Jazear Brooks on Sifchain’s omni-chain approach to decentralized exchange

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have jazeera brooks the ceo of siftchain jazeer welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here today hey thanks for having me you're very welcome i'm excited for this discussion to deep dive into d5 into what sift chain is working on and let's

0:21just kick it right off with what exactly is the focus of the sift chain platform what are the problems that your team is solving for yeah um so it's designed to be an omni chain dex what i mean by that is it basically connects to every blockchain i think our team is signed up for 20 to 25 different cross chain pegs uh we're just going to build those out in parallel

0:43and if we can do that when then we can get decentralized um flow of cryptocurrencies across chains uh to the point where uh people can think more about the dow that they're working in and less about the chain that they're working on um i'd say that's the important thing we also want to have margin trading and limit orders which we see as a good complements to amms which

1:03we'll also have and those three will provide the the components of our crypto economic program great so building in a decentralized exchange with cross blockchain compatibility obviously there's a few hurdles to jump with that right and right now the d5 space seems to be predominantly with ethereum and there is some platforms that are trying to do some cross chain but

1:26this sounds like a huge undertaking so props to you for that how is the project going so far and you know what hurdles have you had to face as you've gotten to this point yeah um it's going pretty well we've got a test net up live monkey bar so you can check take a look at that um we packed out at um 100 validators which is the max we can host on cosmos right now

1:49um so pretty solid people are testing the ethereum uh to sift chain compatibility so you can actually do cross chain transactions um right now um a lot of what we're doing right now is uh basically around the infrastructure build out and testing um so some devops work and writing a substantial number of tests um so that's really where we are in terms of completion but a lot of the

2:09core work has been done thanks to cosmos and then thanks to peggy which is some cross-chain software that we built earlier for uh ethereum um i'd say as far as goals we really just want to wrap this thing up get get mainnet out live and um yeah i'd say if we can do that we're off to the races and people have a usable product definitely and now with decentralized

2:31exchanges there are there is this solution that you're bringing in where you no longer are just stuck with erc20 tokens moving back and forth and you can move to all the other coins and just really open the floodgates and there are other projects that are looking to do this because obviously this is a huge problem in the industry being stuck on just ethereum so as you

2:51continue to grow release the platform and you're looking for mainstream adoption you know what are the unique selling points and value propositions that that sift chain is going to bring in from other cross-platform decentralized exchanges yeah i mean i'd say no one's really trying omnichain that's a huge one for us we know most of the other cross-chain projects thor chain

3:12obviously many members of our team were heavily involved with um there's rosetta from coinbase there's chain bridge there's poly network we're pretty familiar with a lot of them but no one are none of them are targeting the number of uh chains that we're targeting um that's a huge bit i'd say there's another bit in that we're basically among the first to get

3:34connectivity to the cosmos network itself proper so you'll be able to take the chain the tokens that you uh bring on to sift chain and use them with other cosmos chains like kava or terra or akash or the cosmos hub and so i say that's another really huge drawing point i'm unaware of any really solid um decentralized exchanges that do margin trading and also limit orders um you know

3:59there's some that do one or the other but i think that that bit is still in its um infancy so yeah i would say those are the things that to me stand out as key differentiators for sift chain that's that's great and also you're moving into the d5 space with decentralized exchanges there's a lot of other functionality for decentralized finance whether it's

4:22swaps providing liquidity decentralized trading cross platform can you talk a little bit about how that works and is that the prime like one of the sub primary functions of the exchange or is it really your focused main focus is is swapping coins cross-platform yeah so um i think the way to imagine this is that there are two key components of siftchain one is

4:47sifnode itself which runs of the nodes that people use and that's an application specific blockchain which is designed for the specific application of swapping tokens um so you've got your liquidity pool people pull in that everyone's used to that and then they actually swap tokens against that liquidity um there's a separate component which is peggy which is around

5:07moving tokens to and from other blockchains and so for ethereum um there's basically um a an extension of tendermint consensus on ethereum so we have a peggy smart contract and that smart contract allows you to send token like you can you can receive tokens uh from the ethereum network and when it hosts those tokens um it has the capacity to then mint

5:32a pegged version of that token on sift chain and so that's entirely separate piece right now they happen to be running in the same code but i'd say as soon as we get the chance we're going to split that out into its own blockchain with its own separate validator um set and uh that'll be used um in conjunction with ibc with the inter blockchain protocol

