SECTION 1: APPLICANT INFORMATION
Applicant Name:
Seraph
Project Name:
Solidly
Project Description:
Solidly is the first and only seamless omnichain ve(3,3). The core AMM engine is a vastly improved Uniswap V3 fork. It features 50% gas savings on swaps and 60% on mints/burns. LPers and Voters split the swap fees 80% / 20%, respectively. Voters decide on a weekly basis which pools and which chains to incentivize according to sustainable fee metrics.
Protocols (or any third-party) can permissionlessly incentivize any pool with direct LP incentives, or alternatively incentivize voters with bribes to vote for their pairs. This in-house innovation enables protocols to quickly and seamlessly build deep and efficient liquidity on Solidly.
Team Members and Roles:
- Seraph (Co-Founder, Lead & dev)
- Roosh (Co-Founder, Advisor)
- Lojesad (Full stack dev)
Project Links:
- Website: https://solidly.com/
- Github: SolidlyLabs · GitHub
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SolidlyLabs
- Discord: Solidly
- Docs: https://docs.solidly.com
- Analytics: Solidly Analytics
- DefiLlama: https://defillama.com/protocol/solidly-labs
Contact Information
Point of Contact:
TG handle:
@seraph_444
Twitter:
@SolidlyLabs @Seraph_333
Email:
Do you acknowledge that your team will be subject to a KYC requirement?:
Yes
SECTION 2a: Team and Product Information
Team experience:
The culmination of expertise flowing into the creation of Solidly V2 and Solidly V3 ranged from backgrounds of cybersecurity, academic sciences, early DeFi pioneering (2017-2021 arbitrage bots), former SV CTO roles and more. As such Solidly had and has a diverse and dedicated team of builders creating an innovative mixture of the ve(3,3) model with a much improved version of Uniswap V3 core.
Background and Solidly versions to date:
Solidly V1 was launched by DeFi pioneer Andre Cronje in early 2022. Due to various reasons (mostly technical) this initial version didn’t work out. We, a small group of enthusiasts, including Lafa, Roosh, c30, beepidibop & me hard-forked it with a 97% community consensus, bailing out everyone from the initially failed version with absolutely free and no-strings-attached 1:1 migrations. There were zero team allocations and through our dedication and purist views, we were able to remain 100% VC-free. The launch of Solidly V2 was in January 2023.
Knowing of Uniswap V3’s BUSL-1.1 expiring in April 2023, we already started our work on Solidly V3 in early March 2023, the vision was a much more powerful & improved version of the industry standard. Ultimately we managed to launch Solidly V3 in September 2023 with some impressive feats. Wherever we went with it, we managed to out-compete all the competition in terms of TVL efficiency margins. To date, Solidly remains the most competitive clAMM on the market.
- Within 2 days of launching we managed to become the #2 DEX on Fantom without any external stimuli.
- We managed to defend the #3 spot on Ethereum mainnet for many months now, even temporarily surging ahead to the #2 spot for some weeks.
- Currently we manage to retain #5 or #6 spot on Arbitrum without any external stimuli and with a very small amount of TVL (currently around 800k).
What novelty or innovation does your product bring to Arbitrum?
As mentioned above, Solidly V3, as opposed to Uniswap V3 (and its many copy paste forks), innovated at the core level right from the start. Boasting up to 50% swap gas savings and 60% LP gas savings.
The innovation doesn’t stop there though! In addition to the above, Solidly V3 also introduced:
- Volatility fees (anti-IL)
- Only ve(3,3) to share 80% of fees with LPs (as opposed to 0%), increasing sustainability and decreasing the reliance on the native governance token
- Full customization in LP incentives (i.e. incentivization of specific CL ranges by projects)
- Vertically integrated multi-week or even multi-month bribes (only ve(3,3) to accomplish this)
- Only ve(3,3) to allow direct & permissionless bribing of any liquidity pool (no whitelist required)
- Zero smart contract risk for staking, rewards are streamed over-the-air, using our in-house Rewards Distributor (offchain computation with on-chain rollup via merkle trees)
- 100% protection from JIT attacks (although most likely not relevant on Arbitrum, depending on how the sequencer is run)
Furthermore, we’re currently working on a much improved version of Uniswap V2 as well (very relevant for memecoins), the edge over Uniswap V2 (and copy paste forks) will be significant (not talking about gas, but a brand new-feature / primitive).
