Camille A. Hanard
AMA Recap: QuickSwap
Speaker: Sameep Singhania, co-founder of QuickSwap
Date of the event: November 23, 2021
DeFi Teller
Hello, everyone! We are happy to welcome you here in the DeFiTeller group! Today, we are meeting here with the co-founder of the largest exchange on Polygon - QuickSwap - Sameep Singhania!
Hi Sameep, very happy to have you here with us today! How are you doing?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
First of all I would like to thank you guys for hosting QuickSwap today. I am glad to be here.
I am doing great and I hope the same for you guys as well!
DeFi Teller
How are you coping with yet another market downturn?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Haha, well it's a part and parcel of being in the crypto/blockchain industry. So, I am not very much worried about it. Our focus is always on building stuff that helps grow this industry. And that's what we are doing right now.
DeFi Teller
That's great! Let's get our event started! I'd like to ask you to briefly describe what QuickSwap is all about. We understand perfectly well that during this relatively short time of its existence, the project has reached a stage where you can say that it requires no further introduction, but we still want to hear a couple of words from you personally. So, what was the idea that started it all, what can you point out as the main feature of QuickSwap, how would you describe what you do yourself?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
That's a great question. Though we have grown to a stage where we have good visibility, I still believe that we have only scratched the surface of what can be done.
QuickSwap is a fork of Uniswap that runs on the Polygon network (formerly Matic Network), a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum. Polygon features lower transaction fees compared to the Ethereum mainnet, enabling QuickSwap to facilitate token swaps faster and at a lower cost relative to exchanges like Uniswap
In a nutshell, QuickSwap is a Decentralized exchange, where you can buy or sell cryptocurrency, at a very low/negligible transaction cost and at a very high speed.
How did it all start?
It’s a very long and interesting story. The inception of QuickSwap was inspired by the increasing ETH and gas prices. In July-August last year, ETH prices and tx cost on Ethereum was increasing exponentially and the platform was virtually unusable by small to mid sized users. We realised that if we want to bring the next 1 million users to the blockchain then we need to fix a major UX problem. And then we decided to set up a DEX on layer 2, as we think DEX is the primary need for any decentralized ecosystem. We discussed it with the Polygon team, specifically Sandeep, and that’s how QuickSwap came into existence.
The main feature of QuickSwap is its wonderful UX. We always wanted to solve the UX In the DeFi industry starting with high transaction cost and low speeds. Because we think these two factors are the biggest hurdle in improving UX. And I think we have solved it for now.
Apart from that, the tokenomics of QuickSwap is also very unique in its own sense. We have more than 95% of the total supply of QUICK reserved for the community. I am not sure if any other project has this beautiful and community centered tokenomics.
Apart from that, we have Liquidity mining, dual farming, dragon's lair, and dragon syrup running of our DEX, which increases the overall returns for the liquidity providers and traders.
DeFi Teller
The fact that Uniswap and Sushiswap have long been and remain out of reach for those who don't move thousands of thousands is a widely discussed reality. So I wonder, would you say that small and mid-size users are the majority on QuickSwap right now?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
That's exactly what is happening on QuickSwap. QuickSwap has enabled small traders to exchange assets. We always talk about bringing the next million or ten million users to the decentralized ethos. But that is only possible if you can enable small participants to come and use the platform and that's what we are trying to do with QuickSwap.
I think layer 2s are all about bringing masses to the decentralized ecosystem. And the majority of them are small players.
DeFi Teller
What can you say have been the most significant achievements since the inception of the exchange and what are the team's future plans? Is there anything major planned, do we need to have our finger on the pulse?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
The most significant achievement to date is enabling users to trade crypto without worrying about gas costs. That was the main reason behind setting up QuickSwap. And I hope we have achieved it.
Apart from that, we have partnered with hundreds of projects. Which is a great achievement. We initially launched with just a DEX, but now we have multiple products including liquidity mining, dual mining, Dragon's lair, Dragon syrup, and limit orders (powered by gelato).
We also got listed on Binance, Coinbase, Kucoin, crypto.com, and tons of other exchanges as well. And all of this happened organically, which is a very rare occurrence.
Another great achievement of QuickSwap is its community. We have grown 100% organically just because of our community. We have reached up to $1.6b in TVL, $1.5b in 24 hours volume just because of our community and partners.
And all of it happened in a span of just one year.
There are tons of things which are planned for the near future. As I said before, our major focus has always been on improving UX. The next step towards this is our new interface which is already under development in a testing phase and should be released very soon.
We are expanding our marketing and BD to reach out to more partners both from the decentralized and traditional ecosystem as well. Our aim is to bring this DEX to self sustenance where the volume on the DEX should generate enough revenue/fees to encourage LPs to keep providing liquidity.
There are a few more things in the plan but I would like to keep them as a surprise for the future.
DeFi Teller
Quite a year it must have been for you!
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
It was one hell of a ride which I would like to take repeatedly every year. It's like living your dream!
