Community Call Recap

16th August 2023 — Audit, Margin & Spot DEX, Bridge and more.

Published in

unstoppable-official

8 min readAug 21, 2023

In our latest community call, Nic, Andi, and Alistor delved deep into the latest developments at Unstoppable, providing insights into our audit process, progress with the Margin and Spot DEX, and the overall sentiment in the crypto space. Dive in to get a detailed breakdown of our recent accomplishments and a sneak peek into the exciting things on the horizon.

Watch the full AMA on YouTube now

Overall Sentinemt

Internally developments are progressing well, despite some elements taking longer than initially anticipated. On the other hand externally, the crypto market, especially on-chain, has felt an increasing lack of activity lately, which we could also directly observe on-chain.

Audit Progress

The Smart Contracts audit by Sherlock seems to be coming to an end soon, with Sherlock being in the process of reviewing the implemented fixes by our developers. Naturally, we would have wished for the audit process to move more quickly overall. However, we have good faith in Sherlock to provide a proper and in-depth audit with their unique concept, especially smart contract insurance post-audit.

Unlike most auditors in the space, Sherlock provides coverage of up to five million USD if a contract they audited gets exploited. This practice of accountability and assurance is still not widespread in the auditor industry, and one of the core reasons we chose Sherlock as our trusted partner.

Launch Preparations

After the audit finishes, we will freeze the codebase and need to set up and test various elements before the launch, including setting the right parameters for things like the rates liquidity providers receive, target utilization rates, leverage levels, and various others. We will then build the corresponding deployment scripts and test the finalized version on a forked Arbitrum chain.

How long this process will take is hard to say. If everything goes smoothly, we might see this process finished in a week. If things are really working against us, it could be longer. In the end, we can’t compromise when it comes to a perfectly working setup that won’t haunt us. We know you are all excited to see the Margin DEX live — but trust us when we say nobody wants it live as much as we do.

Spot DEX Enhancements

While the wait for the Margin DEX continues, we decided to push a large update for the Spot DEX. The audit uncovered only one minor potential issue with the DCA contract, which we immediately fixed and deployed on-chain. With the Spot DEX beta, we introduced a lot of quality of life changes and reached various milestones:

With the current Spot DEX, we cover 80% of all trading volume on Arbitrum.
You can now set customized trading pairs and trade seamlessly cross-pools with multihops and live synthetic charts.
Improved UI and UX, including a new Order History dashboard.
Mobile responsive and fully usable on mobile.

While we saw a lot of focus on the Margin DEX functionality, the Spot DEX really advanced in our hearts and minds from something we initially viewed as a necessity, to something we think turned out really cool and unique in its quality.

The initial feedback we received from the community also has been overwhelmingly positive. All in all, we want to highlight the strengths of the Spot DEX in the coming weeks more in our communication, as we believe we have so far undersold the capabilities and quality of the features, while most of the existing solutions do not reach the same quality.

Assessing Market Engagement

Something we really felt over the past weeks is the low engagement in the markets altogether. This became especially apparent for us with the launch of the Odyssey 2.0, which produced less organic traction than we anticipated. In turn, we started to look for reasons on our side to begin with, but after conversations with our friends and partners over at other protocols, it became apparent that the issue was prevalent throughout the whole space.

Monitoring the on-chain leverage trading niche, we can also observe a low in activity over the past weeks. While naturally large protocols like GMX or GNS continue to find utilization, we also observed that on some days, across 10–15 protocols combined, there are fewer than 2,500 traders in total.

Answering the question for this is challenging and likely multifactorial. It might be rooted in the late summer months, which usually see less activity in general, in the continuous crypto sideways market that fatigued a lot of traders, macro-economic conditions, or a combination of all of these factors and more.

While this prevailing market sentiment is not favorable in terms of launching the Margin DEX with a “big bang”, it certainly allows us to continue building in a low noise environment to position ourselves in the best way possible once the sentiment shifts into more positive regions again.

Expanding Our Horizon

While some of our products naturally tap into the niche sectors of on-chain trading, our task is not to compete with existing leverage trading platforms for the few remaining on-chain traders. Rather than competing in this sector, the mission is clear: we have to grow the overall space altogether.

