Sameep Singhania on Quickswap’s Layer 2 DEX advantages

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have sameep singhania the co-founder of quick swap samee welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here today thanks esther thanks for hosting me today and yeah i mean like i would love to you know be interviewed by you and i'm

0:21like really thankful to eventually you guys for hosting us today thanks a lot thank you for being here and yeah i'm really excited to dive into quick swap and the decentralized exchange with layer 2 solutions that you have i would love for you to start us off for the people that aren't familiar with quick swap with just a high level overview and the focus

0:40of the protocol yeah of course why not so quickstart is a decentralized exchange right it's an automated market maker and it's built on top of polygon blockchain i would say it's a layer 2 right so yeah on top of the medium blockchain so it's an automated market maker so it's a clone uh yeah so from the smart contract perspective it's a clone of uni swap v2 which is the very famous

1:00or the biggest dmm in the industry so far right so our aim by developing quick swap was to allow users to allow traders to do a swap even worth five dollars you know that's why because on polygon chain doing a transaction is very cheap for a dollar you can do you know thousands of transactions so that's why like we adopted that particular technology and built quick swap on top

1:23of poly one blockchain yeah so that's you know a basic overview of what bookshop is all about definitely and thank you sami for that and yeah you mentioned from a smart contract perspective very similar to uniswap and sushi swap uh except integrating polygon as a layer two solution can you talk about the main advantages and the reason behind why you implemented polygon and how that

1:44creates a competitive advantage for quick swap and makes it you know more ideal for trading uh than those other decentralized exchanges yeah of course so i think you know i should give you a brief summary about the history of bookstore like how it came into existence and that should answer your question right definitely it's okay so yeah so if i remember correctly last year

2:06yeah in march 2020 the ethereum prices were somewhere around 90 base dollars correct me if i'm wrong and the grass prices were very cheap somewhere around two point five four point that was the standard at that time in march when you don't get talking about for more than a year from now but since march you know since this forward 19 pandemic came in

2:24we saw a recent search uh in people coming towards cryptocurrency and that basically led into increasing prices of all the cryptocurrencies whether it be btc ethereum like or any other out there and with the increased use of these blockchain networks we saw a certain surge in gas prices as well and suddenly in somewhere in july or august we realized that the gas prices

2:45are insanely high and it doesn't make sense for the small traders of the small users who use the network anymore so suppose if i want to do a swap off i'm i'm giving an example of uni strap here because since we are you know a similar exchange so i'll take an example of phoenix suppose uh let's say in july 2020 you wanted to do a swap of let's say hundred

3:03us dollar and yuri swap and it will have to pay a gas price or a transaction price of 10 us dollar it doesn't make sense to do that particular trade because you are paying the ten percent of the total transaction amount as a transaction fees right and and and you know then we started basically looking into this particular trend and we followed and then what we figured out that

3:22the gas price is increasing every day right so today if it's twenty tomorrow it's 15 then it's 20 years 25 50 100 so gas prices were insanely high right so that's what that's when we thought why not build something which a smaller user can actually use because uni strap was only usable by big players at that time right even today it's usable by big players even today you can't do a

3:44trade-off let's say 10 us dollar on unified does it make sense to do right so then we decided let's build something which is actually usable by small users as well right so then you know we basically discussed this idea with multiple people right sandeep was one of them so deep is like one of the founders of polygon network and then you know we onboarded lda team

4:04as a marketing advisor for rock lda dave nicole all like they are wonderful people right and a very awesome marketer so they joined us and then we started building quick swap on polygon because at that time even today polygon was like damn fast so the block times on polygon is two seconds which means it will take your transaction to mine just two seconds into that

4:25second your transaction will be confirmed right and the cash prizes are insanely cheap but you can do thousands of transactions for just one dollar just one us dollar right so basically you know the purpose was to uh was to build a quick swap on a platform where user can do trades without thinking twice about that reaction cost right and that's what we have achieved

