Sifchain Update — End of August 2022

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Sifchain Finance

8 min readAug 30, 2022

This article is a recap of the development and project progress for Sifchain for the end of August. AuthZ went live for automatic reward restaking, the margin trading product demo is live, and SifDAO is reducing ROWAN staking inflation!

Margin Trading v1.0: The Long Game Product Demo Released!

The biggest news in these last two weeks is the release of the product demo for Margin Trading v1.0: The Long Game! The product is live on TempNet and soon to be deployed on Betanet. Read the docs here.

Currently, a group of community testers is collaborating with Sifchain Engineering to do tests on the testnet version, with additional community members being invited in as well, after which it will be deployed on Betanet to a whitelist of addresses, and then opened up for public use.

As a reminder, the current phases of Margin Trading product development are as follows:

CURRENT PHASE: Margin v1.0: The Long Game (initial release)

Ability to open Margin positions on select pools at initial launch.
Ability to long ROWAN against enabled pools at up to 10x leverage.
Ability to long any of the tokens in the select pools against ROWAN at up to 10x leverage.
Ability to open numerous positions per wallet.
Ability to view open positions and interest rates.
Ability to manually close positions.
Incorporation of an Insurance Fund to protect liquidity providers
Incorporation of analytics & charting

Margin v1.5 (later releases):

3rd party integration for Limit Orders, Stop Losses, and other tools.
The ability to adjust an open position

Margin: The Big Short

Ability to short Rowan:TKN

Margin: The Open Trade

Ability to take TKN:TKN positions. This means you can long or short any margin-enabled token against any other margin-enabled token.
This means a user can long ATOM against ETH, or JUNO against USDC, or wBTC against OSMO. Then, with the introduction of Peggy 2.0 and Omni-EVM, users will be able to permissionlessly list ANY token from ANY connected chain and open a position using that token. This creates endless possibilities for traders opening positions for pools with large enough depth.

Margin: Deep Margin

Reputation System
Submersion
Oracle Pricing Integration
Increased Leverage, planned up to 100x

Margin Trading Business Development

The BD team has been focused on the following initiatives in relation to margin trading:

Initiative 1: Get Charting

DEXScreener integration with Sifchain. DEXScreener will be incorporating Sifchain into their platform! This is underway and we are working closely together to get this implemented ASAP.
Creation of an ‘info.sifchain.network’: An external development team is building a ‘info.sifchain.network’ page for key analytics to support margin & the DEX.

Initiative 2: Trading Community Engagement

The team is doing outreach to various trading communities to get them educated, interested, and involved in our Margin trading product.

Initiative 3: Get Investors Involved

The team has reached out to several of our top and closest investors to get them involved in testing margin.

Business Development & Marketing

Leap Wallet Integrates Sifchain

The team at Leap Wallet has integrated Sifchain into their app! The UI looks fantastic, and they are planning a mobile wallet app for release soon.

The Sifchain integration offers:

Portfolio overview: A quick glance into your assets and how they’re performing
IBC Transfers: Easy transfers between Cosmos chains
Governance: A handy in-wallet voting utility to make participating in chain governance seamless
Staking: Delegate to a validator and claim rewards, plus a randomized validator list to support decentralization

Learn more & download Leap Wallet.

AMAs around the Cosmoverse

This month has been a month of AMAs. The Sifchain team has had the good fortune to be invited to AMAs in several communities, and featured Citadel, an integrations partner, in the Sifchain Discord. A list:

English: Citadel Product Demo & AMA in Sifchain Discord — Recording
English: Marketing Fireside Chat with Zadkiel, new Head of Marketing at Sifchain — Recording
Chinese: Sifchain x Citadel China in PANews — Recap link
Russian: Sifchain x PostHuman for Sifchain in Russian — Recording
Vietnamese: AMA with Sifchain for TIỀN THUẬT TOÁN — Recording

Sifchain in Coingape

Coingape published an article showcasing Sifchain, called From Bitcoin to Sifchain — The Evolution of Blockchain.

Lack of interoperability is a longstanding problem with blockchain technology.

The Cosmos IBC is a solution for rapid and seamless asset and information transfers, and Sifchain aims to grow the Cosmos IBC by connecting non-IBC-enabled chains to Cosmos through its Peggy 2 bridge technology.

SifDAO

Validator Delegation Council

The validator delegation council has finished scoring all validators and has released a statement about it.

The next steps of the process will be raising an on-chain proposal and making the relevant delegations.

Token Listing Council

The token listing council’s work to shift the reference pair from USDT → USDC is complete, and the reference pair has been changed. This improves the experience for arbitrageurs and traders on the DEX. In addition, they have pooled 100k of liquidity in the ROWAN:DAI pool as part of their protocol loaned liquidity initiative, in which they lend capital to a pool in order to bootstrap its growth and improve the usability of the DEX.

