WandX— Now supporting decentralized Trading, Staking, & Lending
One of our learning, over the many months of working on the WandX app, has been that in order to create a truly decentralized platform, one that solves annoyances and problems for anyone holding crypto assets, we need to work on the platform’s ability to allow users to store their funds and various assets in a simple, safe, and efficient way, supported by a seamless and intuitive user experience.
This view is supported by the substantial increase in new crypto addresses being created as well as tokens from innovative projects being stored on these addresses, underscoring the emergence of a sizeable new asset class. Resultantly, we are also seeing DeFi (Decentralized finance) apps and protocols emerging across the trading (DEX), lending, and staking verticals to cater to the new asset class.
Where we see this industry heading over the next few years is not necessarily around creating new protocols for DeFi services, but around creating one-stop solutions that act as an aggregator of trading, lending, and staking protocols.
To validate this, take any user who is currently holding crypto on MEW, Jaxx or similar non-custodial wallet. By and large, they don’t have an easy means of staking their staking tokens or lend liquid tokens because one, there are one too many applications to choose from and two, most applications centered on enabling these suffer from poor UX that deter instead of encouraging actions and forward momentum.
The only decent token trading ecosystem today is provided by centralized exchanges, which limitingly enough means that the deposit of tokens has to happen into the wallet of a centralized exchange, or routed to a decentralized exchange or liquidity network like Bancor.
How does this translate into what we are building?
Our aim behind developing the WandX Desktop app has been, and remains, to not just to serve to you the Basket Protocol and DEXs across different blockchains, but to develop a one-stop decentralized non-custodial trading, lending and staking solution for anyone holding a crypto asset. This way anyone holding a crypto asset will be able to manage, grow and make the most of their asset while always maintaining control over their assets, without ever entrusting it to anyone other than themselves.
Additionally, other exchanges and wallets will be able to use our SDK to enable the ability to lend/stake crypto for the users of their wallet and exchange.
What’s the recalibrated scope of WandX?
For statements and reasons made above, it’ll be fair to define the WandX app as
- Your multi-asset wallet: On WandX, you own the keys, so only you will ever control your crypto asset(s). You can also import/create a new wallet on ETH, NEO, Wanchain, AION, and Tezos chains and integrate Ledger into the desktop app.
- Your one-stop trading platform: Apart from the WandX DEX on ETH, NEO, Wanchain, and AION, WandX will act as an aggregator of DEX orders across Bancor, Kyber, Uniswap, and 0x. Hence, depending on the crypto that you own in your wallet, you will always get the best price to run a trade.
- Your crypto lending platform: We are designing the WandX app in a way that it will act as an aggregator of lending protocols, starting with those built on ETH. This way, any crypto asset that is present in any of your wallets can be lent out using any of the decentralized lending protocols connected to the desktop app. As easy as that!
- Your crypto staking platform: PoS and dPoS tokens provide the easiest way for you to be able to grow your crypto while holding control of your funds. WandX app, then, will provide a decentralized staking solution for these staking-based cryptos. For the initial pilot, Tezos and Livepeer staking will be introduced, after which other tokens will follow suit.
The way this translates into business is that a percentage of the transaction fee will be deducted on staking, lending, and trading actions that happen by the user of the platform.
What does this mean for the utility of WAND?
The utility of the WAND token will be enhanced significantly to support not just trading, but also lending and staking functions. The WAND token and its derivates (WANDN, WANDW and WANDA) can be used to obtain discounts up to 75% on all of the above services.
Distilled, none of this points to a pivot but does indicate a recalibration of development plans. Our broad goal remains what it has been, it’s scope now greatly enhanced. It’s a massive goal, we know, but it’s the hard problems that are worth tackling.
We’ll be updating our progress on the development front shortly. Meanwhile, please reach out with suggestions and thoughts on the new way of WandX.
Reach us on t.me/wandxapp
