A couple of days ago the Morphswap Team participated in an AMA - ask me anything - in the Polygon News Telegram group, a group with 6.5k members and a lot of activity. This is huge for Morphswap and the partnerships keep coming for the very first decentralized cross-chain AMM.
Here's a transcript of the information relayed for anyone to get as much information about the project as digested as possible:
About the Morphswap Team
Eric is the project Founder and CEO and is a certified developer genius, as measured by Leetcode competitions in which he ranked in the top 0.5% globally. That’s the type of contest that Meta/Google subject engineers to in interviews. He has fantastic experience as a blockchain developer and is a master of arbitrage.
Alonso is the Chief of Growth. He has 10 years of experience in digital marketing with the past two years being 100% focused in Web3. He developed and launched and NFT series which generated 7 figures in revenue and used the profits of that to build some NFT games working with Gio, another Morphswap key team member. His 9-5 job is CGO at a seed funded blockchain infrastructure company that’s about to be acquired by [CENSORED DUE TO NDA]. Morphswap is the project he believes in the most out of anything he's ever seen or been involved with.
Gio is the chief of community and business development. He and Alonso have worked together for more than a year in Web3. Gio is the guy who gets Morphswap into meetings with Polygon, Chainlink, market makers, and is the beating heart of our community. He also works on a cutting edge blockchain startup.
Alex is our senior FE developer & product manager and anomadsoul helps with marketing.
Building Morphswap from the ground up
Eric worked on Morphswap alone for about 7 months before announcing a minimum viable product to the world. Before Before Morphswap, his experience in Web3 was running and maintaining Arbitrage and MEV bots on AMMs. So before starting a cross-chain AMM, he had already acquired a lot of experience with AMMs prior to Morphswap.
The name Morphswap was born out of the idea of wanting a name that portrayed what it represented. All Uniswap-style AMMs are signified by having "swap" effectively be a suffix to their name. So the last part of the name was always going to be "swap", but for the first part, he wanted a short term, in the pedestrian lexicon, that people associated with changing form (as Morphswap facilitates the seamlessly change of the chain your asset is on).
Basically MORPH any coin on any chain to anything else:)
Morphswap is the world’s most powerful DEX: It has all the capabilities you love from Quick, Uni, or PCS as a permissionless and highly secure DEX but it blows them all out of the water because Morphswap supports 7 chains with interoperable swaps. This means you can swap ETH on ethereum to USDC on Matic in a single swap.
Morphswap completes cross chain transactions in 30 seconds or less, and due to the completely decentralized nature, it is far more secure than Centralized bridges (even Binance’s got hacked this year).
Why Morpshwap instead of any other option?
Right now if you want to move crypto across chains you have 2 solutions: A CEX or a centralized bridge. These two options are:
❌ SLOW (30 min completion time)
❌ UNSECURE (Donate to SBF, or the bridge gets hacked) 20 BILLION customer funds lost on centralized tech this year alone.
❌ Not private (enjoy donating gains the government)
Morphswap.io on the other hand is the fastest and most secure way to transfer coins from one chain to another. It’s about 60x faster than most bridges and a lot faster, more secure, and private than a CEX.
Bridges are very slow, people have lost opportunities to profit by having to wait hours because of some bad congestion, it's STILL a mess with bridges even after 2 years of constant 'development' across the blockspace. It's also terrifying for new web3 adopters the first time you use a bridge... waiting/refreshing for these confirmation ticks, hoping NOTHING WRONG will happen
The thing is, for the past couple of years it seems like every project has been saying that they have a "cross-chain solution" in development, but never seem to actually make progress on it. That's also also why it was pretty surprising to a lot of people that nobody had done what we had done before.
About the Native token: Morphswap (MS)
Our team's philosophy is that 99.9% of "native protocol token utility" result in failure. Speaking from the team's experience of trying to design a sustainable p2e ecosystem model, these models simply DO NOT WORK mathematicallly.