We want to reiterate how significant the gas savings are even on Arbitrum. We saw gas for swaps can get crazy, even into the multi-dollar range during congestion on L1. Solidly is the only DEX to offer a solution to this problem.
Link to raw data
Is your project composable with other projects on Arbitrum? If so, please explain:
Yes, Solidly allows permissionless pool creation with any ERC20 tokens, furthermore Solidly allows third-parties to incentivize liquidity via LP or voter bribes.
Do you have any comparable protocols within the Arbitrum ecosystem or other blockchains?
Yes: Uniswap, Camelot, Trader Joe, PancakeSwap, Ramses, WOOFi, Balancer, Curve, Sushi, and others.
How do you measure and think about retention internally? (metrics, target KPIs)
Solidly’s primary focus is and will remain on self-sustainability. Anything we do, whether it’s with external or internal stimuli is done with maximizing the speed to self-sufficiency.
As such our primary retention metrics, which automatically rolls up many other metrics is TVL efficiency. Self-sufficiency is defined as a pool that continues to retain 100% of its TVL with zero incentives required. This is the primary internal retention metric.
Relevant usage metrics - Please refer to the OBL relevant metrics chart 27. For your category (DEX, lending, gaming, etc) please provide a list of all respective metrics as well as all metrics in the general section:
| Category | List of Metrics |
|---|---|
| General | Daily Active Users, Daily User Growth, Daily Transaction Count, Daily Protocol Fee, Daily Transaction Fee, Daily ARB Expenditure and User Claims, and Incentivized User List & Gini |
| DEXs | For each asset/trading pair: TVL, Trading Volume, Market Depth, Price Impact, List of Traders, and List of Liquidity Providers |
| Gambling | TVL, In-Game Betting Volume |
| Options | For each asset/trading pair: TVL, Trading Volume, Open Interest, List of Traders, List of Liquidity Providers, and Fees |
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
Did you utilize a grants consultant or other third party not named as a grantee to draft this proposal? If so, please disclose the details of that arrangement here, including conflicts of interest (Note: this does NOT disqualify an applicant):
No
SECTION 2b: PROTOCOL DETAILS
Provide details about the Arbitrum protocol requirements relevant to the grant. This information ensures that the applicant is aligned with the technical specifications and commitments of the grant.
Is the protocol native to Arbitrum?:
We ran our beta version on Arbitrum in November 2022 (on-chain deployments, multi-million TVL & thousands of transactions) but ultimately decided to launch on Ethereum. Solidly, like Uniswap, has become a multi-chain DEX.
On what other networks is the protocol deployed?:
Ethereum, Fantom, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base (in chronological order)
What date did you deploy on Arbitrum mainnet?
Beta: November 2022
Our beta launch (on Arbitrum mainnet) was in the last week of November 2022 (SolidlyProxy | Address 0xDbc994f3843CF1FE9252F076F971DE5ec9B6Aa1D | Arbiscan)(Arbitrum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Arbiscan).
Our full omnichain suite has been deployed to Arbitrum on Jan 24th 2024 (Arbitrum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Arbiscan)
Do you have a native token?
Yes, $SOLID
Past Incentivization: What liquidity mining/incentive programs, if any, have you previously run? Please share results and dashboards, as applicable?
We have incentivized various core pools since our launch on Arbitrum a month ago. In that short-period we managed to reach:
- $2m TVL (peak)
- $97.2m in total volume
- 113,444 swaps
Current Incentivization: How are you currently incentivizing your protocol?
veSOLID voters decide on a weekly basis on how to incentivize pools, who are incentivized to vote for pools creating the most swap fees since they receive a portion (20%) of fees of the pools they voted on.
The active incentives, fees & bribes can be seen on https://solidly.com/liquidity/?tab=0 (hover over the rewards number to see a detailed breakdown).
In 1 month since we’ve been live, we have distributed $132,443.17 USD worth of SOLID incentives to key Arbitrum pairs such as ARB/WETH, PENDLE/WETH, WETH/USDC and more.