DeFi Teller
And now, let's move on to questions from our subscribers. We have received a lot of them, and I tried to pick out the most important ones. So let’s get started!
The first bunch of questions is about QuickSwap and its latest activities. Now I want to point out that these are quite diverse questions, but I think it's better to ask them at the very beginning and then move on to discussing particular topics, like the TreasureHunt campaign or the Polygon ecosystem.
The first question goes like this:
How does your decentralization work? How many QUICK does a user need to hold to get voting or proposal power? What kind of decisions are made by the community?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Decentralization is something, which is managed by the underlying blockchain, which in our case is Polygon. But, if you are talking about the QUICK governance token then you can participate in all the voting activities that happen on the platform.
There is no minimum amount of QUICK required to get voting rights. If you have 0.00001QUICK you can still vote, but your voting power will be less. The more QUICK you have, the more voting power you will get.
Almost all decisions related to the platform are taken by the community vote. Some of the more recent votes were:
1. Vote for bringing Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder polygon, as an advisor.
2. Changing reward token of the mining program to dQUICK instead of QUICK.
You can find all past and ongoing votes over here.
DeFi Teller
One of QuickSwap's best highlights recently was the Integration of your RSS FEEDS on none other than Crypto.com. So tell us, is there a significant increase in users or TVL after the integration news? Is the integration going to be permanent or temporary?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Yes, it was a great integration. I think the integration is permanent. But the crypto.com team is best suited to give this answer.
Whenever such news comes out, we definitely see an increase in the influx of new users. Maybe, it did not impact our TVL much but it definitely gave us tons of new users. On a daily basis more than 100k unique users visit our exchange and we are processing almost 400k transactions every day.
DeFi Teller
How has the growth of the Polygon’s ecosystem affected Quickswap? Is it hard to stay number 1 DEX on the platform with so many competitors?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Growth of QuickSwap is directly related to Polygon. What we have seen in the last year is that any project coming to Polygon eventually comes to QuickSwap as well and brings all their users to us. So, I would say, both Polygon and QuickSwap have a major role to play in each other's growth.
I think it's good to have competitors. We already have tons of competitors on Polygon and other layer 2s but we are still number one by a great margin. But it's not all about being #1. We always wanted to grow the ecosystem and it can only happen when there are multiple DEXes out there. So, I welcome all DEXes who want to come to Polygon and join the wagon. Because they are helping us realize our dream!
DeFi Teller
Two questions that relate to the grant QuickSwap has received from Polygon. I'll ask them both at once, to make it easier for you to respond.
The million-dollar grant from Polygon didn't help you boost liquidity, the TVL is gradually declining, compared to June. Is this a logical dynamic, showing that there are more valid projects on Polygon now and liquidity is distributed among them, or do you see this as a problem?
Some exchanges saw users outflow at some point after their initial liquidity mining programs and yield farming opportunities wore off. With Quickswap turning 1 year old soon, how do you feel, is your DEX protected from such fate?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
The grant from Polygon allowed us to sustain our liquidity when others were losing out on it. And since the beginning of dual rewards on the MATIC pairs, we have seen a subsequent amount of MATIC liquidity coming on to our platform. So, overall this grant from Polygon did good to us. And I am hoping we will receive more such grants in the near future.
I agree, distributed liquidity is a problem because then users are not able to get best prices without higher price impacts. But, I think that problem is broadly solved by aggregators like Paraswap which tap into the entire platform's liquidity.
I completely agree that some exchanges see the outflux of liquidity when the rewards dry out. It's a very real problem. But Uniswap has proven that a DEX can sustain even without any rewards. And that's only possible when you have good volume to generate ample amounts of fees to keep Liquidity providers incentivized enough to stay on your platform. And we are working towards it. All of our partnerships and business development efforts are aligned towards bringing volume to our DEX.
Though we still have enough rewards to cover the next three years, we still believe that rewards are just a way to bring users to the platform. So we definitely need more volume and we are working on that path. Our volume is great compared to others out there.
DeFi Teller
In light of recent U.S. regulations in crypto, DeFi users in the future might need some additional tools to control their "unrealized gains" levels. Does Quickswap plan to address this issue, maybe by integrating with portfolio managers?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
I am not sure if that is something QuickSwap needs to do. This regulation is specific to the US and QuickSwap does not want to do anything specific to any jurisdiction.
But, these portfolio managers can easily integrate QuickSwap to show the information about unrealized gains to the users. QuickSwap is a platform and other tools and services can use it to provide various kinds of info to the users as per their jurisdictions.
DeFi Teller
A couple of questions about the new affiliate platform you announced not too long ago - Starter. And by the way, what exactly does QuickSwap have to do with this launchpad?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
This launchpad is not a product of QuickSwap, just to clear this out. At QuickSwap, we do not believe in doing everything on our own. We just want to focus on excelling at one thing and that is running a DEX. Everything should be done by others.
Going by that philosophy, we’ve decided to partner up with projects to provide best services to our users. So we’ve partnered up with Starter to provide IDO services to our users and projects. Similarly, we partnered with Gelato for the limit orders.
