SECTION 1: APPLICANT INFORMATION
Applicant Name: 0xMitch
Project Name: Integral
Project Description: Integral develops a capital-efficient decentralized exchange to maximize the effectiveness of each dollar of liquidity on Arbitrum and Ethereum, and provide effortless management of concentrated liquidity to token projects.
Team Members and Roles:
- 0xDorsal, Contributor/BD
- 0xKeiko, Contributor/Marketing
- 0xMitch, Contributor/Community
Project Links:
Contact Information
Point of Contact: 0xMitch
Point of Contact’s TG handle: Telegram: Contact @mitch0x
Twitter: IntegralHQ
Email: mitch@integral.link
Do you acknowledge that your team will be subject to a KYC requirement?:
Yes
SECTION 2a: Team and Product Information
Team experience:
The Integral team began with a small group of friends spread across the world, brought together by crypto. We share a common, deep interest and career backgrounds in finance, trading, quant research and technology.
It’s currently the 7th most used DEX on Ethereum, whose liquidity has been trusted by some of the biggest names in DeFi, including 1inch and Cowswap.
Over three years of operation, the team has been designing and running Integral, a concentrated liquidity protocol that has processed $2 billion worth of volume with zero fund loss.
To us, DeFi was the emergent plumbing on the frontier of finance. So, we naturally set out to be its early plumbers and join its pioneers, with Arbitrum this time.
What novelty or innovation does your product bring to Arbitrum?
Integral’s overarching goal is twofold:
- to enhance the overall trading experience on Arbitrum by providing a intuitive and user friendly platform to trade and manage liquidity;
- to support blue-chip Arbitrum projects in evolving their tokens into recognized stores of value (SoV), whose traders have higher requirements in terms of liquidity and execution.
It delivers these goals from two perspectives:
- On the liquidity front, Integral presents a passive concentrated liquidity (CL) farming solution for both token projects and farmers.
- Unlike the current “set (the price range) and follow” user flow adopted by ALM platforms, Integral combines passive LP with concentrated liquidity farming. Token projects need only create a pool on Integral, add token rewards, and the farmers will be able to reap the benefits of concentrated liquidity. Neither liquidity managers nor farmers don’t need to specify price range, as liquidity will automatically appear in its optimal placement in active trading ranges.
- On the trading front, thanks to the well-incentivized concentrated liquidity, Integral offers competitive quotes to aggregators, solvers, and wallets, and eventually reduce the on-chain slippage.
- Our system design protects LP’s from toxic order flow while eliminating price impact on trades.
Is your project composable with other projects on Arbitrum? If so, please explain:
Yes, Integral liquidity can be integrated with various smart contracts, providing them with competitive pricing & execution, including:
- Swap aggregators (1inch and odos)
- Cross chain aggregators (OpenOcean)
- Wallet (OKX)
- Solver/PMM-based liquidity route
Do you have any comparable protocols within the Arbitrum ecosystem or other blockchains?
- On the trading side, we generally operates as a classical AMM similar to Uniswap and Camelot, with some differences:
- Ability to provide highly competitive quotes with a modest amount of liquidity.
- Offering versatile suite of trading options, including spot, time-weighted average price (TWAP), and limit orders (testnet).
- On the LP side, we are one of a kind, as we introduced a UX to passive concentrated liquidity farming for the first time.
How do you measure and think about retention internally? (metrics, target KPIs)
Relevant usage metrics: - Please refer to the OBL relevant metrics chart 8. For your category (DEX, lending, gaming, etc) please provide a list of all respective metrics as well as all metrics in the general section
- For each asset/trading pair:
- TVL: a daily time series expressed in USD.
- APR: swap fees earned by liquidity providers
- Trading Volume: a daily time series, also measured in USD.
- Price Impact: ratio of the difference between the execution price and the spot price to the spot price for each trading pair, expressed as a percentage. This measures how much the price of an asset changes due to a specific trade.
- Integral’s rank as a liquidity venue: does it have the first/second/third most utilized liquidity pool for a certain pair?
- Protocol-level
- Number of smart contracts using Integral’s liquidity
- Rank on DefiLlama DEX volume charts
- Daily protocol fees
- List of Traders: A comprehensive record of addresses or entities engaged in trading activities. This list should include trader addresses and the volume of trades executed.
