In this THORswap Community Twitter Space, hosts Chad Thoreau, Michael and paperX, are joined by Justin, Eric and Oliver from Pangolin DEX to talk about their Pangolin’s partnership with THORchain, the launch of BridgeSwap, THORswap’s API, and more.
Read our notes below to learn more.
Pangolin’s background
Bootstrapped by Ava Labs as they saw a need for a DEX for a then new L1.
Fair launch with 95% of tokens to LPs (Liquidity Providers) and 5% as an airdrop with no team and VC allocation.
Was left alone for a while after launch until Avalabs recognised the need for a dedicated team.
A vote was put up and the team was chosen.
Almost 17 billion in volume has been done.
BridgeSwap
Allows cross-chain swapping from Pangolin DEX.
The UI checks if the user specified route is supported and displays it, if not it’ll use other aggregators like LI.FI for EVM chains and Axelar for some EVM and Cosmos chains.
Plan is to connect every chain and ecosystem and THORchain is a key component of that.
An example of usage is taking all the different coins you may have on Avalanche and sending them directly into native BTC on your ledger.
Products are developed in a specific way so that anyone can use what they do (swap widget built in a component way that people can use in their own dAPPs).
Chain agnostic bridge or back-end agnostic UI.
THORChain
The vision has been shifting towards being an aggregator of aggregators and giving users the most efficient route.
CEX vs DEX
A lot of crypto is in-fighting, e.g. DEX and ecosystems fighting amongst themselves.
Loses sight of bigger goals.
In Binance, users can buy any tokens without thinking about the underlying infrastructure or chain.
DeFi needs to compete better and become a more viable threat to the CEX stranglehold.
DEX has been isolated due to chains.
Partnership
THORswap was originally THORchain.
Swapping of native assets then expanded into aggregation which meant pulling liquidity from all ERC-20s, using 1inch, Uniswap, Sushiswap, etc.
Now adding first AVAX aggregation route which is Pangolin via THORswap and any API partners that’s using THORswap on the backend.
Allows AVAX tokens in Pangolin to be swapped with all ERC-20 tokens.
Brings new volume to Pangolin and allows Pangolin users to go multi-chain easily.
Pangolin will be the first partner to use THORswap API to enable all THORchains functionality.
Thorswap API
Integrated both EVM and non-EVM wallets into the frontend.
Built from the ground to be chain and VM agnostic, allows true cross-chain.
Has to support a lot of wallets until wallet Tech catches up.
Learnt from Sushiswap cross-chain experience Sushi did not take their tokens with them and relied on chain foundation incentives instead.
When the incentives dried up, liquidity went to local competitors.
Introduced a franchise/sub DAO model that allows the respective chain’s team to manage their own treasury .
Deploying DEX contracts is easy but deploying a full DEX suite (token, farming, etc) is a lot.
User Experience
Multi-chain multi-token swapping will give users convenience but the tech is not quite there yet.
THORswap is building the foundation so when thing catch up they are well positioned.
Q&A
Q:Will Pangolin be leveraging the other functions of THORchain and integrating them into the Pangolin interface like putting up LP into THORchain?
Everything you see on the DEX is an individualized widget, a decentralized frontend.
Pools and liquidity are completely open-sourced.
Next step is to make them un-opinionated, e.g. anyone can open a pull request and create an ability for the pools to support THORchain.
Wants projects to contribute to their common UI library so users can use different options.
Finite amount of time for engineers so open source will cut down on requirements.
Q: What is the value accrual of PNG token (Pangolin’s token)?
PNG is a governance token with voting powers.
Single-sided staking that earns revenues going to the platform.
Will be upgraded into “Sunshine and Rainbows” which is a ve tokenomics model.
Ve tokenomics have negative sentiments, Pangolin is doing it differently by rewarding sticky liquidity and loyalty (eg staking a month vs a day receives higher APR).
Q: Pangolin is an early integrator of the thorswap API. Will there be any news to be shared about this?
Will be supporting all of the THORchains.
The UI is completely done.
API has saved Pangolin a lot of administrative work.
Q: When bridging AVAX from the official Avalabs bride, wAVAX (wrapped AVAX) was received instead of native AVAX. What is the reason for this?
Native AVAX is at a protocol level while wAVAX is an erc20 wrapper with different functionality.
Avalanche primary subnet consists of P, X and C chain.
Speculating that AVAX is only movable between P and C chains. C-chain AVAX is a different representation with EVM-ERC type functionality.
Wrapped bridged tokens like USDC.e and BTC.b are risky if something happens and people attempt to bridge the tokens back.
Pangolin allows wrapped tokens like wBTC to be unwrapped into their native version.
Gas on THORchain
If you want to go from Bitcoin to Avax, you just need bitcoin. You don’t require Thorswap token, RUNE, AVAX on the receiving side, etc, which provides a seamless experience for users.
Building a token proxy contract that helps users to skip multiple contract interactions on different DEXes.