[Ideation] SCP-121: Roadmap Proposal Jan - Mar 31, 2023

Snapshot Ideation Vote

Incubation Post

Summary

This is a proposal for Phase 1 of the roadmap for the ShapeShift DAO as reviewed, debated and discussed over several community calls and at the DAO WOW. This Phase is through March 31, 2023. (Another proposal for Phase 2, will be brought forward ahead of the completion of Phase 1.) This roadmap includes plans to add new features and additional chains to the ShapeShift platform.

Right now there exists a large void in the industry, for users who already use Ethereum (or other EVMs) and Cosmos zones. Integrating both EVM chains and Cosmos zones to our app puts ShapeShift in a unique position to attract users by being the best place to view and interact with Multiple chains including EVM and Cosmos Zones; and view their defi positions across them all.

The objective with the proposed roadmap is for ShapeShift to become the easy-to-use, decentralized platform that gives users a single place to view their portfolio and DeFi positions while earning yield, swapping, and bridging assets seamlessly between EVMs, UTXO-chains, and Cosmos zones.

Note: The results of the Phase 1 features & integrations will help inform the strategy for Phase 2.

Abstract

A link to the roadmap for Phase 1 can be found here: https://shapeshift.notion.site/d6e396d4e89d4264b936c2165f0f5dd1?v=0b95572137754700b9326ae6a1631cf5

Wrap up the Osmosis bounty: Get Osmo staking and Osmo / ATOM LP over the finish line. The core engineering team has volunteered to allocate their resources to wrap up the loose ends on the Osmosis bounty and get it shipped by mid-January. This includes Native wallet and Keplr support. PastaGhost is planning to wrap up KeepKey support as well, and once that’s ready, it should be shipped around the same time.

Savers Vaults:

Give users a simple way to earn great yields on popular, native assets such as bitcoin. The savers vaults are single-sided, and super simple to deposit into and withdraw from without any wrapping. The decentralized ethos of THORChain truly aligns with the ShapeShift vision, and users will be able to benefit from these returns without any KYC.

Yearn Revamp:

The original Yearn integration was completed very early on in the DAO formation. This line item is just to document that the integration will be updated to utilize the newer abstraction that the core engineering team built which will reduce the maintenance burden going forward.

Add 3 new EVMs; Optimism, Polygon and BSC:

Optimism: one of the leading layer 2 scaling solutions. It’s powered by a technology called Optimistic rollups which bundle large amounts of transaction data into digestible batches. As of this writing, there are at least 88 protocols on Optimism with $552 million in TVL value locked in their smart contracts collectively. Aave and Uniswap are two of the most popular protocols on the chain. YTD Optimism has seen 1,764,650 new wallets spin up with active transactions even in this bear market.

Polygon:

Polygon currently has $1.07 billion TVL, across 310 protocols and YTD has seen 66,018,560 new wallets spin up with active transactions. Aave, Balancer and Uniswap are some of the top protocols on Polygon. Polygon has the potential to handle up to 65,000 transactions per second, whereas Ethereum can process only up to roughly 17 transactions per second. And, like other EVMs, Polygon fees to users are mere pennies.

Binance Smart Chain:

Binance Smart Chain is one of the world’s fastest blockchains. BSC is well known for its lightning-fast transactions; on BSC the blocks are made every 3 seconds. It is the 2nd dominant blockchain as far as user-activity is concerned, behind Ethereum. According to DefiLlama current TVL on BSC is $6.62 billion. So far this year, BSC has seen 97,417,942 new wallets spin up with active transactions so far this year, impressive growth even in the bear market.

Note: we are also pursuing Grant opportunities from these integrations.

Sunset Portis Wallet: The Portis wallet is being sunset at the end of January. We will need to remove it from ShapeShift, and plan to give users a migration path to migrate to a ShapeShift native wallet.

Swapper 3.0: As we now aggregate multiple DEX’s and plan to add a couple more, engineering has been working on the logic for “best rate”. We plan to update the UI on the swapper to display the rates to the user, with a “best rate” pre-selected, but the user will be able to choose which DEX their trade is routed through.