4:46using quick swap right and that was the entire purpose of building footwork that's the history of bookstore right and yeah i mean like even yesterday right so even today if you'll go to our info site and you will look at the last you know that's hundred transactions you will definitely find at least five or ten transactions which are worth just ten dollars

5:04right so that was our aim and like we are actually moving towards this and it's it feels really good when we see that people are actually you know using put swap to do very small trades and that was the purpose behind the club that's great and thank you for that backstory same eep and yeah it was noticeably i noticed myself the the transaction fees for ethereum and especially on unit swap

5:27when you're doing decentralized swaps or adding liquidity the costs seem to be even more than sending just a transfer uh regularly sending ether to another address so obviously with fees you mentioned ten dollars but i actually saw some of the fees actually up to over a hundred dollars uh per at at the peak uh which was just not sustainable for small players

5:50um so that's definitely a competitive advantage for a quick swap i mean you are you're like right so i i like i said ten dollars that was last year right but if i remember it correctly like a month from now when like ethereum prices were somewhere around 400 us dollar the gas price of doing one single transaction on uni swap was 300 us dollars right and here the normal transaction

6:14like so that was like that's insanely high because at that time the gas prices were somewhere around 1500 to 80 right and the ethereum prices were 4 500 us dollar so effectively it was 300 us dollar to do us one small trade on on uni swap which just went through one single pool right so yeah like insanely cheap insanely expensive sorry i'm uniform now

6:36sami i we're talking about the competitive advantages and i'm curious on the flip side are there any downsides or challenges of creating a decentralized exchange like quick swap and utilizing a layer two solution rather than using uniswap you know is there anything that actually makes it harder to use yeah so there are certain downsides as well right so there are certain pros and

6:58then like of course there are cons as well right and the biggest disadvantage that i personally see is uh is a bridging mechanism right so right now if uh all the assets lie on player one right layer two is just the way to scale layer one so polygon is not a competitor of ethereum and footstop is not a competitor of uni swap right so we all we both like we love ethereum and

7:21we love uni sub as well right the entire purpose of building polygon first to scale ethereum and the entire purpose of building bootstrap was to scale union stuff right but there are certain disadvantages so the basic again the main layer or the core layer is still ethereum so all the assets lies on ethereum so the one of the biggest ux problem i wouldn't say a disadvantage but a ux

7:40problem is when users have to you know bridge assets from ethereum through polygon so suppose if you have usdc on a tdm and if you want to use it on quick swap or if you want to use it on any other application on layer 2 on polygon the first thing that you have to do is you will have to transfer your assets from layer 1 to layer two and i think that's one of the biggest ux

8:00problem that we are trying to solve how to make this process seamless right so apart from this there are other problems as well and uh and the second most compelling problem being like which we hear from users on like everyday basis is wallets so right now like you know all the famous wallets or the big wallets out there to support layer one or ethereum you know by

8:20default but they don't support uh their tools like polygon right even on even matamas doesn't support it if you want to use a player to solution like polygon applications for metamask you will have to add custom rpc over there so metamask has provided a a very cool api using which application developers can basically provide that functionality within the application but

8:39still it's a pain right i mean like because they do not support it by default and same is true with coinbase coinbase doesn't support uh they are two solutions like polygon then trust wallet doesn't support then like no i'm not sure if any you know big wallet support as of now so that's another like big pain that we'll have to face and we'll we'll have

8:57to figure out how to fix this so i think if somehow we are able to solve these two ux problems like the biggest qx problem in the not only in quickstart but the entire layer to application industry i think it will be a big big relief for the users definitely and thank you for being transparent on that that there are still some challenges and it is fairly early on i know polygon has got a

9:18lot of support recently but it's still really early on in adoption for these layer two solutions i think in terms of what it will become in in the coming years um and now at the beginning of our talks to make you mentioned uh quick swap is a decentralized exchange but also an automated market maker and with that people can provide liquidity themselves to help

9:39uh build liquidity on the protocol and i'm curious uh for liquidity providers that are looking at using quick swap is there any difference from providing liquidity on quick swap and on the other exchanges like uniswap and also how are the apys calculated uh for the liquidity providers to earn interest while they're uh putting their funds and locking them

