 550% annually.

Gracefully ending the alpha release

We decided to err on the side of caution and end our alpha earlier than initially planned. The decision we made to put the safety of users’ funds first is something we are proud of and we will strive to maintain this mentality and culture in the future.

This was our controlled process for a soft landing of the experiment:

• Step 1: We first communicated what we were doing and how this would affect users.
• Step 2: Raised fees to make using the platform unsustainable.
• Step 3: Disabled opening new positions.
• Step 4: Turned off the exchange.

Liquidity providers can continue to withdraw their deposits when it’s convenient for them.

The immense activity and feedback we observed during this initial launch has deepened our understanding of the system. The positive response to this first version of Futureswap is both thrilling and motivating. Our task now is to take everything we’ve learned from our research, initial implementation, and use of the alpha release to ensure we have a production-grade system that can withstand naive users, malicious actors, and everything in between.

Final numbers for Futureswap’s 3-day alpha:

• Total trade volume: $17,018,921
• Total liquidity: $1,359,134

We want to give a special shoutout to the team behind Chainlink, which enabled Futureswap price feed data. We plan to relaunch with them once we go live again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Some of our most asked questions during and following were related to trust and security:

• “Who are you?”
• We are 4 passionate engineers with deep experience in product, finance, governance, blockchain, and community.
• “Who’s doing a security audit of your code?”
• We’ve been working with Open Zeppelin for over two months. They are a team of some of the brightest and most thoughtful security engineers in the space who have audited many of the most used blockchain projects. We will release their full report prior to re-launching.
• “Can I review your code?”
• We will open-source our code during our full release. Doing so now could put users in jeopardy since we’re still working towards a version 1.0 release. We recently saw a project fail after moderate growth because they cloned an established project’s codebase without deep insight into how it was architected. We do not want this to happen with Futureswap.

Next steps

Again, we are extremely encouraged by the results of our alpha and the community response. At the same time, we’re patient and looking to build something that drives the most long term value. We will take as long as we need to get this right, but trust that we’re as eager to re-launch as our users are.

In the meantime, join us on our Discord community where our team is most active or follow us on Twitter for updates and announcements.