We need to get people who are currently not on-chain trading over to on-chain trading, and then not just get them to on-chain trading, but to get them to trade on-chain on Unstoppable. And this has been our thesis from the start. This includes CEX traders, FX traders with little exposure to crypto, and in the final step, even “normies” with no prior exposure to crypto at all. Seeing a lot of protocols struggle with having users on-chain activity, having volume, this really makes the point for us that we are completely on the right track with that.

Bridging Real-world Finances

With the first pieces of our infrastructure coming together with the Margin and Spot DEX, we are also moving forward on the third puzzle piece: the Unstoppable Bridge and its FIAT on- and off-ramp. This will allow us to directly integrate the on-chain trading infrastructure with the real-world bank accounts or debit cards of its users.

Within the next four to five weeks, we will have finished the process of incorporating a legal entity in Lithuania that is licensed as a cryptocurrency exchange. This will give us the opportunity to partner with banking partners and lay the legal foundation to tokenize currencies and other real-world assets via the Bridge.

As for banking partners, we have already made good progress with one within the European Economic Area. Nonetheless, we are looking for a second to increase the availability within the EEA. With those partnerships established, we will start to look for additional partners to make our Bridge available in additional markets such as the US and Asia.

Mobile App Development

With the Spot and Margin DEX, as well as the Bridge coming together, our focus will shift towards creating an accessible mobile application. The goal of this application is to abstract away a lot of the steep learning curve wallet management and DeFi usually includes, allowing users to follow a simple sign-up process mimicking web2 flows.

At the same time, we will allow users to onboard funds directly via the app, utilizing the bridge. This is not only a requirement if we want to build a competitor to centralized exchanges but also is something most other on-chain applications lack or implemented very ineffectively. Naturally, this offer is not only targeted towards CEX traders but also will appeal to the on-chain crowd as the app will be a progressive web app (PWA) and be governed by the (upcoming) Unstoppable DAO.

This will allow us to not only get community input on what kind of features should be included, but also from a technical standpoint, we are less reliant on being hosted in the App Store and Play Store. The bridge component will operate under the regulated entity and thus include all the required AML and KYC measures. The pure on-chain functionalities, however, remain unaffected by these measures.

Team Expansion

To realize the app, we onboarded two more developers to our team, with one of them also being also specialized in UI/UX design, while the other is a full stack developer. This will significantly improve the speed at which we can develop and design the application.

Core Community Group

We’re excited to announce the creation of an exclusive group for our most engaged community members. Our goal is to foster closer ties with the community, providing an environment for closer collaboration on product development.

As part of this group, you’ll get early access to (work in progress) updates, have the opportunity to test alpha versions, and ensure your feedback directly influences our direction.

More details will be coming soon, but if you’re keen on becoming a core-community member, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

AMA Recap

Q: What has been your takeaway after collaborating with different teams on Odyssey 2.0 and has it had the intended effects?

We have mixed feelings about the Odyssey 2.0 collaboration. While the collaboration was definitely marked by a lot of enthusiasm and participation, there also were challenges that were created by organizational issues and missed deadlines from some of the participating protocols. Nonetheless, the collaboration created connections and interdependencies that will be beneficial not only for us but also for a lot of the other participants in the future.

Q: Are significant swaps happening in the Spot-DEX?

The Spot DEX Limit Order usage has been sporadic but we observed constant use of the DCA feature. We believe the Spot DEX features have been undersold from our side a bit so far, so we plan to increase the focus on the Spot DEX in the coming weeks. A dedicated statistics section for the new version of the Spot DEX is running internally and while not a priority, we might be able to share a more refined verison with the public soon.

Q: How is the rebranding and redesign progressing?

The rebranding and design efforts are ongoing. We got an external designer on board who is working on branding while our internal UI/UX designer focuses on the website and landing pages.

Where do you guys see DeFi in the next 2–5 years?

We remain optimistic on DeFi. While the next two years might be influenced by macroeconomic events and potential regulatory shifts, DeFi has a huge upside potential. The true capabilities of what DeFi can offer have not yet been fully realized. But we are encouraged by the continued efforts of the serious development community in the space. That being said, tokenizing real-world assets might be the next big thing for DeFi — which is something we also look for.

Signing Off

Thank you to everyone who joined our recent community call. Don’t miss out on our next one — join us on Discord. We invite you to explore our Spot DEX beta and share your feedback; your insights are invaluable to us.

Your consistent support and enthusiasm drive us forward. Together, we’re poised to shape the future of DeFi. Stay updated by joining our community channels, and let’s continue on this Unstoppable journey!