In our latest space we were joined by Swell ecosystem partners Ambient, Ion and Brahma to explore the opportunities and rewards they will unlock on Swell L2.
In case you missed it here, here are the top questions from the event.
Why are you excited about Swell L2?
“A key part of why we’re excited about Swell L2, is the caliber of builders that have been kind enough to signal building on our L2, which includes Brahma, Ion, Ambient and others to follow. Part of our core thesis for Swell L2 is that we see it as the logical next step for an LRT to capture more of the value chain in a manner that is win-win across restakers, AVS’s, token holders, builders and primitives that we all know, use and love.
Part of this belief was that the future of finance was in many ways optimizing towards building the best possible experience for LRTs, and this meta of being able to seamlessly tap into the composability power of the LRTs and primitives such as DEXs, consoles and borrow lend protocols.“
– Daniel, Swell
Give us an overview of your protocol
“Ion is a lending platform built specifically to support staked and restaked assets, allowing you to gain access to leverage, hedging, shorting and all sorts of financial structured activities without any exposure to depeg or price risk. Our goal is to focus on supporting the financialisation of staked and resstaked assets as much as possible while making sure users can be as safe as possible when utilizing all these assets in DeFi.”
– Chunda, Ion
“At Brahma we are working to make execution easier for users across chains. If you're interacting with dApps on any EVM chain, you can use the Brahma console to batch your transactions, do sequential transactions and also manage your positions. The goal is that if you're on any EVM chain you can initiate any transaction and interact with any dApp while on the console.”
– Kaku, Brahma
“The core idea behind Ambient is to reinvent the AMM experience. One thing that we think we need is the ability for ordinary people to participate in providing liquidity and earn a decent return for doing so. We are trying to push back against this trend in the industry where a lot of liquidity is moving towards professional market makers because we think that it is unethical to the core concepts behind decentralized markets. We focus on making the experience better, more intuitive and easier for AMM users, and try to improve the economics around being an AMM. We have built out the protocol to be sensible and the protocol itself supports its bias towards LPs in the sense that it is trying to increase the rewards that they earn from our internal incentives, but also from the swap fees themselves.”
– Doug Colkitt, Ambient
Why did you choose to deploy on Swell L2?
“I believe roll ups should focus on building ecosystems around the core competency of the founders, and focus on curating and providing resources to the best applications for that specific ecosystem. Swell in particular are positioning themselves to own the LRTfi and LSTfi ecosystem and creating a specific ecosystem for builders who are thinking very actively about this asset class."
With that in mind we definitely wanted to be on the ground up helping build the foundation of that ecosystem as one of the first protocols that was focused on exclusively supporting LST and LRTs.“
– Chunda, Ion
“Swell has been progressive in terms of building a new ecosystem around LRTs and we will see a lot of interesting DeFi applications building on Swell. We want to be the default gateway for users on Swell and we are really excited to see the innovations that happen on top of Swell L2 and LRTs.”
– Kaku, Brahma
“We were very impressed with Swell’s vision when we first spoke to the team about how they imagine the future of the LRT ecosystem and the approach they are taking to cultivating an L2 ecosystem. We have been very impressed with Swell’s methodical approach to making sure the chain will be active on day one, whilst also being a great experience for users. We think restaking not only opens up a lot of primitives for us as a DEX, but it also opens up a lot of possibilities for DeFi across the space. Once you can safely move computation offchain, a lot of limitations of DeFi are no longer there.”
– Doug Colkitt, Ambient
Tell us about your Points program and what it will look like?
“Ambient is running a points program currently on our existing deployments. We mostly emphasize rewards for liquidity providers, with Swell pre-depositors to be rewarded as well. As a concentrated liquidity dex we are focused on a combination of TVL and depth. Some points do go to swaps but we are an LP first so most of the points will be emphasized on liquidity.”
– Doug Colkitt Ambient
“We will be announcing most of our information around our program next month. We will have chain specific rewards connecting all EVM chains together which will evolve around the activity that users do on our chain, and the amount of assets being moved across all chains.”
– Kaku, Brahma
“We will be going live with our points program within a week's time. For Ion Core, you just need to participate on the platform i.e. interacting with the different markets. You will be able to generate rewards and earn points from us but also from our LRT partners. A few weeks from now we will be announcing another extension on how you can earn even more points on top of the initial ones by working with our L2 and chain abstraction partners.”
– Chunda, Ion
What can we expect from your project in the next 6 months?
“We are focused on making the user experience seamless and yields more attractive for LPs by adjusting swap fees in different ways. We’re also really focused on getting builders to build on top of Ambient.”
– Doug Colkitt, Ambient
“Short term, we’re going to be deploying Ion Core on mainnet within the next week and allow anyone to interact with the Ion platform. After that, we are going to be launching our new initiative with roll ups of which we have 17 partners lined up, with Swell being one of our core partners. Starting next month we are going live with new infrastructure and extending the rollup initiative to support chain abstraction and the bridging ecosystem. Our goal is to make Ion as entrenched as possible in the rollup infrastructure ecosystem by the end of the year.”
– Chunda, Ion
“We just recently launched on mainnet and in the coming weeks we will be working on execution. We will be pushing out mobile progressive web apps where users can sign transactions from their phone as well as connect with CEXs, where you can seamlessly move funds onchain from centralized exchanges using the same wallet address.”
– Kaku, Brahma
Thanks to everyone who attended the event!
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