Onboarding Focus Group

The on-boarding focus group continues to meet weekly to discuss on-boarding processes for SifDAO. You can follow along with their meeting minutes here.

IPFS

Sifchain validators have come together to explore using IPFS as a way to increase the longevity, redundancy, and accessibility for SifDAO documents such as proposals or frameworks. If you’d like to get involved, reach out in the #validators-betanet channel in discord.gg/sifchain. Also, check out this recent margin trading teaser that was created and hosted in IFPS by Julius from Decali.io:

Governance

The proposal to decrease staking inflation has passed and additional proposals implementing these changes on-chain has been raised.

The proposal to elect Don Luv to the token listing council is in the discussion period now.

SifDAO Events

The bi-weekly SifDAO roundtable meeting took place on August 18th. Watch the recording on YouTube. Join us for the next event on August 18th to ideate, incubate, and initiate work within the DAO.

Mark your calendar! The next SifDAO townhall will be on September 9th, in which we’ll focus on the launch of margin trading as well as hear updates from around the DAO.

Other Updates

The code to block delegations to validators with greater than 10% voting power as well as hard-code the minimum commission rate at 5% has been implemented.

Get Involved in the DAO

Stay tuned in the #DAO-chat on discord.gg/sifchain or on commonwealth.im/sifchain to participate in governance.

Product & Engineering

Updated Core Feature Timeline

Cosmos SDK .45 Upgrade (with support for AuthZ): Live!
Swap Fee adjustments to support Margin Trading & Asymmetric Liquidity Adds: Aug 30th, 2022
Margin Trading v1.0 The Long Game: ETA Sept 2022
Re-enabled Asymmetric Liquidity Adds: ETA post Margin Trading
Peggy 2.0 Launch: Upgraded ETH<>Sifchain bridge to Peggy 2.0: October 2022
Peggy 2.0 Next chain integration: November 2022

Margin Trading Development Team

The margin trading team made huge strides these past two weeks as they continue to get the v1 of the product ready for launch. The team completed the implementation of incremental interest payments, which allows interest from positions to be paid to LPers in an incremental way instead of all at once at the close of a position.

Further, the team completed end-to-end integrations for opening, viewing, and closing positions! This is the entire full lifecycle of a position, which includes integrations with the front-end, sifnode, and data services.

The front-end team made several rounds of UI refinement around trade entry, viewing positions, and closing positions.

And finally, the team finalized all test scenarios and are testing the product with the proposed governance parameters that the solution will go live with!

The next 2 weeks will be full of final testing, bug fixes, and UI adjustments as we prepare for deployment of Margin Trading v1.0: The Long Game.

Peggy Bridge Team

The Peggy Bridge team continues to plow through all of the code remediations on the 4 audits that were completed on the Peggy 2.0 code base. The team is over 80% complete at this point.

Front End Team

The front-end team has completed v3 feature parity with the current v2 of the DEX. v3 of the DEX will be what allows us to upgrade to a completely re-vamped and re-architectured DEX user interface. We will be releasing this after we launch margin trading.

Data Team

The data team continued their focus on creating internal, external, and DAO-centric data dashboards that will be used to support Margin Trading. These will empower the various audiences with the data they need to do research and analysis on the system after Margin Trading is launched.

Developer Relations Team

The DevRels team continued their support of the community by creating the below educational documentation & tutorials:

Sifnode Team

The Sifnode team successfully deployed a software upgrade to v0.45, which enabled AuthZ and auto-compunding of staking rewards!

Visit Restake.app or Yieldmos to auto-compound your ROWAN.

The team also prepared another deployment that will adjust the swap fee mechanism to switch from a slippage-based swap fee to a fixed swap fee for swaps on Sifchain. This is necessary because:

Create a more favorable fee environment to increase adoption of margin trading. It is cost-prohibitive to do slip-based swap fees with margin as collateral + borrowed position are large, especially as leverage increases. Slippage-based fees can erode the margin trader’s collateral quickly.
In order to re-enable asymmetrical liquidity adds, the DEX needs to move to a fixed-based fee.

Get Involved

This is what we’ve been working on in the last two weeks, and we give regular updates via Medium & Discord to keep you in the know.

Plus, here are three simple things you can do to get involved in Sifchain right now:

✅ View & vote on DAO proposals at https://wallet.keplr.app/#/sifchain/governance

✅ Provide liquidity on the dex at https://sifchain.network/

✅ Tell your friends about how epic Sifchain is and join our Telegram & Discord!

Official Channels

Media & content creators, contact us at communications@sifchain.finance.

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