UPDATE Feb 20 2021: Bountyswap is live — start swapping today! Watch instructions on how to connect your Zelcore wallet to Bountyswap.

After a successful and productive run in testnet, Kadenaswap is headed to mainnet to start “Bountyswap” — the live beta! It’s a good time to lay out the current plans for Kadenaswap, Bountyswap and the future of multi-protocol, scalable DeFi.

Kadenaswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) running on the Kadena blockchain, modeled after Uniswap and other “constant product” exchanges. Like those, “automated market makers” (AMMs) provide liquidity for pairs of tokens, so that users may _swap _one token for another at the ratio currently provided by the pair.

The great thing about this design is how it lives up to the “decentralized” claim: everything from liquidity provision, pricing to swapping is done entirely on-chain, requires no intervention from off chain authorities or oracles, and is fully autonomous with no control by any central on-chain authority either.

Constant Product Exchanges

There are two roles in this style of DEX: the AMMs providing liquidity, and “swappers” accessing that liquidity to swap between tokens. For example, let’s look at a hypothetical altcoin ABC in a pair with DAI, MakerDAO’s stablecoin, “wrapped” on the platform. We’ll talk more about “wrapped tokens” below but for this example, we’ll just call it DAI.

Liquidity provision

To swap ABC for DAI on a constant-product DEX, there needs to be ABC and DAI already there to service your swap. An AMM facilitates this by *adding liquidity *to the ABC:DAI pair. If the pair doesn’t exist, the AMM can create it, otherwise they add to what’s there. An AMM must provide both ABC and DAI, in a ratio that represents the current “market price” of swapping between DAI and ABC.

Thus, if ABC is trading at USD $0.25, since DAI tracks the dollar closely, an AMM could provide 1,000 ABC and 250 DAI to launch the pair. A remarkable principle of constant-product exchanges like Kadenaswap is that arbitrage swapping ensures the price faithfully reflects the off-chain market:

Swapping and Fees

Now that the pair is provisioned, a user can come in with DAI wanting to buy ABC, or with ABC wanting to buy DAI. The rate is determined by the available liquidity, as the smart contract enforces the constant product. With 1000 ABC and 250 DAI, that’s the square root of 1000*250, or 500: whatever remains after the swap must compute to something equal or greater than this amount.

In addition, the user is charged a fee of 0.3% of the constant product, either by providing more of one token, or getting less of the other. So the swap in fact must result in the constant product with fee increasing or equal. So, if the user wants to buy 10 ABC worth of DAI, instead of getting 2.5 DAI, they will get 2.467895, and the constant product grows to 500.007426. In this way, the holdings of the pair in the underlying tokens grows with each swap.

Liquidity Token ownership

The constant product also faithfully represents AMM positions in the liquidity pool. In the example above, the first provider gets 500 units of the liquidity pool, out of 500 total liquidity. A second AMM coming in with the same amounts also gets 500, but now the total liquidity has risen to 1000. These holdings are stored in the *liquidity token *for the pair, which in our example is ABC:DAI.

To access these profits, an AMM removes liquidity. This results in the burning of their liquidity tokens and a redemption of the holdings in the pair tokens in the current ratio. Since this has increased from swaps, the amount of the underlying tokens has grown, and the AMM profits. Note that there is more to this story if the external price has moved, but at least according to the constant product, and trusting that arbitrage has kept the ratio sane, the AMM is strictly richer due to accrued fees.

Kadenaswap: gas-free, multi-protocol, multi-chain, multi-platform

Kadenaswap is designed to take the constant product design that has proven so successful with Uniswap and other DEXs and leverage the unique advantages of the Kadena platform.

First, as an on-chain DEX, Kadenaswap will be *multi-protocol *from the start, offering any on-chain asset that market-makers want to pool. Unlike many “off-Ethereum’’ DEXes, Kadenaswap pairs are not limited to only super-liquid tokens like BTC and ETH and leading stablecoins, but any fungible asset on-chain, such as protocols that provide unique market access like LUNA and CELO, as well as proven protocols on Ethereum like DAI, and of course all tokens on the Kadena platform.

Thanks to gas stations, trading on Kadenaswap won’t require a user to hold KDA to trade. Even if they did have to pay gas, gas fees on Kadena are currently microscopic (usually ~0.0000000001 KDA). However, this can change if usage steeply increases. If only running on one chain of the Kadena blockchain, gas prices would inevitably go up for the same reason they do on Ethereum: in the face of congestion, increasing the gas price increases the priority for a miner to include your transaction in the next block.

