[Shipped] Increase Incognito pDEX volume and liquidity pools

[andrey]

What’s a privacy problem I am trying to solve?

Incognito’s pDEX is the first decentralized and confidential exchange in the world. But, it does not have enough liquidity to support increased trading demand (got several request from users who can’t trade because of small liquidity pools)

Liquidity Volume

pDEX is young and current liquidity pools are not comparable with top DEXes based on ethereum chain. For example

	Locked (liquidity pools)
Uniswap	$30.5M
Kyber	$3.9M
pDEX	$0.28M

Why it’s importnat:

Liquidity allows users to trade with higher volumes and minimal slippage.

What is the solution ?

I am going to focus on growing liquidity pools on pDEX by:

• Incentivizing new liquidity providers. Here’s the idea.
• Working with privacy focused user groups
• Working with crypto holders called whales

It will be direct conversation with potential liquidity providers.

Who are we?

Andrey is here ! I’m an Incognito Rebel, a member of the core team, and I’m working on making the financial world a little bit more private and decentralized.

You can track my past activities on growing awareness around Incognito.

@tien - full stack engineer (past works he was involved (https://incognito.org/t/add-notifications-to-the-wallet-for-incoming-transactions/554, https://incognito.org/t/incognito-mode-for-smart-contracts-and-dapps/330, https://incognito.org/t/quality-control-strategy-to-minimize-oversight/597/3)
@dungdang - blockchain engineer (https://incognito.org/t/continue-integrating-other-blockchains-via-trusted-bridges/671)

What’s your schedule & KPI?

Current liquidity pools on pDEX is around $300k.
My goal is to increase liquidity pools at least on $100k and hit $400k in liquidity pools ( April 30).

Date	activity to run	size of added in liquidity
Week 1	Prepare & launch pDEX incentives program
Week 2	work with existed miners, PRV holders to add liquidity	+$20k
Week 3	approach crypto lending/borrowing companies	+$30k
Week 4	approach crypto whales	+$50k

What’s your budget?

Growth

Resource	Cost	Quantity	Monthly Cost	Type
Implementer	2,000 PRV	1	2,000 PRV	result-based bonus
Fullstack Engineer	1,000 PRV	1	1,000 PRV	performance-based
Blockchain Engineer	1,000 PRV	1	1,000 PRV	performance-based

Total monthly expected bonuses: 4000 PRV

Feel free to comment if you have a feedback or any ideas how to make this proposal better.

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All the best,
Andrey

[Jamie]

I understand the promotion part, but what will be built/developed?
Will you be the back-end/front-end engineer?

[andrey]

They going to work on pDEX improvements. Such:

• Add Price Chart
• Trade History, etc
• Implementing liquidity pool incentives (tool: prv rewards)

I feel once we start pushing it up, there will be a list of improvements.

[annie]

@andrey, Congrats! Your proposal got 4/5 votes and has been moved to the funded category. Please keep the community updated!

[abduraman]

It seems that one person did not accept the proposal. Imho, in such cases, disclosing empty vote or the reason of abstain/reject vote would contribute to the democracy of platform. Besides, the reason may be a lesson-learned item for the future proposals and increase their qualities. @annie

[andrey]

Yep, the board must reach consensus at least 3 votes out of five to get project funded.

[andrey]

Hey guys, friends, community, team.

For the past week we have launched incentives for the liquidity providers.

Supply liquidity for Incognito DEX. Provide privacy for the world.

Provide liquidity for the Incognito DEX and earn rewards In the same way Incognito validators stake PRV to earn block rewards, now liquidity providers can contribute liquidity to earn rewards (in addition to trading fees). You can access the pDEX from the Incognito Wallet, found in these app stores: [Appl%20store]       [google-play-badge] [image] Earn rewards for helping people trade on the world’s first privacy-protecting DEX! To start earning rewards, you just need to add liquidity for …

1. It means that if you add liquidity to the pairs pBTC <> PRV or pXMR <> PRV you will start earning interest accordingly to the rates

2. The interest % rewards will be landed on your pDEX wallet automatically every week

3. We still thinking about what would be the best day of week to set up for reward distribution. So if you have a suggestion and reasons why you think so, please share it here

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Liquidity already started coming into the PDEx. I’ll keep updating you regarding the results every Friday, but feel free to follow changes of the pools any time https://pdex.incognito.best

[duy]

@abduraman

It seems that one person did not accept the proposal. Imho, in such cases, disclosing empty vote or the reason of abstain/reject vote would contribute to the democracy of platform. Besides, the reason may be a lesson-learned item for the future proposals and increase their qualities. @annie

i think this is a great suggestion. @annie let’s do that for the next round of proposals. i think @ning is also working on adding proposal voting onto the site so that it’s all transparent. once proposal voting is live on the site, i believe the feedback will be also public on the site.