5:52so that's not quite done yet that ibc protocol is not done we're waiting on the cosmos guys to finish it out once that happens um we'll set that up and so yeah i'd say sift chain proper is really designed for swapping pegs tokens but you can take those peg tokens um you can move them back and forth with their original chain you can also send them to

6:10other chains in the cosmos ecosystem as well very cool and now i i saw recently that the sift chain team closed a 3.5 million dollar saf sale so first of all congratulations to that that's a big step forward and i know that you have some major investment partners that you're working with can you talk a little bit about the partners that uh have believed in the

6:31project from the beginning are invested and what are the next steps now with that staff sale complete yeah i'd say i'm really proud of the investment um group that we put together um there are the the full list is on our website you can just check out siftchain.finance but yeah a lot of a lot of heavy hitters um a lot of groups like alameda that really understand market making

6:52um they were surprisingly uh you know interested in doing this on a decentralized platform even with serum there's just so much opportunity um to do uh you know defy and with a with a bunch of different uh styles and um and structures i do i know i mentioned that our core protocols our core features are sorry are margin trading and uh limit orders and

7:14regular swaps but we are interested in doing other things like connectivity with other chains uh solana for serum compatibility would be a great one but there are a bunch of other things that we've sort of discussed um i'd say yeah mechanisms another um bc i'd really love to call out for being really thoughtful for working with us from the ground up um andrew kang is

7:32extremely notable on crypto twitter um and he's not just sort of the dj kind of trader people that he appeals to but actually a lot of really thoughtful um analysts as well and so i i'd really say he he's been a solid thought leader not just him but but the entire mechanism team um ngc another really well-known uh firm they've been extremely great with us for

7:53uh design um for protocol for feedback i can call them you know whenever um they they've been really helpful for our promotion um in asia i'm super super appreciative of that so yeah i'd say we have a lot of pretty good partnerships um we've also started some sort of behind-the-scenes things with uh with our investors around connectivity to centralized exchanges or

8:14or to other decentralized exchanges i mentioned you know briefly some ideas but that's kind of scratching the surface um i do think that we are we're very very interested in decentralized governance and decentralized control but we're also really interested in leveraging some of our larger partners and their capacity to bring solid liquidity or volume so

8:33definitely stay tuned for announcements on that definitely and i'm glad that you mentioned the decentralized governance there and that sort of leads me to you know talk about how these decentralized projects really are can be community run you know with the governance and with the growth of it and but as well you sort of need to have the economics in there so that

8:52people are excited to use it and want to use it and sometimes at the beginning in the early stages you need to either incentivize or you know encourage people to become adopters liquidity providers and validators now do you guys have a strategy for having that incentivization or do you expect with all of these competitive advantages that there will be organic growth in

9:14those areas as well yeah i think the organic growth will come for sure we're definitely getting a lot of traction um we also want to have a pretty robust liquidity mining program i'll spill uh some of the beans now because i don't think we've talked about this publicly but this will be um an exclusive for this program um it's designed with some of the

9:35feedback that a few notable people andrew kang being one of them have discussed on twitter um i'd say the the multi coin guys have also heavily influenced us um the general gist here is that we want to reward validators swappers and also liquidity providers and we want to do it in proportion to the amount of volume that they give to us either in held

10:00assets for stakers and providers for traded or swapped assets for the swappers um we also want to do it uh in proportion to the amount of time that they they're doing it with us so um you know if you're holding for a longer amount of time you're gonna get more liquidity mining rewards and so we haven't announced many details for that publicly but we've got some pretty solid

10:20cryptoeconomics i think behind it um we don't want to just kind of offer out tokens um without making sure that people deliver value in exchange for it um i i showed uh this to you know a an investor just to get some feedback and like they were thinking hey we'd love to invest um just based on the liquidity mining program alone so we're hoping that you know when we do

10:41launch it um it is still at the cutting edge but yeah i'd say we have not been as thrilled by some of the liquidity mining programs we've seen from groups like uni swap where it's just a flat fee um andrew kang discusses this in more detail on twitter and we've really taken a lot of the improvements that he mentioned to heart well that's really exciting and uh great

11:01to break the news on the show as well and now talking about rewards i want to specifically mention you know the sift chain token and and how that governance and incentivization everything works within the protocol so you could really just touch on you know with people that are helping to provide value to the system they're also going to be interacting with the sift