Scaling an on-chain DEX

The real answer to gas prices is scalability. This is where Kadena shines: even the fastest Proof-of-Stake platform has upper limits on throughput, but Kadena’s chainweb protocol uniquely can scale the number of chains to meet any demand. In turn, Dapps on Kadena simply scale out to the number of chains needed to service demand.

So, just run Kadenaswap on multiple chains, problem solved? Well, not exactly. Chains in Kadena still run independently, and a coin “can’t be in two places at the same time”. Each Kadenaswap smart contract on its own chain will have completely separate pools for a given pair. This can mean prices can get out of sync, but that can be fixed by the same arb-ing described above. The harder problem to solve is *liquidity fragmentation, *where a pair on one chain has way more inventory (and is therefore a better place to trade) than on another chain.

Multi-Venue AMM Incentives

We like to call multi-chain Kadenaswap “multi-venue” to indicate the notion that there is more than one venue where the trade is made. To solve liquidity fragmentation, incentives are needed to reward AMMs for balancing liquidity across venues.

An initial design simply incentivizes AMMs to lock up liquidity in a pair for some period of time, let’s say a week. An AMM can then prove to the same pair on Chain 2 that they are providing equal liquidity on Chain 3 for that same week and receive higher gains accordingly, through either yield incentives, or through a fee structure that rewards cross-chain provisioning higher than single-chain.

This allows pairs to scale independently: if one pair isn’t overloaded on a single chain, it can enjoy an unfragmented market. Meanwhile, a hard-hit pair can scale to as many chains as demand requires, and market makers will be rewarded for splitting up their positions to service each venue.

Finally, insofar as pairs are truly isolated, they can simply exist in separate venues. For instance if some altcoin is really only paired with stablecoins, they can all hang out in a single venue, even though other pools with those stablecoins and other coins are scaled over multiple venues.

If this sounds confusing, worry not: it will be easy to swap and AMM across all chains in Kadenaswap. The hard part is the multi-venue design and incentive structure, which we will be iterating on as we scale. Solving this problem is a first step to building a truly industrial-strength DEX.

Multi-Platform

The great thing about Kadena’s multi-chain structure is that it’s truly multi-chain while still being in the Kadena universe: once it’s in motion, the multi-venue design can then scale onto other Pact-supporting platforms like Cosmos, or Polkadot (once the Pact Core/Kadenadot initiatives are ready).

In this way, Kadenaswap will be the only multi-venue, multi-protocol, and multi-platform DEX, leading to a future where users won’t have to even think about platforms and protocols, but just access value wherever it is.

Bountyswap is a “soft”, live-beta launch of Kadenaswap on mainnet, using a “temporary” token that only has value while Bountyswap is in progress. We expect Bountyswap to run for 2–4 weeks, or longer if issues are found. The goal is to use the temporary token to incentivize “white-hat hackers” to try to break the system and steal coins, which is theirs to keep if their hacks are successful.

“KPenny” temporary Bountyswap token

We call the Bountyswap temporary token a KPenny which gives a hint of its functionality. KPenny tokens can be reserved for use with Bountyswap at a rate of 1M to 1 KDA token.

Bountyswap will then launch three pairs on Kadenaswap, using two “test tokens’’ called ABC and XYZ. The three pairs will thus be KPenny:ABC, KPenny:XYZ, and ABC:XYZ. The bountyswap admin marketmaker will provide liquidity in all three pairs. The target quantities will thus represent up to 100,000 KDA, creating a significant “honeypot” to attract hackers to attack.

At the end of Bountyswap, all KPennys will be returned in the equivalent KDA, and all three tokens will be decommissioned. However, swaps and fees will mean that these values will have changed, and the amount returned will reflect this. This ensures that the “honeypot” will reward the tester if an exploit is found.

This of course also means that any KPenny token reserved for Bountyswap program is not guaranteed to return to its original owner. Indeed, testers need to be aware that their reservations can be entirely lost due to an exploit or otherwise. But in any case, testers will want to swap out of the test tokens before the program ends. Thus, there will be a “shutdown period” where KPennys will no longer be available for reservation and will only support transfers out of pair accounts. During this time, testers can swap out of XYZ and ABC into KPenny in time for the full shutdown.

The Bountyswap home page has everything you need to get started. At time of writing, Bountyswap is not live as we’re finishing up KPenny functionality in Testnet. After that, use links there to download/connect your wallet, reserve some KPennys, and get swapping and AMM-ing! Don’t forget to join our communities on Telegram and Discord to get support, ask questions, and suggest improvements!