- List of Liquidity Providers: A compiled list of current and past participants per pool who have provided liquidity during the incentivized period of the protocol. The list should include LP addresses, their current liquidity in USD, time-weighted liquidity in USD, and the duration of liquidity provision.
Do you agree to remove team-controlled wallets from all milestone metrics AND exclude team-controlled wallets from any incentives included in your plan:
Yes.
SECTION 2b: PROTOCOL DETAILS
Is the protocol native to Arbitrum?:
No, initially deployed on Ethereum and expanded to Arbitrum due to its growing ecosystem.
On what other networks is the protocol deployed?:
Ethereum, Arbitrum.
What date did you deploy on Arbitrum mainnet?:
October 20, 2022.
Do you have a native token?:
Yes, the native token of Integral is ITGR.
Past Incentivization:
Please note that the Arbitrum incentives program was paused as there wasn’t any meaningful integration back then. Right after 1inch integrated the Arbitrum pools, Integral switched to fee distribution mechanisms, which help attract some liquidity.
Liquidity Incentive (paused)
Multiplier System (redacted)
Rewards were distributed based on trading volume. Both LPs and traders could increase their rewards through a multiplier system, which is based on the amount of ITGR staked and, for traders, also on the average trade size.
Trader Rewards (paused)
Traders were eligible for rewards by trading at least one order in eligible pairs per day on at least three days each week.
Current Incentivization:
Starting in November, 2023, liquidity providers (LPs) are able to directly receive a portion or all trading fees from Integral pools. LPs receive these fees in the tokens constituting the pool, such as WETH or USDC.e in the WETH-USDC.e LP.
This feature was introduced on Arbitrum, and was made available on Ethereum the following month of December 2023.
Protocol Performance:
Integral’s protocol performance is comprehensively detailed on its analytics site at https://info-size.integral.link/. As of February 25, 2024, Integral has become the 7th most used DEX on Ethereum, as reported by DefiLlama.
It has gained recognition and trust within the DeFi community for its integration with major aggregators and solvers including 1inch, Odos, OKX Dex aggregator, various Cowswap solvers, Unidex, BitKeep, and OpenOcean. Integral stands out for its exceptional capital efficiency, boasting the highest volume/TVL (Total Value Locked) ratio among classical Automated Market Makers (AMMs).
The platform supports a wide array of major token pairs; beyond the foundational ETH-stable and Stable-stable pairs, Integral has introduced trading for a selection of blue-chip token pairs such as RPL <> ETH, wstETH <> ETH, and LDO <> ETH on the Ethereum mainnet alongside ARB <> ETH on Arbitrum. Integral prides itself on its commitment to security, maintaining a record with zero fund losses over three years of operation.
Protocol Roadmap:
Integral’s next chapter is about enhancing sustainability. With a new LP system and a capital-efficient model, we aim to create a mutually beneficial cycle where LPs, token projects, and aggregators all thrive, contributing to the value of the Arbitrum ecosystem.
- 2023Q3 (completed)
- Gas optimizations (to make a spot trade cost equal amount of gas to Uniswap)
- Launch ETH-USDC (native) on Arbitrum
- 2023Q4 (completed)
- Launch LP fee distribution, which enables LP to earn a portion of trading fee on both mainnet and Arbitrum
- Arbitrum pools got integrated by 1inch, OpenOcean and Odos.
- 2024Q1 (ongoing)
- Pilot program of ETH-RPL concentrated liquidity incentive program.
- Currently Integral is the second most used liquidity venue for this pair.
- List ETH-LDO, ETH-wstETH on mainnet and ETH-ARB on Arbitrum.
- Looking for more chain deployment
- Working on partnerships with various projects to help boost liquidity.
- Pilot program of ETH-RPL concentrated liquidity incentive program.
Audit History & Security Vendors:
Audits conducted by Optilistic and Akira, ensuring platform’s security and integrity; reports available at docs.integral.link/size/library/audit-report.
SECTION 3: GRANT INFORMATION
Requested Grant Size:
500,000 ARB
Justifications: Breakdown of rewards for liquidity providers and aggregates integration to build a robust Arbitrum ecosystem.