DeFi Teller
Ok, that's what I wanted to know. Here's the question from our reader anyway. I think you can answer it at least partially, on behalf of QuickSwap.
Please tell us about the launch of Starter, an IDO platform on QuickSwap. What projects are going to benefit from it? How can a retail investor participate in this process?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Starter is a great launchpad. One of the best I have seen so far. Their process to vet the project before launching them is great and cuts the crap out. I think you can get more information about Starter from their website, as I don't know much about their processes.
So projects looking out for IDO and DEX listings can greatly benefit from it.
DeFi Teller
Ok, then, thank you Sameep for clearing this out, because I think a lot of our followers had an impression that the platform was in fact of the same origin as QuickSwap. Now, I suggest we move on to other questions.
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Cool, I am glad I was able to clear this out.
DeFi Teller
What is your stand on interoperability? Do you plan to bridge more chains - after Solana, will the next network be Avalanche?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Well, it depends on what you mean by interoperability. To us it means when we are able to tap into all platforms at once. And it's not possible at the current technological level. So, we are not planning to bridge to more chains as of now. Because we think by doing so we will be thinning out our resources massively. And right now, we only want to focus on making QuickSwap best on just one chain.
Maybe in the future, when we have achieved our initial targets, we will plan to move to new chains as well. And this future can be very very near.
DeFi Teller
The next question somewhat echoes the previous one, and since you've already expressed your opinion about spreading to many networks at once, I would like to ask you to answer the part where the user asks for your opinion on comparing Polygon to other Ethereum scaling solutions.
What do you think about other scale solutions for Ethereum? Any plans to migrate on Optimism or Arbitrum? Do you agree that the rollups technology is more secure than Polygon's 'commit chain’?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
I think every solution out there has its own pros and cons. Polygon is good for one set of problems and optimism another. It's very much similar to traditional technologies out there. For example, you choose either postgres or mongodb, according to your needs. If you choose postgres over mongodb, then that does not make mongodb less superior or less useful.
Similarly in the case of blockchain scaling solutions each solution has its own set of features. And now it's up to the application developers and users to choose which solution they like as per their needs.
By the way, Polygon is also adopting and investing heavily in the rollups technology, and Polygon Hermez is a great example to it. As I said before, we have no plans to move to other chains as of now. But we might do that in the near future.
DeFi Teller
I have some questions about your TreasureHunt campaign here next.
Proof that you value community-engagements is the recently concluded fun activity called QuickSwap's Treasure Hunt. Now, why did you decide to have this activity in the first place? Do you have plans to have more QuickSwap community activities?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
All of it is managed by our community and marketing team, so maybe they are best suited to answer this one. But I will try my best.
As I have always said, the community is at the forefront of everything we do. We are what we are just because of our community. And I feel that our community is the most active and vibrant community any project could have.
Keeping that in mind, we always keep our community engaged and Treasure Hunt was one such activity. Another such program is our ambassador program, where members from the community become QuickSwap ambassadors and spread the word around like fire.
We definitely have more such things coming out for the community. But as I said before, it's all managed by the community and marketing team which is led by Roc. So maybe I will pass on these questions to Roc to answer.
DeFi Teller
Thank you, Sameep! So we have ten more minutes and two questions left to ask.
Your approach to marketing, design solutions, your TreasureHunt campaign, it all seems to lead to the fact that QuickSwap will launch a play-to-earn or even a metaverse sooner or later. Are you really planning to expand in this direction, or are you adjusting to the trendy style?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Hahaha, well we may enter into the metaverse at some point of time. After all, it's very enticing. Play-to-earn is on the card sooner or later. We will definitely expand in any direction required to get more eyes to the platform. Because as I said before a DEX can only sustain if it has great volume and it can only get more volume when more users are using it. So, we want every possible eye looking and using QuickSwap.
Sometimes you need to do stuff that is trendy. Because it brings tons of users. And users are all that matters in DeFi.
DeFi Teller
And the last question:
There was news of arbitrage bots spamming the Polygon network and taking leverage of low fees and quick transactions. The community decided to fight them with higher fees - how did that decision impact QuickSwap and its trading volume?
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Arbitrageurs are actually good for DeFi. They are the backbone of exchanges like QuickSwap. Without them we won't exist.
I am not sure if it was because of the arbitrageurs that the decision to increase the gas fees was taken. I personally saw tons of transactions on the Polygon network which were not arbitrage. So some of the haters were actually DDOSing the network. And the decision to increase the gas fees was to handle these attackers.
Arbitrage is still happening at large and will always happen. As I said, it's a backbone of the entire industry.
DeFi Teller
Thanks again, Sameep, for joining us today! I had a great time talking to you! The best of luck to you and the QuickSwap team!
Sameep Singhania | QuickSwap
Thanks to you guys for hosting me. I really enjoyed our conversation today. Bye-bye guys. See you at QuickSwap!
