In the wake of Seawolf surfacing on the Goerli testnet, we invited the Aquanauts to join us in Discord for an AMA.
The resulting discussion spanned a range of topics — from technical details of the testnet, to Swell vaults, and how to earn Discord Roles through the Aquanauts program.
In case you missed it, here's our pick of the five best questions from the event:
1. What's the purpose of the testnet? And is it incentivized?
The purpose of deploying Seawolf on the testnet is to make sure that all the protocol functionality is working properly. This helps manage risk and ensures that everything is safe and secure when it goes live on mainnet.
We appreciate all community testing efforts, but have also experimented extensively with the protocol internally. As such, testnet activity will not be directly recognized or incentivized through the Aquanauts program.
However, there is still an opportunity to earn Discord Roles by helping us to promote the testnet!
2. Has there been any feedback on the testnet and adjustments to the roadmap?
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, which is a nice validation of the hard work of the team.
That said, there are still a couple other things we'll be adding prior to mainnet. This includes a communal transaction history so you can see all the deposits as they come in; including details like time, date, size, etc.
3. Will the mainnet launch be ready for Shanghai?
The full public launch is currently timed to flow off the Shapella upgrade.
We'll be launching just as staked ETH withdrawals go live, and then Swell's staked ETH withdrawal functionality will follow shortly afterwards.
4. What is a vault?
Vaults will be coming to Swell shortly after the raw staking functionality is launched on mainnet.
These vaults will enable folks to stake their ETH in return for swETH, and then easily get one-click exposure to various different DeFi strategies: ranging from liquidity providing all the way to leveraged staking and options-based delta-neutral vaults.
Vault rewards will be collected by the staker in the form of various different tokens, and we may build in some functionality that sells these rewards in a gas-efficient way, and compounds them back into the base asset that you deposited. Basically: what you put in would be what you get out.
With these vaults, the Swell dApp will become a gateway to various different yield strategies. Sort of like the App Store offers a convenient one-stop shop for downloading apps.
In the short-term, the first vault to be deployed will be a liquidity provider vault based on Aura and Balancer. Your swETH will be deposited into Balancer to receive Balancer Pool Tokens, which are then carried over into Aura to earn Balancer trading fees, boosted BAL rewards and AURA.
In the long run, we are likely to democratize the process of choosing vaults, enabling community members to vote or join a council to determine which vaults are integrated with the platform. Alternatively we could make them fully permissionless, but this remains to be seen.
5. Will there be a light theme for the dApp?
That's something in the list of development tasks, and can be expected on the dApp a little further down the line.
Join the Aquanauts
Follow us on Twitter and join the Swell Discord to make sure you don't miss our next AMA!
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