matoken.eth products 2020
Before I decide what I would focus in 2021, I want to look back what I have made last year besides my normal contribution to ENS and Kickback
- AMM on Flow blockchain = Ally-oop
- Personal Token social network = Stuckwithu.eth
- NFT on xDAI = artist.matoken.eth on nifty.ink
- Arb opportunity charts = INDEX COOP and xDAI
AMM on Flow blockchain = Ally-oop
During the summer, I participated in an 8-week builder program organised by Dapper labs and created a super simple AMM using Flow programming language called Cadence.
The reason I was interested in Flow is the fact that high gas rise on Ethereum made it difficult to run non-defi centric dapps like Kickback. Even though Kickback now mainly runs on xDAI chain, I wanted to learn an alternative way which was built ground-up from the team who created CryptoKitties and suffered from the scalability issue of Ethereum.
The Cadance programing language definitely made some improvement based on the pain point of Ethereum dapp development and their toolset is way better than Ethereum back in 2016.
I haven’t spent much time on Flow since then partly because the builder program sort of ended without clear ending as the team had to focus on their token launch, NBA Topshot and all other initiatives and it was not at a state to deploy something on their Mainnet by the time the program ended (in the demo of my AMM, I created a dummy Flow token). NBA top shot runs on their mainnet and they have very nice UX for users to purchase NFT with fiat, but I wasn’t quite sure how I can integrate something similar on my Dapp (and receiving fiat will probably require some sort of merchant registration as Flow nor their wallet itself do not seem to offer the fiat payment option on its own when I was learning).
I will probably take another look when more dapps are deployed into their main network.
Personal Token(PT) social network = Stuckwithu.eth
I created this as part of Seed club hackathon as a way to visualise the activities of personal token holders. It allows you to visualise which addresses (or ENS names) hold various personal tokens as well as NFTs.
The reason I was interested in personal tokens is again related to Kickback. Now that all events moved to virtual, there isn’t a strong reason for people to use Kickback for their events. However, Kickback can be a good way for personal token holders to organise events staking their own tokens, or airdrop their tokens to the participants so I wanted to know if there are any social relationship to these PT token holders.
The app was received positively and I was honoured to receive the third place as well as receiving the bounty prize from https://tryroll.com/ . I also enjoyed the communication with other participants during the hackathon. I see many of the hackathon winners as judges to other hackathons as PT experts which is great.
One criticism of PT space which I experienced through the hackathon is at some degree of walled garden aspect. For example, not the entire token balances on TryRoll are public as some balances (mostly the ones airdropped to users via their own airdropping tools) are still stored into their own database and their API only allows the token holders to see their own balances, but not others. I also wanted to add https://rally.io but they run their entire creator coins into their own EVM compatible chain and their chain activity is not fully accessible at the time of the hackathon. Even though they have API exposing activities and token balances, their blockchain address does not map 1 to 1 to Ethereum Address so it will be difficult to draw a social graph with other PT frameworks.
PT is a very interesting candidate of defi in layer2/sidechains. Even though their tokens are on layer 1, the high gas prevents people from interacting with the token apart from exchanging on Uniswap. This forced PT platform and tool providers to add value outside of l1 either by moving part of their assets into database/sidechain or use PT ownership. as access control to web2 platform (https://collab.land/ which automates chat channel access using token balances is the perfect example).
I may add new personal tokens once their data is accessible in public.
NFT on xDAI = artist.matoken.eth on nifty.ink
https://nifty.ink allows you to draw a doodle and turn it into NFT from the browser. It has probably the best user experience in terms of integrating Ethereum Layer 1 to sidechain (xDAI). It has burner wallet built-in and the dapp pays gas to mint NFT on xDAI chain so even people who have no prior experience on Ethereum can immediately become NFT artists.
For the savvy NFT collectors, it can also allow you to connect to Metamask so that you can “upgrade” the token you purchased on xDAI to mainnet and sell in OpenSea. It also uses ENS as the first-class citizen so you can use your ENS almost as a signature as an NFT artist, hence the born of “artist.matoken.eth”
This is the time we bought the latest iPad with Apple pencil so I had a moment where I kept drawing the latest Defi issues. It was very interesting to experiment with supply and pricing. In the very beginning, I kept issuing only 3, give one to the person I drew, keep one to myself, and only sell 1 for around $1~$3 most of which sold out immediately. Then I started experimenting increasing both the price (up to $10) and supply (up to 3656 for the $EMN hack)
I haven’t drawn lately but I may start drawing as more Defi incidents happen.
If you want to purchase my NFT works, check out the below.
Arb opportunity charts = INDEX COOP and xDAI
While I was participating in the graph curator program, there was an assignment to create a subgraph and builds an dapp on top of it. This was the time I start gaining interests on flashloan and arbitrage so I decided to create a chart representing the spread of INDEX coop token and the sum of their underlying assets so that you could arbitrage between the two.
TLDR, I only saw 10 min opportunities of more than a few % spread in the 3 months period which seems that the chance is too slim.
At the same time, I was taking to $JOON to organise his event on xDAI staking JOON personal token. As mentioned at stuckwithu, PT mostly lives in mainnet so to stake his PT, the token has to cross from L1 mainnet to xDAI chain which will cost 5~10 USD with 100 gwei gas price. Instead of forcing all participants to pay extra gas, we thought about crossing the token in mass and put it on HoneySwap, Uniswap clone in xDAI.
Even though it is technically doable, the challenge is the volatility. The most PT has very small liquidity hence small conversion causes a big disparity between the two chains. If JOON price is too high on xDAI, it will discourage participants to exchange. Hence I was thinking about creating arbitrage bot between the two chains but wanted to check whether arbitrage is actually practical, hence creating a very similar chart to INDEX COOP but for any tokens between Ethereum L1 and xDAI chain.
The chart looks quite similar but for this, I added two 2 features.
- It allows users to put the range (eg: 10–100 USD) and the chart simulates the profit model
- When checking the price on L1, it hits 1inch API endpoint to get the best rate.
Luckily I won another bounty during Gitcoin hackathon.
Summary
In this blog post, I guided through all my hacks which I did last year. As you can see, many of my hacks are hackathons/bounty driven and I appreciate a lot that the last defi summer brought nice rewards to builders. I did earn some yield farming and airdrops but it feels good to earn something for fun and profit.
All my hacks look quite random but many of them are driven by the experience running Kickback off L1. I must say that Kickback lost a bit of momentum due to Ethereum scalability issues and the lack of in-person events due to COVID, but I am hoping the combination of personal tokens off layer 1 (plus bringing financial incentives derived from defi) will become easier in 2021 and my research and hack provably continue focusing around the intersection.