10:00into the protocol yeah that's a good question basically i think i'll answer this question in two parts the first part is like how a liquidity provider provides liquidity on put swap and whether it's similar to uni swap or it's different right and the second part of the question is like you know how the apis are calculated and like what's the benefit of providing

10:20liquidity on good stock so to answer the first question right so it's very similar to how you provide liquidity on uni square it's actually the same right because i like as i said in the beginning we are the clone of uni swap right and we are just much more faster and like cheaper than uni swap that's it but we like inherently we are we are the clone of your respect

10:39so it works exactly the same way when you talk about swapping when you talk about you know liquidity provision or when you talk about like anything you know in this particular protocol so it's very similar to how you provide security on uni staff you'll have to go and you'll have to suppose you'll have to choose a pair let's suppose you choose either usdc pair so you'll have to

10:57provide electricity to the both sides of the pair so in the east and in the usgc as well like 5050 that's how it works and it similarly it works on bookshop as well so yeah very much similar now to answer the second part of your question how the api is calculated and what's the benefit of providing liquidity on good stuff right so liquid swap right so yeah so

11:17first of all i'll talk about the toponomics of bitswap and i think that should answer this question right so quickshop has a native currency which is called quickbook right and the total server circulating supply of push to open is one million right and out of that but one million three point two five percent uh you know stays with the team and like

11:3696.75 percent of the remaining supply is basically for the community right so we have decided you know that we'll give somewhere around 95 to the you know liquidity provision to the community governments you know whatever the community decides one percent of the metrics takers and then 0.75 we have like you know kept for just for the marketing purposes

11:56right so now 95 percent is held just for liquidity provision right just for liquidity mining so what happens in quick swap we have a liquidity mining program running on since the inception since since october 2020 and it will last for four years right so right now there are 83 different pairs you know which are being rewarded with quick tokens on the quickstart platform so if you

12:19provide a liquidity in any of those parties on in any of those pairs and then what basically you can stake your lp tokens and you know earn quick rewards so that that's the first benefit of providing liquidity on quick spa right you provide liquidity you get lp token you stake those lp tokens and you earn quicker voters right and now the second question to it

12:38the second question though is it is the trading fees right so as you know right now the pdl of quick swap is 1.06 billion dollars right and the average daily volume on quickstart is somewhere around 250 to 300 million us dollars right uh which is still huge some like i still remember almost a week back it was a 50 million us dollar in a day right that's the volume so yeah so

13:03volume is huge right and on each trade on quick swap there's a fee of point three percent so suppose if i'm doing a trade off thousand us dollar i'll have to pay a point three percent fee on top of it so out of this point three percent fee point two five percent we go to the lp providers security providers so that's the second benefit of providing liquidity on quick

13:22swap you get 0.25 percent fee out of every trade which is made on quick swap and the average trade volume of flip flop on like on every on each day is somewhere around 250 million us dollars so that's a lot of money in key this is being generated on google right now right so that's the two you know benefits of providing liquidity now how the apis are

13:42calculated so apys are basically calculated in two different sections the first section is if you are providing liquid if you are providing liquidity and you are staking your lp token so you are earning quick rewards as well right so we can reconsider you know how much you are earning and then we compound it clearly and similarly we do it for the fee as well right

14:02so as for the total key generated and your your portion in it we do the compounding and we show the api so basically apy is calculated considering two things how much fee is being generated by the pool in which you have provided liquidity and what's your stake in that particular pool and like how much quick rewards are being given and what's your stake in

14:21that so that's how basically the api that calculated as of now great thank you so much for elaborating as well on the quick token there i was going to ask you about that and to hear that the liquidity providers actually have access to almost all of the quick and and you know barely any is allocated elsewhere is really interesting to know so thank you for all that background and

