January 25, 2023
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This interview was originally published by Genfinity.
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King Solomon interviews HeliSwap as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.
King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
What is up, everybody? Solomon here. I hope you guys are all having a fantastic day. Super excited to have Andre from Heli Swap with us today. As you guys know, within the Hedera corner in collaboration with HashPack, we're doing tons of interviews in the Hedera ecosystem. Heli Swap is the first DEX and DAO supporting swaps between HTS tokens, ERC20 tokens, and H-bar on the Hedera network. How are you doing today, Andre?
Heli Swap – Andre – Strategy and Business Development
Hi Ryan, thanks for having me here doing very good, and appreciate the opportunity to talk about Heli Swap and everything they're related with you today. How about you? How are you?
King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Oh, fantastic. Uh, I'm losing track of days here, but we're back into the new year. It's good to see some green action in the market, especially after 2022. If you could maybe provide a little bit of a background about the project and the team for Heli Swap. You know, when did you guys decide that you wanted to launch this? When did you when did you decide that you wanted to launch on Hedera as well?
Heli Swap – Andre - Strategy and Business Development
Yeah, sure, absolutely. Maybe let me start off by introducing myself. So like you said, my name is Andre, focusing on strategy and business development for Heli Swap. And how Heli Swap really came into existence was because it is a collaboration between Mantra, which is like a DEFI platform and also operating like a nodes business. So these people are very good when it comes to the defi aspect of things, and also Lime Chain, which is like the powerhouse, the dev team that built all these nice smart contracts at the back end. They came together and kind of created Heli Swap in collaboration because we saw there was a gap in the ecosystem. With the ecosystem also becoming evm compatible, meaning that, you know, all the devs out there that are currently building on the Ethereum network or any other evm compatible chain can just use the code as it is and redeploy it on the Hedera work. And Lime Chain, they definitely like a big shout out to them, they build a lot of developer tools also that make, you know, deploying smart contracts and whatnot a lot easier for everyone in the ecosystem. So, Lime Chain together with Mantra just saw this opportunity to build the DEX here, and this is how we came into existence and how we came to life. And it has been quite a journey to be honest. So I think the idea came about like nine months ago and it was a lot of roadmapping and figuring out like how to go forward. And there was also some obviously very good collaboration with the Hedera foundation, where we're also very thankful for them. So from the Hedera foundation, big shout out to them as well. Heli Swap got like a 30 million H-bar token grant, which is currently being distributed to the community if they participate in those yield farming campaigns. But yeah, this is a little bit about like how Heli Swap came into life and who are the people behind it. And we're split obviously also across the globe so, a few people sit here in Hong Kong with me and the Lime Chain people. They sit in Bulgaria. So, we're trying to be very global. And the funny thing is though, that I mean, as you know, the big part of the Hedera community is actually in the US. So, we're definitely trying to hit all the different time zones at all times of the day, basically or night, depending on where you are situated.
King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yeah, Lime Chain is kind of...wow! They are a Powerhouse! You're Correct! But from the community standpoint, I wish more people would follow some of the stuff that they're doing because there's certainly a powerhouse. It's actually a little bit of a sidebar. It's how I found out that Alliance Block was using Hedera consensus service like maybe a year and a half ago, before it was even announced. Just looking through GitHub and stuff like that. In the vision statement, that you guys have for the documentation on docs.helswap.io, you guys have the vision statement is being the ultimate goal of Heli Swap is to become the preferred DEX and DAO for users in the Hedera ecosystem. Can you touch base on how the team is planning to achieve that because obviously, we do know that there's some competition in the Hedera ecosystem right now from the DEX standpoint?
Heli Swap – Andre - Strategy and Business Development
Yeah, definitely. Sure. That's a very good question. And maybe let me start off by saying, I completely agree with you. Competition is very good. It makes you wake up every day and try to work hard on yourself and hard on building a good product that everyone wants to use. And hopefully, we're going to get there to become the preferred DEX by all people in their network. And our plan and roadmap to get there is simply like we built the DEX and we're also learning while we're building it and learning together with the community. So, one key takeaway for example that I would like to mention is the DEX is kind of more touching upon the DeFi side of things, right. But we actually quickly learned that in the Hedera ecosystem, the NFT space was much earlier than the DeFi space. So, this is why we then started to collaborate with a lot of different NFT projects out there, trying to figure out what the community really likes about the DeFi space and how we can slowly migrate them for example from the NFT space into the DEX or onto the DEFI side of things. So, this is why we started doing Twitter spaces on this one side. We joined Twitter spaces from other NFT projects but also we hosted our own Twitter spaces where we are trying to actively get NFT projects to talk to us and also get listed on our DEX and educate everyone within that community on how to DeFi, basically. And another thing that I would like to highlight here is, in terms of how we want to become the preferred DEX, is by being very transparent and open about everything that's happening, so that for example, being said, we know very clearly that if you would put APY numbers on yield farming campaigns, they just appear a lot higher right? Because APY means the compounded interest, meaning every day you harvest, you restake it, and this is how a higher number comes into play. But where we purposely put the APR number on it, because that just simply means you put in money today and if you don't move it for a year's time, you will get exactly that percentage. Transparency is definitely one thing that we also want to highlight and that we think is very important in the space because, as aforementioned, a lot of people are only in the NFT space, some people actually have never potentially touched upon DeFi before, and it can be quite scary and overwhelming when you like go into the crypto space for the very first time. What I also found very interesting is a lot of people or a lot of people like we heard a couple of times that people actually that own NFTs on Hedera have never touched crypto before they bought an NFT on Hedera. So there is definitely room to educate a lot of people as well. That brings me a little bit back to the transparency thing but also the educational part like we're trying hard to build good analytics pages. Just so, we first started with an analytic and sorry analytics page that just shows you overall details on what the DEX is, how the DEX is doing, what the TVL is, and whatnot. Then we came out with a version two of it that is now showing more detailed information on each of the different pools that we're having and we're also, and I think I can mention it already, working on a version 3 of that that is going to bring out a use-specific analytics meaning that you will know exactly how much you have staked, where you have staked it, how much are you going to earn if everything stays unchanged, what is impermanent loss, how much are you affected by it, how is that going to look like if you unstick at this point in time so just trying to make it very transparent and clear to people what they're getting into if they for example provide liquidity or if they speak on a yield farming campaign or if they just simply do a swap right because there's also a fee involved when you swap a currency very slippage it depends on how deep a certain pool is so there are a lot of factors that we kind of just really want to educate people on. Speaking of education, something I think that is unique in the Hedera space is also that all these tokens have different keys right? You have like an admin key, a freeze key, a pass key. So, whenever we list the project on our DEX that contains one of those keys, we also highlight that that particular project, that particular coin or token has such a unique key involved with it and just has like a disclaimer token XYZ has this and that key that means that the owners of that particular token could potentially do I don't know like mint more token, swipe the token, freeze the token depending on the key that is involved. So, I was rambling on a lot of different topics but this is kind of our way forward, and also another thing, oh yeah, there's a lot of things that we're trying to fit under the hood here is we just really want to be community-driven as well, so we are also working on bringing out a DAO where everyone can then participate in a fair manner and we're not, you know, you get an advantage if you, I don't know, just have been a super early supporter. I mean that is also obviously very important to, you know, benefit be beneficial for the super early supporters, but we still want to make it fair that everyone can participate in decisions that are being made, let it be for example a fee switch to be turned on and whatnot. So, we're working very hard to bring out a DEO very soon as well.
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