Some observations and thoughts on ZILSwap: What went well, its impact on the $ZIL ecosystem and where we need to improve with some concrete plans that are being worked on. A thread:
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1/ ZILSwap was launched by @SwitcheoNetwork on Oct 5, 2020 (~2 months old). Soon after, we noticed for the first time, a flurry of ZRC-2 tokens (equiv. of ERC20s on $ZIL) getting launched on the network (even though the fungible token standard had been around for a while).
2/ The ability to provide a marketplace for people to exchange tokens was the trigger for deveopers to start issuing tokens and developing a token economy. In fact, there was a token for which, the entire supply was put on a ZILSwap pool w/o any team withholding.
3/ This was an extreme example of why a DEX was needed and the role it played in bootstrapping several tokens and respective token economies. Over 25 tokens are available on ZILSwap in the form of liquidity pools. The total pool size across all tokens is over USD 1 million.
4/ ZILSwap also made it possible for the first time for anyone to get access to $XSGD (the Singapore Dollar Stablecoin issued by @xfers). In fact $XSGD and $gZIL contribute the greatest proportion of the total pool.
5/ As $XSGD and $gZIL were only available on ZILSwap initially ( $gZIL is also on @cex_io now), both have undergone significant growth over the last few months since their launch in October. ZILSwap recorded a cumulative trading volume of $1.3M for $gZIL and $750.9K for $XSGD.
6/ ZILSwap is also the address holding the largest number of $gZIL (2.67% of the total circulating supply) and the third largest holder of $XSGD (18.50% of the total circulating supply). This clearly highlights the central role of ZILSwap for these two tokens in particular.
7/ I do see two issues with ZILSwap though. The first one is around incentive. Despite the fact that ZILSwap has some incentive baked for liquidity providers (0.03% of trading fees), it is imperative to boost the incentive a bit further.
8/ More incentive will attract more liquidity providers and therefore a more liquid market for token issuers and token holders. We are extremely cognizant of this and a solution is in works.
9/ The second one is about bringing more assets that the community would like to interact with. This is where $ZIL - $ETH and potentially $ZIL - $BTC bridge will come into play. Bridging Zilliqa with other chains will bring assets from an external chain on the Zilliqa platform.
10/ The bridge would allow the $ZIL community who hold other assets such as $ETH, $BTC or ERC20s to move them on Zilliqa and be able to transfer them around without congestion or trade them at cheaper costs and that too with just a few clicks.
11/ Cross-chain bridges may also bring different communities together and allow dapp developers to target a wider userbase. However, liquidity will still remain important. The bridge and the assets will only be a step towards the goal as users will need liquidity on ZILSwap.
12/ And therefore the community contribution towards liquidity provisioning will be crucial which again makes the underlying incentive mechanism important. Furthermore, we need to understand that there is much more to be unlocked once the cross-chain assets cross over.
13/ We have to go beyond enabling people to be able to trade ETH-based assets and think of providing applications that can use those assets. Pillar for example could take those cross-chain assets as collateral.
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$ZIL ecosystem has grown rapidly in the last few quarters and at least some of it can be attributed to the cascading network effect of seed node staking. A thread on observations, thoughts and ideas on taking it to the next-level (bundled together with some tangible numbers).
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1/ Staking has so far locked around USD 400 million of $ZIL. In fact, the underlying incentive design has converted passive community members into daily active network users. And the numbers do speak. Since its launch, the daily txn volume on the network has increased by ~40%.
2/ The most immediate network effect of staking came in the form of $gZIL -- an ecosystem-wide governance token issued alongside staking rewards. $gZIL itself has driven a quarter million on-chain transactions (in the form of token transfers).
@zilliqa just completed a network upgrade. Five key improvements that platform users, miner and developers can expect after this release:
1β£ Transactions can now be "soft-confirmed", as soon as they are processed within a shard. It will reduce the visible latency.
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2β£ A new feature to allow tracking of transaction status. Users can now check whether their transaction was dispatched to the network, soft-confirmed, confirmed, or rejected. No more "Oops! The transaction could not be found on viewblock."
3β£ A new governance mechanism for miners. Miners can now vote on proposals by attaching votes to their Proof-of-Work (PoW) submissions. This is in addition to the $gZIL governance.
2020 has been a year of growth for @zilliqa and $ZIL ecosystem. At the start of the year, we'd committed ourselves to launching growth initiatives on all fronts. It's great to see the community benefitting from the tangible impact that those initiatives had.
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1/ I regularly see off the chart growth numbers on all fronts such as general outreach, market and social sentiment, developer adoption, platform usage, and usability, dev tooling, community-run initiatives, market infrastructure, general ecosystem growth and $ZIL value capture.
2/ I must admit I do feel a bit pleased with what I see because this growth has definitely not been effortless. The team and the community together has put a lot of effort into this. Having said that, I do not feel an iota of complacency. Miles to go...
A thread for those who need more clarity on seed node staking with $ZIL that will go live very soon on #Zilliqa.
1) Seed node staking is not a full-blown PoS system. In a PoS system, staking is used to determine the validator who will propose the next block of transactions.
2) Unlike PoS, seed node staking in #Zilliqa is to allow certain non-consensus nodes called seed nodes (those that store transaction history) to earn rewards for their service. These seed nodes do not participate in validating transactions.
3) Staking rewards come from block mining. 5% of $ZIL mined in every block will be used to reward these nodes while the remaining 95% will be given to the miners who validate transactions. The split is intentionally skewed towards miners as they provide the much needed security.