14:43you know we don't have a lot of time here to meet but i do want to ask you about uh what's coming up next for quick swap uh do you have more updates and and milestones in the roadmap that are major releases that you're planning on releasing you know throughout the summer of 2021 and throughout the rest of this year really yeah so that's a wonderful question and

15:03like we get this question almost on daily basis so yeah i would like to answer it here right so like as i said in the beginning you know the entire purpose of quick swipe cost to you know to smoothen the user's journey how they use ems how they use texas right and the first portion of the like the first point of was that you know to reduce the transaction

15:21cost and to reduce the transaction time which were very high on layer one that's why i like chose layer two so i think we have pretty much solved that particular problem so that was the biggest ux problem i would say you know the higher transaction cost and the higher transaction time so we have solved that particular you know the phase one of the ux problem

15:37now like we are still focused on ux right because like still i like i personally think and the entire team thinks that ux is not so good not just off quick swipe but of entire amm industry i would say and especially on layer 2 like as we discussed in your previous questions that you know there are a lot of bridging problem then there are a lot of bullet problems

15:55wallet not supporting but polygon network so it's hard to use applications on polygon on any wallet especially quick swap like and maybe ave go to another application as well right so our major focus right now is on improving the ux because that's why we built quick swap in the first place that was the entire purpose of building the code to improve the ux right so we are

16:15working on a lot of stuff right now to improve the ux and the major one being we are like uh overhauling the entire design of our current interfaces right so we want to just not we just do not want to you know redesign how quickstart works but we want to redesign how how amm works right we want to change the user experience of how amm works right right now it's very rudimentary not just

16:36quick swap like even the good platforms out there um if you so suppose if you're coming from a traditional world from a fiat world and if i'll ask you to use right it will be very hard for you to use it first you'll have to get some tutorials you have to understand what metamask is like how to add a custom network over there how to bridge your assets from

16:52ethereum layer one to poly one layer two and then you will be able to use quick swap or any other application on layer two right so that's the biggest friction i would say so our major focus right now is on improving ux improving the design improving the wallets like and everything like partnering up so we are already partnering up with all these players who are out there to

17:12improve the ux uh problem then the next stage of this would be so we are planning out you know our next version of bookstore so i would say a v2 right so it's still under so we are still considering what to do in that we have some pretty good ideas we are discussing it internally we are discussing it with our advisors as well and so i do not have much to disclose as

17:32of now but i think yeah so quick quick for v2 is in our roadmap as well but again like the first and foremost is the ux definitely and i am excited to uh see that launch of v2 i know uniswap just came out with a v3 so uh it will be really interesting to see and i'm sure there are definitely a lot of ux improvements that will be needed to bring on more no coiners and even people

17:58that are only using centralized exchanges right now in cryptocurrency they're sort of afraid of the technical barriers to entry on even uniswap never mind moving into a later layer two solutions so all the best continuing with that if there are viewers that are looking to learn more about the liquidity providing trading on unit swap how to get start on

18:17sorry on quick swap how to get started trading on quick swap and make their first trades what's the best way for them to learn more and to get started yeah so it's the best way to learn is to go to our medium page i would say and there we have articles we have tutorials and you can like go through them and they start working on it but apart from that

18:37there are certain youtube videos which have been like created by our community member by our team from lda by nicole by day by rock like everyone and those are like wonderful tutorials i will say not just in like english language but they are in regional languages as well in spanish and french like in different languages people have created those tutorials so i

18:55would say why don't you go to youtube you search quick swap and you'll find a lot of tutorials over there or you go to our medium page you'll find a lot of articles over there you know and i'm definitely sure it will help you get started still if you are stuck somewhere go to twitter find me out or find whatsapp out and pms and we'll help you out great same i will leave all those

19:17community links for quick swap in the description box below all the best with the continued uh upgrading and growth of quick swap and let's follow up in the near future thanks a lot thanks esther it was nice talking to you and you asked some of the you know uh very good questions i would say some you know the questions which like the community has been asking for a long

19:38time and we have been trying to answer it but i think for this particular video we will be able to reach masses and they'll have answer to their questions thank you you