The Chainflip Swapping Demo Launch

After 3 long, hard years, we finally present a public demo of the Chainflip Swapping Experience. Within just 18 hours of launching it, we’ve had well over 6000 native cross-chain swaps go through already, and the feedback that we’ve heard from the community has been amazing.

As a quick follow-up, I thought we could talk a little more in-depth about the Demo, what I think makes it special, and what the roadmap is for the swapping product in general.

About This Demo

This demo is running on the live Partnernet private test network. We’ll launch a version on Perseverance as soon as 0.9 is live and stable, but for this we wanted to guarantee good performance by preventing the network from doing rotations and running with only a handful of nodes. We’ve been using it to allow our partners to integrate and test the SDK, cross-chain messaging, LP API, and Broker API.

This version of the Demo lacks any of the aggregation features that will make this product sing, but it does have most of the major pairs that Chainflip will be natively supporting from day one:

• Native BTC - best on-chain pricing on the largest spot market in crypto
• Native ETH - most widely-traded non-stable asset in DeFi
• Native DOT - no comparable on-chain trading facilities to create new markets
• ERC20 FLIP - well, need I explain?
• USDC on Ethereum - most widely adopted DeFi stablecoin collateral (USDT and other stables will also be swappable, don’t worry)
• Possibly an EVM L2 asset and USDC - making swap routing between other protocols WAY cheaper for users

Once we hit the mainnet, thanks to our amazing partnership with Squid, users will be able to trade assets on all these other chains with Uniswap and other DEXes, in any combination with the listed Chainflip launch assets. This will also be true for users of Squid and their widget!

• Ethereum
• Base
• Arbitrum
• Optimism
• Avalanche
• Polygon
• Binance Smart Chain
• Fantom
• Moonbeam
• Celo
• Kava
• Filecoin
• Cosmos Hub

That means Native BTC to BALD on Base, MKR on Ethereum to DOT on the Relay Chain, and USDT on Avalanche to native ETH, all in one seamless transaction through the Chainflip frontend.

The combined routing power of the two protocols, plus the low-slippage power of the JIT AMM will put us in the running to become seriously competitive with the centralised exchanges from day one. I’m not exaggerating.

Special Features

What I think makes the Chainflip swapping experience unique is how flexible it is. If you’ve ever used any kind of bridge before, you may have noticed how much of a headache it can be to connect all the right wallets, perform all of the transactions, and know what stage of the process you’re at.

Chainflip introduces Deposit Channels, a completely new way to get funds into the protocol for swaps, liquidity, cross-chain messaging, and more. It has been quite difficult to develop, with lots of edge cases to consider, but we think the UX improvement and gas savings make it worth it.

Users are very used to connecting their wallet, but we wanted to design the Chainflip experience such that you don’t need to. Users can create a deposit channel and send funds manually or use a connected wallet, but will also be able to call the contract directly to skip the deposit channel directly. This is all handled contextually based on user behaviour, so it feels seamless even though there are 3 different methods of getting funds on the move.

And once it is on the move: that’s it. No followup transfers. No next steps. You can “fire-and-forget” - just walk away and your requested asset will appear in your wallet, no matter how many swaps or hops it had to take to get there through aggregation. We handle it all.

Roadmap for Swapping

You’ve probably noticed there’s a few things missing. The Pool data, LP dashboard, many tweaks and improvements including mempool monitoring for better data, full integration with Squid, better information about expiry and liquidity, and block explorer pages for individual swaps are all in various stages of development, with some scoped out and some almost complete.

As we approach the end of the token sale, launch of the mainnet, and then the swapping launch itself, we’ll keep releasing a new version of the swapping experience.

The next steps for us are to integrate the feedback we’ve gotten from this demo, upgrade the frontend so it’s compatible with the new 0.9 release dropping very shortly, and then re-release the swapping app on the fully public Perseverance testnet.

From there, we’ll work through that long list of improvements and new pages to the app to make the experience seamless and comprehensive.

How can you help?

Every time we announce a new version, we’d really appreciate it if you could just give it a go. Users in this demo get a shot at the limited remaining priority queue slots in the upcoming Coinlist sale, but those in the future will help to make this product stronger and the ecosystem behind it even better, even though we can’t promise a direct reward.

At the end of the day, we are building this for the average web3 user. It’s not for advanced traders, or complete newbies. If you’re reading this, you are our target audience.

To use Chainflip, you need to have a bit of crypto anyway, so we’re not onboarding any grandmas. We’re trying to build the best product for you.