Frogs!

It has been a busy past few weeks, and we sincerely thank all of you for sticking with us and actively helping to develop the ecosystem.

As a team, we have been beyond impressed with the level of effort and engagement put forth by our community, who have on their own volition implemented some incredible features to the platform, including skins, translations, and a whole host of bug fixes.

As we head into the new year, we wanted  to take some time to update you all on the progress of both LINKSWAP and the YF Link ecosystem as a whole, as well as outline a roadmap for our plans in the weeks and months to come.

LINKSWAP Update

It has been said that LINKSWAP is the heart of the YF Link ecosystem, making progress and developments surrounding its growth is vital for the progression of other initiatives, including LINKPAD, LINKCHECK, and eventually, Project Titan.

Since its launch a couple weeks ago, we have made significant progress in fixing the front-end bugs and issues identified by users, as well as adding brand new features! The desktop version of the site is close to fully polished (as we’re sure you’ve noticed!), and our dev team will soon move to making some fixes to mobile functionality.

In addition, in the past week we have completed two pivotal pieces of infrastructure in the form of the LINKSWAP subgraph (you can check it out here) and the LINKSWAP Info site, so that users can more accurately track LINKSWAP analytics, TVLs, and other relevant details. These are key data elements that will help users navigate the project and provide a solid context for users looking to quantify the success of the platform and their participation in it.

Finally, we’ve rolled out our LINKSMAS campaign, that has enabled special NFTs to be granted to individuals who are taking part in the initiative, and liquidity for participating pools has shot up to over 200% in some cases! We’ve also rolled out the updated LP Rewards site and added a special new pool as part of our CyberFi campaign.

Thanks to some incredible community efforts, LINKSWAP now has some exciting new features like skins and site translations.

Users can now switch between 2 new versions of the site:

Thanks to a few members of our community, we will be adding many more themes in the weeks to come, a fun addition to the decentralized exchange experience!

We have also added support for 15 languages, with all the translations implemented by community members.

LINKPAD Update

LINKPAD has been firing on all cylinders to realize its goal of being the first community-owned decentralized venture capital fund.

Following the passing of Proposal 6 outlining the restructuring of LINKSWAP’s fee structure, the LINKPAD fund has begun accumulating its share of the platform’s trading fees, and the core team has already made their first investment in Sovryn, a Bitcoin-based DeFi platform.

The LINKPAD team is currently talking with smart contract developers to create a mechanism for easily distributing profits to the staking vault each quarter — more information will be released on this soon.

For more information about LINKPAD’s first investment, check out their latest blog post.

As previously discussed, we’re excited to submit our proposal for a development grant application to Chainlink in early-to-mid January.

This will be a huge first step towards tying our LINK-focused platform into the Chainlink ecosystem, and using the infrastructure we have developed to benefit the Chainlink network.

Here's the run-down of our application:

The current Chainlink Truffle Box requires users to fund their requesting contract specifically with LINK token in order to create a request to an oracle. On a test network, this isn’t a problem since there exists LINK token faucets to fund these requesting contracts. However, on the Ethereum mainnet, this requires the requester to purchase and hold some amount of LINK in order to create requests. By using LINKSWAP, these users can simply purchase the necessary amount of LINK for their request dynamically, using the currency of their own choice. This prevents them from being exposed to an asset that they may not wish to be exposed to holding, while still utilizing the LINK token as its intended use of a utility token.

To demonstrate the capability of LINKSWAP and how it benefits the Chainlink ecosystem, we will develop a Truffle Box that utilizes LINKSWAP before making a request. This will allow requesters to hold any supported currency in their contract, and dynamically purchase the amount of LINK necessary for each oracle request. This way, node operators are still compensated in LINK for retrieving data, and requesters aren’t exposed to the volatility of LINK when utilizing Chainlink.

We will keep you updated throughout this process.

What’s Next?

As we head into the new year and another chapter for the YFL ecosystem, we wanted to provide a simple roadmap for what the plan of action is for the days, weeks, and months ahead:

Near-Term Action Items (to be completed in the coming days):

  1. Staking rewards for the governance vault (protocol fee revenue distribution!)
  2. Final front end fixes for desktop and mobile
  3. LINKSWAP integration on CoinGecko/CoinMarketCap/DeFi Pulse (applications and relevant data have already been sent to these parties) as well as 1inch and other AMM aggregators
  4. Implementation of hallmark features such as Ruglock and activating the permissionless listing for anyone to create a LINKSWAP pair.

Mid-Term Action Items (to be completed in January):

  1. Chainlink grant application
  2. Exploration of COVER insurance for vaults to ensure maximum security for users
  3. Launch of community-created marketing campaign
  4. Begin onboarding exclusive listings via LINKCHECK (more project details soon)
  5. Add UNILAYER limit orders
  6. Add Cyberfi limit order functionality for LSLP (LINKSWAP LP) token positions (to allow users to reduce impermanent loss)

Other Action Items:

  1. Wafflehouse launch (the application is now complete, but we want there to be a focus on LINKSWAP for the time being and release this as part of the upcoming marketing campaign)
  2. Meme Competition App (the beta version is complete and has been tested by some community members, the release should come around the time of Wafflehouse’s launch)
  3. Project Titan (this is a revolutionary concept that has yet to be done by any DEX/AMM, and we think you’ll all be thrilled to hear about it! However, for the time being we want our developer’s focus to remain solely on making LINKSWAP as good as it can be before we announce new features)

We hope this provides some clarity as to where things are at present with the YF Link ecosystem, as well as what is coming next.

So far, all the data regarding LINKSWAP usage and utility in such a short time has been incredible to see, with volume trending at over $1 million per day, $20m+ of liquidity across the pairs, and nearly 30% of the YFL supply being staked in the governance vault.

In addition, between LINKSWAP and Uniswap we are reaching all-time-high liquidity for YFL pairs, topping out at 6 million dollars of liquidity! On Uniswap alone this would place us in the top 40 of ALL pairs, including titans such as Chainlink, YFI, and stablecoin pairs. The numbers are only increasing by the day, and as key features and rollouts continue, we expect these numbers to increase.

They were so promising, in fact, that Cointelegraph covered the rapid inflows of liquidity into our platform in a recent article, which was great to see.

We’re beyond excited for the coming month, and think that the release of the platform’s hallmark features, coupled with the Chainlink grant and a few other exciting things we have up our sleeve will make for an exciting start to 2021!

Happy holidays Frogs! 🎄 🐸