Have you received a grant from the DAO, Foundation, or any Arbitrum ecosystem related program?
No
Protocol Performance:
Our protocol performance in terms of swaps, TVL, volume & fees can be found here and here
Our average weekly trading volume grew from $5M in September 2023 to $151m in March 2024, currently at sustainable and organic all time-highs as can be seen from the following chart:
Our total cumulative volume exceeds $1.8 Billion USD.
Protocol Roadmap:
Short-term:
- Automatic merkle roots along with our 4th audit by Cyfrin
- Re-launching optimized version of V2
- Launching perpetuals via our infrastructure partners at SYMMIO. Solidly’s founding team is the largest stakeholder in SYMMIO perpetuals.
Audit History & Security Vendors:
Audits (3 to date, 1 pending)
Vendors:
- Cyfrin by Patrick Collins
- Pashov audit group
- Dudesahn (security researcher & core dev at Yearn Finance)
- Beepidibop (security researcher and smart contract dev)
Security Incidents:
N/A
SECTION 3: GRANT INFORMATION
Requested Grant Size:
750,000 ARB
Justification for the size of the grant:
With a grant this size, we’ll strive to grow from ~$4m in daily volume to ~$100m in daily volume & self-sufficient TVL to support this volume even after the grant period ends. To achieve this goal we are targeting of acquiring $20m in TVL mostly composed of hyper efficient core pairs in addition to a few key non-core pairs at an average yield of 30% APR.
The justification for this spend from Arbitrum’s perspective comes from the unique technical edge that Solidly possesses. It’s not just another copy-paste DEX of Uniswap but has a large uniqueness factor to it. Solidly’s metrics of the past few weeks speak for themselves in how efficiently Solidly converts its TVL into volume & fees.
After discussions & feedback from our Advisor @JoJo we are highlighting our capital efficiency with data-backed figures (all sourced from DefiLlama):
In the only full month on Arbitrum (February), Solidly has managed to come out on the top with regards to converting its TVL to Volume.
In order to showcase that this is not a unique outlier, JoJo also asked us to provide the same data for a longer time-frame (90d) on our Ethereum deployment. We have compiled this data from Dec 2023 to Feb 2024 and the same pattern as on Arbitrum can be observed, Solidly comes out even with a larger margin to the second place, as gas cost matters even more on Ethereum.
This demonstrates that Solidly has a unique and distinct technical advantage over other AMMs on the market. It is cheapest AMM in DeFi and is thus lowering entry barriers for new users. And as can be seen from the gas comparison futher above, this even matters on L2s such as Arbitrum.
Grant Matching:
As mentioned above, in the few weeks we’ve been live we’ve already disbursed $132,443.17 USD to various Arbitrum core pools. Irrespective of whether or not this proposal passes, our incentives to Arbitrum will continue.
Grant Breakdown:
| Allocation | ARB amount | Grant % |
|---|---|---|
| Liquidity mining for V3 pools (core pairs) | 500,000 | 66.6% |
| Liquidity mining for V3 pools (non-core pairs) | 250,000 | 33.3% |
Funding Address:
TBD
Funding Address Characteristics: The multisig must be able to accept and interact with ERC-721s in order to accept the funding stream.
TBD
Treasury Address:
0x2A007e518481D94176F21EF83F4441e1d4A4F5b7 (Ethereum)
0xdc2c3c7776b6c3b8404265330E6fBd2f52e79C2d (Arbitrum)
Contract Address:
- RewardsDistributor contract: 0x777DfB70EB952a081d0d11fF828715f79572cFE4
- Solidly V3 factory: 0x70Fe4a44EA505cFa3A57b95cF2862D4fd5F0f687
SECTION 4: GRANT OBJECTIVES, EXECUTION AND MILESTONES
Objectives:
Increase healthy, organic and self-sufficient TVL, volume and users on Arbitrum.
Execution Strategy:
Allocation 1: Liquidity Mining for V3 Pools
Users deposit their liquidity on Solidly V3, and can claim ARB rewards via our vertically integrated RewardsDistributor - a huge benefit for LPers as they stay in complete custody of their funds.
