GM Ethereum,
The weather is clear on the approach to Swell City, and if you peep through the porthole you might just be able to make out the promised land on the horizon!
That makes now the perfect time for us to set out our vision for Swell, and invite you all to contribute to what will become a living and breathing source of guidance and inspiration for the DAO: the Swell City Charter.
Building the LST for DeFi
Since our launch which flowed off the back of the Shapella upgrade, Swell’s core focus has ultimately been to maximize alignment with Ethereum.
That means supporting permissionlessness, open access and community-driven development. But also, it means creating an LST that maximizes economic freedom for holders by providing unparalleled opportunities in DeFi.
In building the LST for DeFi, we aim to provide access to more economic opportunities in the fun ways that only DeFi makes possible — with gamification, community, and Pearls!
From conversations across the ecosystem among the likes of Bankless, Danny Ryan, Vitalik, and Ryan Berckmans, it is now clearer than ever to us that there is strong demand for such a distinctive LST to disrupt the market, and introduce much-needed choice, collaboration, and competition to liquid staking.
Making it happen: the road to Swell City
Before the Voyage launched, we set strong foundations by onboarding eight institutional professional operators — InfStones, Kiln, Blockscape, SNC, DSRV, Stakely, RockX, and HashQuark — and enlisting top-tier security partners in Sigma Prime and Immunefi. We also became the only LST to integrate Chainlink POR, enabling anyone to instantly verify the ETH backing each swETH
With the aid of our established Redstone price feed oracle, we have since delivered more than 40+ integrations to become one of the most ubiquitous LSTs on the market — without the aid of a token.
These integrations include:
- DEXs such as Balancer, Maverick, Curve and more
- Boosted yield protocols Aura, Liquis, Equilibria and Penpie
- CDPs such as Raft and Gravita
- Yield tokenization protocol Pendle
- Indexed baskets such as Yearn’s yETH
- Wallets, including OKX, Rabby, and others
- Top data providers including CoinGecko, DeFiLLama, and Rated Network
As a result of these integrations and the Voyage, Swell accelerated to become one of the fastest growing DeFi protocols in the weeks following launch, welcoming 14,000 Voyagers and bootstrapping almost 50,000 ETH in ~5 months.
What’s on the horizon?
Looking ahead, Swell is now focused on these areas of development:
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Swellnomics: Implementing Curve style vote escrow and gauge flywheel systems within the Swell ecosystem.
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Withdrawals: Enabling primary market withdrawals in the upcoming Barracuda upgrade slated for early next year.
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Decentralized innovation: Incorporating bonded validator layers as well as upcoming technologies like DVT by projects such as Obol and SSV to drive permissionlessness throughout the network.
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LSTfi ecosystem expansion: Deepening collaborations with LSTfi protocols to drive even more opportunities for swETH holders, and bringing the opportunities to you through new silky smooth interfaces on the Swell app.
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Liquid restaking primitives: Conducting research and development into new and exciting primitives like liquid restaking with EigenLayer, and collaborations with upcoming ecosystem projects like Ion Protocol and Cubist.
With this in place, the next major milestone will be getting to 1M+ ETH staked.
Drafting the Charter
If you’re collecting Pearls, you’ll soon be able to take your rightful place at the levers of influence, helping with protocol direction and reaping the rewards throughout the Swell ecosystem.
Until then, if you have feedback on our strategic direction and plans for Swell City, please leave a comment below. Further details will be shared over the coming weeks on each of these exciting areas to help create the LST for DeFi and a genuine compelling alternative and complement to existing solutions out there.
Thanks to you all for joining us in the first chapters of our story and being early on this Voyage!
Special mention to our supporters including: Framework, IOSG, Apollo, Maven 11, Bixin, Bankless, Mark Cuban, Sassano, Synthetix, Mask, Balancer, Suji Yan, Joey Santoro, Loong Wang, Eitenne vanKruys, Charlie Karaboga, and many more.