-
Liquidity incentives to improve overall Arbitrum trading experience (300,000 ARB)
- We will allocate 300,000 $ARB to conduct a 6-month liquidity mining program on SoV (store of value) token pairs, including WETH-USDC, WETH-USDT, WETH-wstETH, and WETH-ARB.
- Target TVL and APR for the following pools are:
Pair Target TVL (the corresponding pools on mainnet has $1mil) Target Daily Volume (assuming 600% capital utilization rate) Target APR Total ARB allocated WETH-USDC.e $0.5mil $3mil 60% 50,000 ARB WETH-USDC $0.5mil $3mil 60% 50,000 ARB WETH-USDT $0.5mil $3mil 60% 50,000 ARB WETH-wstETH $0.5mil $3mil 60% 50,000 ARB WETH-ARB $0.75mil $4.5mil 75% 100,000 ARB -
Liquidity incentives for bluechip token projects to deploy community-own pool on Integral (100,000 ARB)
- We intend to work with 5 growth-stage token community with an Arbitrum presense to help them bootstrap liquidity and evolve into a store-of-value on Arbitrum. Target TVL and APR are $0.3mil and 40% respectively.
- We reach the number assuming each pool’s liquidity gets utilized at least 5 times a day, which gives us a swap fee APR of 18.25%. With the addition of 20k ARB incentive (assume 1 ARB = 2 USDC), the final APR can reach 45%.
- We will work with these projects to set up the pools. After the token project deposit rewards into these pools, we will deposit ARB rewards into these pools on a weekly basis. Any unused $ARB will be returned to Arbitrum Foundation.
- We intend to work with 5 growth-stage token community with an Arbitrum presense to help them bootstrap liquidity and evolve into a store-of-value on Arbitrum. Target TVL and APR are $0.3mil and 40% respectively.
-
Development incentives for other Arbitrum projects to distribute Integral’s concentrated liquidity (100,000 ARB)
- We will allocate approximately 100,000 $ARB as incentives for aggregators, solvers, vaults who integrate our liquidity in the next 6 months. 1-20k $ARB will be used to incentivize each aggregator. Any unused $ARB will be returned to Arbitrum Foundation.
- By distributing Integral’s liquidity, this incentive program aims to improve the general liquidity condition of Arbitrum, reduce trading costs, and improve trading across not only Arbitrum. Based on our previous experience, aggregators, particularly emerging ones, often face bandwidth limitations and may struggle to provide optimal liquidity to end users in a timely manner.
Grant Matching: N/A
Funding Address:
0xFf030bEb0335432e156A0Ee55Bd87850eAaD228E
Funding Address Characteristics:
Gnosis safe wallet, 2/4 multisig.
Treasury Address:
Contract Address: TBD
SECTION 4: GRANT OBJECTIVES, EXECUTION AND MILESTONES
Integral’s grant proposal is designed to align with our overarching objectives of enhancing the liquidity condition on Arbitrum. By focusing on improving the trading experience, boosting liquidity for projects, and encouraging broader utilization of Integral as a liquidity incentive platform, we aim to contribute significantly to the ecosystem’s growth.
Objectives:
- Improve the On-Chain Trading Experience in Arbitrum: by improving liquidity of store-of-value pairs on Arbitrum, including ETH-stable, Stable-stable, and ETH-ARB.
- Enhance On-Chain Liquidity for Arbitrum Projects: by helping Arbitrum’s bluechip token projects improve liquidity and evolve into the store-of-value status, e.g. ETH-GMX, ETH-MAGIC.
- Promote Usage of Integral as a Liquidity Incentive Platform: encouraging more token projects to leverage Integral’s innovative features for their liquidity strategies will foster a more vibrant and interconnected DeFi environment.
- Encourage more projects to integrate and distribute Integral’s Arbitrum liquidity
- Integration is a public good that should be compensated. We’ll set up bounty to reward projects and SCs that integrate our liquidity pools.