[duy]

@andrey

Date	activity to run	size of added in liquidity
Week 1	Prepare & launch pDEX incentives program
Week 2	work with existed miners, PRV holders to add liquidity	+$20k
Week 3	approach crypto lending/borrowing companies	+$30k
Week 4	approach crypto whales	+$50k

growth – @andrey thanks for the update. i want to circle back to the proposal’s promises on deliveries. can you share if we hit +$20k in liquidity in week 2 yet?

@andrey

They going to work on pDEX improvements. Such:

• Add Price Chart
• Trade History, etc
• Implementing liquidity pool incentives (tool: prv rewards)

I feel once we start pushing it up, there will be a list of improvements.

product – @tien can you share the exact ship dates for these features? these features were promised to ship by the end of the month, and it’s almost 1/2 of the month already. if you have an early mockup of these features or the ui/ux flow to show how they work, please share them. i think it’s really helpful for the community to understand how they work and give feedback to your team too, before they go into development.

[andrey]

Hey @duy thanks for the feedback. So far we have quite interesting results.

pBTC <> PRV pair

For the pas four days were added

• ~ 51k PRV
• ~ 3.45 pBTC

Which is equivalent of ~ $45k

pXMR <> PRV pair

• ~ 17k PRV
• ~ 143 pXMR

Which is equivalent of ~ $15k.

I started topic on Monero Reddit

@everyon please join the discussion. Let’s try to convince more people to join.

[tien]

Hi @duy, this is the ship dates of the features:

• Price Chart: 27 April
• Trade History: The app already have it
• Buy PRV: 07 May
• Liquidity Pool Incentives: 20 April

Price Chart (testnet data)

Buy PRV: User don’t need to deposit and withdraw anymore.

[Jamie]

Removing the need to deposit/withdraw will be welcomed by many. Are pDEX(Withdraw) no longer in use then, or are they used in the background? Does it affect current pDEX(Withdraw) accounts that are in use/have funds?

[tien]

No, pDEX will not have any changes. Users still need to deposit/withdraw in pDEX screen.

pDEX screen will be changed to new flow after buying PRV work properly.

[Jamie]

I read it as a general “no need to deposit/withdraw”, but it only relates to buying PRV. Got it, thanks.

[raz]

Liquidity in the PRV-USDt dex skyrocketed, great job @andrey!

[andrey]

Hopefully by the end of this month we will close the liquidity question and will focus more on product and user growth.

[tien]

REPORT 13 April - 17 Apr 2020

Finish:

• We finalized new pDEX flow. It help users trade directly with their account, user don’t need to deposit/withdraw anymore with new flow. We will test it in buying PRV feature
• We had final design for price chart.
• We finalized reward calculation formula for pdex liquidity holders.

In progress:

• Liquidity reward: We have done the implementation. We are testing it. It will be release next Monday
• Price chart: We are implementing it.
  
  

[andrey]

Some updates from the growth activity

We got quite good results for the first week of the campaign;
+$65k in total for pBTC & pXMR pools
+$690k in total for USDT & USDC pairs
Please find details below.

The same time we faced problems for attracting liquidity from monero & communities and collected several request for improvements.

• difficult to convince people to add liquidity who see PRV in the firs time
• not clear guidance for adding/removing liquidity
• difficult to manage staked assets (dashboard with details)
• some confuses from users who trade with “empty” liquidity pools

All feedback are added to the backlog and team work on improvements.

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Below you can find a breakdown of changes of the liquidity pools.

liquidity pool PRV /pBTC (~$50k)

	Apr 10	Apr 17	Difference
PRV:	88,091	143,094	+ 55,003
BTC:	6	10	+ 4

liquidity pool PRV /pXMR (~$15k)

	Apr 10	Apr 17	Difference
PRV:	31	17,492	+ 17,461
XMR:	1	146	+ 145

liquidity pool PRV /pUSDT (~$360k)

	Apr 10	Apr 17	Difference
PRV:	148,292	551,252	+ 402,960
USDT:	65,249	252,159	+ 186,910

liquidity pool PRV /pUSDC (~$330k)

	Apr 10	Apr 17	Difference
PRV:	90,684	459,980	+ 369,296
USDC:	40,866	214,441	+ 173,575

[aaron]

Those are fantastic results, and interesting feedback from those communities.
I have a question: Is the increase in liquidity for those pairs shrinking the pools for other pairs, and if so, is that fine? Are people just moving their prv one pair to a different one, or is it mostly new?

[andrey]

yep, for BTC & XMR I assume that funds moved from BTC <> XMR pair to BTC <> PRV & XMR <> PRV.

I think it’s totally ok, coz it make more liquidity focused on just 2-4 pairs which allows higher trading supply.