- ARB amount:
- 500,000 for core pairs (66.6% of grant)
- 250,000 for non-core pairs (33.3% of grant)
We define core pairs as tokens that are considered blue-chips on Arbitrum and that have achieved steady waves of organic and non-event-driven volume. Examples would be ETH, ARB, WBTC, USDC, USDT, PENDLE, GMX and others.
Non-core pairs would be pairings where volumes appears to be more cyclical and event-driven, but where we see big potential of them becoming future blue-chips. We will engage these projects individually and will always be looking to run co-incentives with their own governance tokens, extending the shelf-life of the LTIPP $ARB grant.
Incentives, especially for non-core pairs can be subject to change, depending on the overall development with each respective partner.
For the core pairs we consider incentivizing:
- ARB/WETH
- ARB/USDC
- WETH/USDC
- WBTC/WETH
- LINK/WETH
- PENDLE/WETH
- GMX/WETH
What mechanisms within the incentive design will you implement to incentivize “stickiness” whether it be users, liquidity or some other targeted metric?
The Solidly suite is a fully vertically integrated and unique DeFi experience. We have received a lot of positive feedback on our UX and general platform, as such we have developed a faithful community of power-users. The goal of the LTIPP grant will be to onboard more users to Solidly, as for many liquidity providers, earning $ARB incentives might be the kick they need to try out something new.
With the growth of a steady amount of TVL, volume and fees, our technological advantages, which naturally give users on Solidly more rewards and helps them save gas, will financially incentivize newly onboarded users to continue using the Solidly platform.
Specify the KPIs that will be used to measure success in achieving the grant objectives and designate a source of truth for governance to use to verify accuracy.
| Allocation | Current progress | KPI |
|---|---|---|
| Liquidity mining for V3 pools | $3M average daily volume, $858k TVL | $50M daily volume, $10M TVL |
Grant Timeline and Milestones:
Solidly will distribute the grant linearly for 3 months in the form of direct LP bribes.
Milestones:
- Month 1: $15M daily volume, $5M TVL
- Month 2: $25M daily volume, $12M TVL
- Month 3: $50M daily volume, $20M TVL
How will receiving a grant enable you to foster growth or innovation within the Arbitrum ecosystem?
Currently, Solidly is not very well known, by getting a liquidity incentive grant through LTIPP we’ll gain additional exposure and liquidity providers on Arbitrum might be more inclined to try out our platform if they’re getting native $ARB incentives, which are in high demand.
A grant has the great potential of kickstarting a positive feedback loop, making our improvements to UniV3-core shine & come to light.
Specifically this is achieved by acquiring self-sufficient TVL. As we’ve shown in the past weeks, every dollar sitting in SolidlyV3Pool contracts earn more than the same dollar on any other DEX in the ecosystem (Volume to TVL ratio of ~5:1).
Do you accept the funding of your grant streamed linearly for the duration of your grant proposal, and that the multisig holds the power to halt your stream?
Yes
SECTION 5: Data and Reporting
OpenBlock Labs has developed a comprehensive data and reporting checklist for tracking essential metrics across participating protocols. Teams must adhere to the specifications outlined in the provided link here: Onboarding Checklist from OBL 27 . Along with this list, please answer the following:
Is your team prepared to comply with OBL’s data requirements for the entire life of the program and three months following and then handoff to the Arbitrum DAO? Are there any special requests/considerations that should be considered?
Yes and no special requests.
Does your team agree to provide bi-weekly program updates on the Arbitrum Forum thread that reference your OBL dashboard?
Yes
First Offense: *In the event that a project does not provide a bi-weekly update, they will be reminded by an involved party (council, advisor, or program manager). Upon this reminder, the project is given 72 hours to complete the requirement or their funding will be halted.
Second Offense: Discussion with an involved party (advisor, pm, council member) that will lead to understanding if funds should keep flowing or not.
Third Offense: Funding is halted permanently
Does your team agree to provide a final closeout report not later than two weeks from the ending date of your program? This report should include summaries of work completed, final cost structure, whether any funds were returned, and any lessons the grantee feels came out of this grant. Where applicable, be sure to include final estimates of acquisition costs of any users, developers, or assets onboarded to Arbitrum chains. (NOTE: No future grants from this program can be given until a closeout report is provided.)
Yes
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