Execution Strategy
To achieve our objectives, Integral will deploy a reward distribution contract similar to Sushi MasterChef. This enable us to manage ARB token emissions effectively and oversee reward distribution efficiently, with a battle tested framework. The deployment aims not only at incentivizing participation but also at ensuring sustainable growth across all facets of our platform.
- To incentivize liquidity for SoV pairs on Arbitrum, such as ETH<>USDC & ETH<>wstETH, an initial of 4,166 Arbitrum tokens will be deposited into the farming rewards contract for each pair in order to reach a target TVL. Additional deposits will be made every epoch, which lasts 2 weeks.
- In order to assess the effectiveness of the program a spreadsheet will be kept and updated bi-weekly. The spreadsheet will track all pairs that are incentivized with ARB tokens and will also track the change in metrics such as TVL, volume, APR, and ARB tokens allocated for the given epoch.
- To incentivize bluechip token communities to set up pools on Integral, we plan to proactively reach out and work with existing & up and coming token projects to improve their on-chain liquidity.
- Once the project is reached and evaluated, we will help them set up liquidity pools on Integral, and deposit ARB rewards to these pools once they top up with their gov token rewards.
- To assess the effectiveness of the program, we will use the spreadsheet mentioned above.
- To encourage more projects to integrate and distribute Integral’s Arbitrum liquidity, we will set up bounty and publish it in our community and Arbitrum community. The actual rewards will be decided case by case, and the progress will be reported to Arbitrum governance forum frequently.
What mechanisms within the incentive design will you implement to incentivize “stickiness”?
- Stickiness is built-in in our system design. The combination of passive LP, concentrated liquidity farming and mean-0 IL requires far less attention from LPs, making it “deposit it, forget it, earn it”.
- We specifically allocate a considerable amount of budget to projects, for example token projects that’ll use Integral as farming incentive platform, and aggregators/solvers that’ll tap Integral’s liquidity. We believe these integrations will be much more sustainable than rented traffic.
- With the flywheel between token projects, LPs, traders, aggregators and Integral up and running, we want to establish Integral as the one-stop concentrated liquidity farming/incentive platform. The budget will help us spread out the brand awareness, making us one of the top choice for DeFi users with free-to-spend tokens.
- We recently launched RPL<>ETH pair on Ethereum mainnet and ARB<>ETH on Arbitrum which continue to get capture steady flow from aggregators. Integral is #2 on-chain venue to trade RPL <> ETH, second to Uniswap, and the pool currently offers the highest yield for RPL on-chain. https://defillama.com/yields?token=RPL
- In terms of the ARB<>ETH pair on Arbitrum, we serve as the #5 on-chain venue for the pair, also offering a competitive APR of 39%. https://defillama.com/yields?project=integral&token=ARB
Our success metrics are aligned with our vision for Integral and its role within the Arbitrum ecosystem:
- Increase in TVL: Aiming for a milestone TVL increase where blue chip pairs on our platform reach or exceed $0.5 million in value, while other pairs maintain a minimum of $0.3mil in TVL.
- Increase in Trading Volume: We anticipate growth in trading volume as a direct result of increased Total Value Locked (TVL) and enhanced integrations with key players within the DeFi space.
- Decrease in Trading slippage: For any bluechip tokens with a Integral pool, we hope to become its #1-3 liquidity venue when people trade it on aggregators.
- Expansion through Integrations: Targeting an uptick in collaborations with aggregators/solvers that integrate with Integral’s liquidity offerings—thereby broadening access for users across the Arbitrum network.
- Arbitrum Ecosystem Expansion: Success is envisioned not just through metrics related directly to Integral but also via contributions towards transforming ARB into a store-of-value token through enriching Arbitrum’s ecosystem.
Grant Timeline and Milestones:
- Initial announcement and building awareness
- Dashboard for tracking participation
- First community driven Arbitrum token pool
- Liquidity integrations on Arbitrum are community driven
SECTION 5: Data and Reporting
Is your team prepared to comply with OBL’s data requirements?
- Yes, with the creation of Dune Dashboards and commitment to full transparency.
Does your team agree to provide bi-weekly program updates on the Arbitrum Forum thread?
- Yes, with the inclusion of updates across various community channels.
Does your team acknowledge that failure to comply with any of the above requests can result in the halting of the program’s funding stream?
Yes