The Morphswap Team is made of decentralization MAXIMALISTS, and as such the MOST important thing for the future of interoperable DeFi is to have an open, public, and decentralized protocol (morphswap) that is owned and operated by the DAO.
Unlike many protocols creating vaporware usecases for tokens that amount to nothing more than a veiled scheme for high APY, Morphswap's governance token has real utility. By holding MS tokens, a user has ownership in the DAO of Morphswap.
This gives them the right to propose and vote on other people's proposals for code updates to the protocol, determine how treasury funds are used, and implement things like "protocol fees having a percentage allocation to token holders" to name one among countless options.
We believe in an efficient, decentralized protocol where DAO participants define the future of how the protocol benefits them.
This means:
- The more holders of MS, the more decentralized (secure) the protocol becomes.
- As more adoption of the MS Protocol occurs, the value of securing that protocol becomes higher.
- DAO Voters can implement "token utility" if there is a shared community vision for a new function for the MS token.
Our DAO can literally propose and update the protocol smart contract code to be whatever we want it to be.
Any change to the code is entirely within the realm of our future but the voice of the community and token holders must enact these implementations. Decentralization at its best.
Tokenomics matter for Morphswap
First of all, the tokenomics are also going to be governed by the DAO:
BURNING TOKENS
MS is non-inflationary and it is naturally sustainable: 100 million MS tokens is all that can exist from our ERC20 contract. We do manual burns occasionally, and it is also possible for a governance vote to enact burn policies.
TOKENOMICS
There is a 100M total supply.
- 35% allocated to liquidity incentives, necessary for gaining the liquidity to facilitate transactions.
- 30% initially put on the market.
- The remaining 35% is split between the team funds (15%) and reserves (20%).
We have managed to not use any of the reserves so far, since we are doing everything within our power to minimize sell pressure and inflation.
Morphswap Rewards
We think it's very important to reward early liquidity providers as that is what makes our protocol usable but we also want a FINITE time where the token is rewarded to people who provide liquidity, rather than a permanent reward system.
We view token distribution as a way to get people to provide liquidity; we don't want the token to eternally have sell-pressure and inflation. So right now about 0.8% of the supply is given out per week, and that will continue until the funds are out, slowly decreasing every few months.
The total supply is limited and is not that big, so we are already prepared for a steady increase in value over time.
Generating Revenue for the protocol
90% of web3 projects don't actually have a revenue model, their only way to make money is to dump tokens. This is not the case with Morphswap.
- Every bridge generates fees
- Every swap generated fees that scales in line with value of swap
- Every swap also generates a fee in $LINK due to swapmining
We are still working out our revenue forecasts, but compared to other, inferior solutions, it will be quite easy for us to hit the 8 figure revenue watermark within 12 months as long as our growth and partnerships continue as they are going now.
In fact, as of today, we are extremely lean and already turning a profit
Security above everything else
We are actually finishing up an audit from Shellboxes right now, we have been working with them on an audit for the past couple of weeks and expect to be done and release the report in the next week. The audit has taken multiple weeks, and that's not because of errors, but because of the massive codebase for a project of this complexity - the protocol has 8 contracts deployed per chain.
We still chose to pay an arm and a leg for it out of pocket rather than using our reserves to fund it.
The possibilities are endless
Morphswap allows users to create their own cross-chain SWAP pools. As long as the tokens paired are built on top of a blockchain that Morphswap supports - which is seven, with many more under development - then the pool can be created. One of the tokens has to be on Polygon, and the other token can exist on any other supported blockchain.
There are a few requirements to create pool:
The new Pool has to have a liquidity of $400+ on each size
Right now we still have to manually assign token rewards to LP providers on new pools. This will be fully automated in the near future.
The LP rewards come in two forms: MS rewards for eligible pools, and the fees generated fees from swap volume.
Morphswap short term Roadmap
The protocol already works but we’re also tackling things that are highly innovative...