11:22chain token what are the main functions there and how does it create a sustainable ecosystem for sift chains platform overall yeah um it's good i think to talk about row on the sift chain token so it serves a couple of purposes first and foremost it secures the network so validators need to stake it and without it it just can't run no matter what so

11:42um it is the currency that our validators are using for block and it's what they'll receive as a function of block rewards um and i'd say of the validator community as i mentioned has been um pretty strong and is showing substantial interest in the token so that's a huge um demand base right there then there is um the liquidity providing um so if you are providing a token then

12:07it doesn't matter which token you have you're doing it in a pool that has 50 row on 50 or some other token and it's probably worth uh doing a quick walk through for what that means crypto economically let's say you've got your your uh bitcoin and you want to swap it for usdt we're actually doing bitcoin to row on and then row on to usdt um so the rowan token would be used no

12:28matter what um all of our polls are equally weighted with row on um and everyone who swaps is going to pay some fee as a result so it makes sense to be a row on holder if you believe in sift chain as a network overall another thing to keep in mind is that because these are equally weighted pools we have more of a direct connection between the tvl the total value lock for

12:49external tokens and the price of rowland so let's say we've got 10 million dollars of external assets um from bitcoin to usdt to east or whatever else um that means that there has to be at least 10 million dollars worth of road in those same pools because they're equally weighted and an arbitrager would definitely even them out if um that wasn't the case um and so that

13:10really gives our community a target to to work for uh in terms of getting tvl locked so that they can see the appropriate rise in rowan um and then we are like unlike a standard ethereum project right we are running on our own sovereign chain uh which is validated as i mentioned and secured by rowan and so we know that we want our validators to take at least as much as

13:34is on chain so if you've got 10 million in external tokens that means you've got 10 million in row on 20 million combined being secured by the network which means you need 20 million at least securing the network so if you've got that 10 million in external assets that means that you've got like a 30 million dollars on sift chain alone in row on but not counting things that are in cold

13:52storage or on other exchanges or so forth um and so this logic i'd say is um something we're pretty proud of because it means that um there's much more of a direct connection between um usage and price for the token we did a lot of analyses with this back when we copied it frankly from thor chain which has a similar model and this does hold up under rational

14:16profit seeking agents at least according to a multi-agent simulation that uh the gauntlet network team did so uh we're pretty happy about that um that's the second big use as a settlement token then there's also the validator the third thing that it makes sense to keep in mind is that it's a governance token so you use rawan to vote on changes to the protocol and we hope to have a

14:36really robust doubt we've done some communication in the past about what that means put out a pretty long speech about how that relates to open source development to computer-aided governance to what we call teal organizations uh self-managed self-organized organizations and i i think we take that to heart um we definitely want to have a robust dow so

14:55if you are interested in decentralized governance that's another reason you'd be interested in the rowan token thanks for that and now i want to talk about the next steps uh you're you have the test net launch you're moving towards the main release do you have a time frame on that and what are the next steps for you and your team right now yeah so um we will probably

15:17hit say um january or so in of next year um it's a tentative date uh we're not quite sure but i think that's when we'll be able to release the chain um for for mainnet and live life token value transfer um at this point it's pretty much entirely um around uh like testing we brought in like a separate external testing team we have an audit team um we're talking

15:41to potentially another auditor um to work alongside so we have uh dual coordination uh we're setting up a bug bounty program um so that's pretty much it we've already started taking some of our issues and throwing them up on git coin so if you are an enterprising engineer and you just want to you know tinker around with the code but make money for it

15:57um we encourage you to go to git coin um any of the issues that we have that are bugs um you know we're happy to compensate for um you know assuming we've got a bitcoin grant out for them um so yeah it's it's pretty much entirely about putting the pieces together a lot of the core work we'd already done um on pegi and you know building out uh sift chain

16:15at using 4chan as a reference reference implementation uh was not too bad um it's it's basically just you know testing under multiple regimes stress testing documenting tests document just documenting the product in general um that's that's that's the deal uh so we love any collaboration from any open source developers who are interested definitely and now you mentioned the git

16:38coin for other community members that are just looking to follow along leading up to the launch or to get involved in the social communities where are your main communities and how can they get involved yeah telegram is obviously a big one um we also have a newsletter you can check that out on our website and then i'd say discord has a lot of the meat and potatoes for engineers

17:00great jazeer i will leave those links in the description box below thank you so much for the time it's been a pleasure speaking about sift chain all the best with the launch and everything else moving forward and let's follow up in the near future yeah ashton thank you for having us you