Over the last week, a new Dex has appeared in the Cosmos. Junoswap, built on the Juno smart contract Cosmos chain is live. I figured I'd take a look and give it a go.
Armed with a few JUNO tokens, I'm just having a play at the moment. First impression on visiting Junoswap is "ouch, wen dark mode?"
Once my eyes adjust, and keeping in mind that this is a very new product, in Beta and without an incentive structure yet, I take a look at what is on offer. Firstly, There is currently around 9 liquidity pools live, all paired with the JUNO token. ATOM has the deepest pool, with $4 million in liquidity.
I decide that I will pool my few JUNO (literally talking about 3.5 JUNO here, just playing around) into the JUNO/LUNA pool. I'm playing with all this while the crypto markets are taking a beating, but whatever, it is what it is.
So here is my pool, as you can see there is $100K in liquidity, and no rewards incentive yet. The rewards program, and a new token for this Dex called RAW is a work in progress and coming soon. More on that in a bit.
I switch to the Swap tab, and trade half on my Juno to Luna.
The first attempt failed, with an error message. Likely this was because I took my time, taking the screenshot for this post, and so on, and the pool prices likely moved so my add liquidity wasn't balanced. Try again without the time delay and the tx works fine.
So there you have it, my first liquidity on this fledgling platform. So, why get involved so early and before there are any incentives on offer? A few reasons:
Just to give it a try.
See how similar it is to Osmosis - the UX is very similar - IBC works so well, and TX's are fast and cheap.
Just in-case - I have a JUNO stake, and the upcoming Dex token for Junoswap is going to be airdropped to stakers on various Cosmos chains - not announced in detail yet, just mentioned in a tweet. I'm starting to pool now in-case there is an airdrop to early adopters.
So this is a very early work in progress addition to the Dex environment in the Cosmos. JUNO will be the base asset for all pools, Cosmos tokens will be there but longer term the primary use case will be for new tokens being launched on Juno. There are a raft of projects launching on Juno, building it out as its own eco-system with its token structure (CW20). This Dex is not intended to be a competitor to Osmosis. The range of JUNO native tokens will be the primary use case.
The RAW token will be the reward and governance token for the Dex. This is being launched as a separate token from JUNO primarily as Junoswap may not be the only Dex on JUNO, and using the Juno token only as an incentive would not be sustainable. Here is a quote from the team about RAW:
$RAW will be assigned & rebalanced by the DAO to incentivize strong pools on Junoswap on a weekly basis.
Additionally anyone will be able to stake their $RAW in the DAO.
$JUNO by default is the base pair to all assets on the interchain DEX + used for gas.
All in all, it is a good start for the team, and the overall JUNO platform is likely to become a treasure trove of new and interesting options. I'm here for it, and building by JUNO stake and will play with things as they come to life. My concern at this point with Junoswap is the value proposition of the RAW token. What its value capture and use case, beyond just a reward token will be holds the key. If people can earn it from LPing, and then have ways to invest it and it carries some use case, then it will work. Remains to be seen the tokenomics structure of this coin, and that will be critical to the success of Junoswap attracting liquidity.
Going to be busy, with Osmosis, the upcoming Comdex offering, Junoswap and no doubt EVMOS will have some significant offerings into the future. All of which will be connected through the magic of IBC.
Anyone not taking the explosion of activity and growth throughout the IBC eco-system as a serious opportunity is missing out.
Thanks for reading,
JK.
For more to read, take a look at some other recent Cosmos eco-system posts:
