The Future of Astroport: Liquid Staking DEX

General
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Astroport needs liquidity and volume. But here’s the problem.

Problem: Astroport was state of the art when it launched in December 2021, but now it’s quickly becoming obsolete. Cutting edge Cosmos DEXes have order books and / or concentrated liquidity. As far as I can tell, Delphi is focused on Mars and TFL is focused on new NFT apps. Apparently no devs doing serious work to improve Astroport.

In the crowed field of cutting edge Cosmos DEXes, Astroport needs a niche.

Solution: Astroport becomes the liquid staking DEX of the Cosmos. We use ASTRO incentives to create deep pools of staking derivatives. LSD providers will help with incentives, because there are many of them across the Cosmos and they will soon be fighting for market share.

Here’s the vision: stJUNO - stATOM, stOSMO - stATOM, stLUNA - stATOM, stEVMOS - stATOM. Don’t worry about stAsset - asset pools. We need to conserve incentives, so let Osmosis have the stAsset - asset pools and Astroport have the stAsset - stAsset pools.

Pros: won’t need much ASTRO incentives, cause staking reward is built in; also, LSD provider will contribute incentives; also, these are unique pairs that don’t exist elsewhere in the Cosmos. People will come to Astroport to trade assets without worrying about missing out on staking rewards.

Cons: none! At this point, Astroport doesn’t have anything to lose.

Once liquidity builds up, TFL can set up with a money market or a decentralized stablecoin that uses LSD LP tokens as collateral. That will certainly set Astroport apart (although Crescent is working on something similar).

We can partner with the LSD providers Quicksilver or Stride. Obviously there are Stader and Prism. But Stader is working to expand out of the Cosmos, and months after the crash Prism hasn’t even been able to figure out if it will airdrop new PRISM tokens to old holders. And anyway, in the nearterm Prism won’t have a token, so they won’t be able to help with incentives. Whereas Quicksilver and Stride probably would help with incentives.

What do you guys think? (Will be posting this in discord as well. Tune in there for possible discussion.)

4 Likes
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very interesting! I agree that Astroport need to find its way and not only on terra. Astroport need to go interchain on cosmos. So what do you prefer to do as next after discussion?

3 Likes
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Most worrying sentence of this post:

Apparently no devs doing serious work to improve Astroport.

The idea that Astroport could have some unique Cosmos pairs is intriguing. Could bring both liquidity and action to Terra. I appreciate your proposal ser.

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Is there nobody maintaining Astro currently? Who is pushing code/ security.

Would love to have some transparency as to how tokens could be allocated to innovation and business development.

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Liquid staking DEX is a strong idea… Terra 2 doesn’t enable IBC yet does it?

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My worry here is that volume for these exotic swap will be low, and most of the traffic routed in hops through lsd - asset - lsd pairs on Osmosis anyway.

I don’t think that’s how Astroport wins.

Let’s not burry Astroport unnecessarily and just recognize that for it to be successful it will need to compete with Osmosis and other cosmos DEXs.

One potential advantage is the slAMM, since Osmosis outpost model differs from the slAMM in that satellites merely route trades to Osmosis. This makes them second class (asynchronous) citizens in the execution layer they deploy on.

The slAMM is different, and thereby has a chance to compete on UX (no need to bridge to Osmosis to access a good DEX anymore) and composability (satellites are first class citizens). It can reach markets where they are rather than rely on its leading position to force participants to bridge to the platform to trade.