From the product perspective:
- Finish security audit.
- Add BTC swaps (this month).
- Scope out XMR swaps (depending on feedback from interested capital firms).
- Improve product UI/UX.
From the Marketing perspective:
- We’re growing a lot through partnerships right now (we’ve gotten endorsements from Fantom, Chainlink, working on MATIC).
- We have a strong word of mouth growth.
- We're building a major SEO campaign for sustainable growth.
From the Business Perspective:
- We are finishing a pitch deck right now
- Starting VC raise in january
- Establishing long term connections to Layer 1 Business development managers
- Already have indication of interest to join our cap table from an extremely big name market making firm (we’re under NDA).
The reality here is that we need 8-9 figs in protocol liquidity to really hit the zenith of what's possible. Our dream vision is handling 500 billion in annual volume. The infrastructure supports that today, but we need LP.
Conclusion
What we really hope is that when you need to move coins across chains you try morphswap.io first. We don't have tons of liquidity so we can only handle smaller txs right now but that will improve.
This is a multi year project so if you do choose to join the DAO keep that in mind. We don't blow budget on marketing shenanigans since our product really gains adoption by itself.
Q&A Section
These are only the digested answers to facilitate reading.
We have a volume of 10-20K USD/day on SWAPS, which is amazing for such a young AMM and literally 0 spent on marketing.
Polygon is our central chain. If a user goes to the DASHBOARD section and check our pools they will understand how important Polygon is for Morpshwap and viceversa!
Maybe after we add the other major non-smart chains (BTC/XMR/LTC/DOGE) we will look into possibly doing decentralized NFT exchange, but that's not really on the radar right now. Additionally holders could vote upon whether to greenlight swapmining based on NFT holding, but that's not what our focus is currently on.
We already have a docs page which is a bit easier to read than the whitepaper.
There is a bridge for Morphswap, but the cross-chain swap feature is not actually using any bridging. It's utilizing Chainlink Oracles in order to make the transaction happen in one swap transaction. This means most of the swap transactions will be very cheap. It uses the native network coin and fee to swap.
The fees are taken on the domestic chain (the chain the swap originates from), and the charged fees are based upon the destination chain. Of course, all the L2s are very cheap, with the only non-negligible cost being when Ethereum is a destination chain. For LP providers this isn't noticeable though, as the principle of AMMs means it balances out across both sides.
Morphswap doesn't depend on any servers or anything like that. It is all on-chain, meaning that you can always interact with it directly on-chain, and it doesn't depend on any centralized tech or off-chain tech keeping it up. Additionally, it doesn't depend on outside price oracles for swaprates, so it can't be manipulated during times of drastic price changes.
Thanks to the steady number of swaps, bridge use and fees, we are a sustainable DAO. From here we only foresee bigger growth. We look at Morphswap as a long term decentralized protocol which will be governed by MS holders.
Additionally we are powered by Chainlink and so our cross-chain transmission is based on us using their Oracles. So unless Chainlink or Polygon go down, you will still be able to bridge to and from any chain that Morphswap supports.
Our community is one of the healthiest and more actives in the crypto space. We've grown from 14 people in Sept to 1000 aprox between discord, telegram and our amazing twitter. An ambassador program is something we have thought of, we believe in organic growth and those programs can be extremely effective.
We have a referral program, where people you refer get 0.1% lower fee and you get 0.1% of their volume fees.
We are getting the non-smart chains audited as well. But for all EVM chains, they are constructed in a way where we effectively get to deploy the same contracts to any chain we want to add, so it only requires one audit for all EVM-chains since it's the same code.
That's it!
If you made it this far then you are already more informed about Morphswap than the average user is on any other project.
You still have to Do your own research if you are looking to get involved in this project and become a holder of the Morphswap governance token.
If you want to join our highly active community, you can join our Telegram group, our Discord server and follow us on Twitter