Wallet Connect V1 Dapps: ShapeShift is expanding the amount of protocols users can interact with through WalletConnect. With the WalletConnect integration on app.shapeshift.com, users will be able to connect to over 450 dapps and confirm transactions with their connected wallet in ShapeShift’s interface. This feature is almost complete, but there are some technical pieces being wrapped up. The plan is to launch early in January.

Wherever: This is a tool that allows users to opt into notifications via ShapeShift and optionally via email, Discord and Telegram. Users will get notifications for things like new feature announcements, governance alerts, and notifications when they receive assets. Wherever is built on the Push protocol, a web3 communication network, enabling cross-chain notifications and messaging for dapps, wallets, and services; in addition to notifications from ShapeShift’s Push channel, the Wherever integration will enable users to see all of their Push notifications on ShapeShift.

Cosmos Staking Revamp: Similar to the Yearn integration; the original staking integration was completed very early on in the DAO formation. This line item is just to document that the integration will be updated to utilize the newer abstraction that the core engineering team built which will reduce the maintenance burden going forward.

Kill the splash screen: to improve the bounce rate on the ShapeShift web app, we plan to remove the splash screen and drop users directly into a Welcome page on the app itself.

Trade settings (slippage): This feature on the trade widget will allow users to change their trade settings so that they can control the slippage tolerance

Integrate 1inch & LiFi to swapper: Both 1inch and LiFi are DEX aggregators with rev share agreements available. Integrating both of these will allow the user to get the best rate across any DEX and provide another source of revenue for the DAO. Lifi also offers bridging, which will be part of the bridging integration.

Display NFTs: With the work being done in blackbook, we will soon be able to have NFT support for Native wallet and all of the wallets that support ETH.

Metamask Snaps: The majority of the work for the snaps is done. We’re just waiting on the results from the audit. The MetaMask Snap allows Metamask users to buy, trade, send and receive assets across multiple chains while using ShapeShift. This functionality is not currently available via Metamask, and will give their 20M+ active users access to chains beyond EVMs such as bitcoin, cosmos, thorchain, and doge.

Wallet Connect Update to V2: This will open WalletConnect support to chains beyond Ethereum. This is also something we need to do to continue to support Wallet Connect in the app because V1 is planned to be sunsetted in H1 2023.

Bridging: With so many chains supported, it’s important that our users will be able to trade and bridge easily between them. We’re currently planning to integrate Squid and LiFi to support bridging between both EVM chains and cosmos zones.

Display Cross-Chain Defi Positions: This will show users all their DeFi positions across all the supported chains when they connect their wallet.

Motivation

This lays out a strategic plan for the development of the product over the first 3 months of 2023. Through community discussions, research, and time-phased projections, together we’ve identified this strategy for the next few months that will give ShapeShift a unique position for which to attract a larger user base. This strategy also aligns with the broader DAO vision.

Drawbacks

There are a lot of projections being made based on the research we’ve done to support this strategy. Given that it’s a bear market and conditions could even get worse, there’s a chance that a different strategy would be better for the DAO and that we’re not going to see the growth that we’re forecasting.

Vote

For: a vote for this means you support the priorities laid out in this roadmap for Phase 1

Against: a vote means you do not support this roadmap or support a different priority of work.

1 Like

Very nice work! I agree with pretty much everything said/listed and the priorities.

I have a general question about the EVM networks support. I find it great that we aim to add networks and provide independent support by syncing our own nodes for them (and eventually even use Arkeo instead). But wouldn’t the app benefit from also adopting a similar approach as MetaMask: allow users to add/interact with any EVM network by adding it using a custom RPC and import any custom token for these networks?

We can offer a “preferred” list of networks we support as we currently do (and provide/advertise better privacy for these) and still give more freedom to our users by letting them use our wallet or the third-party one they’ve connected to their full potential. We’d obviously have a warning message explaining we cannot provide the same level of Customer Support for any custom RPCs/tokens users choose to use.

My concern is that if we want to support “All chains”, adding them one by one is a really Sisyphean task, even if we were only talking about popular ones… just for EVM networks the list is pretty long already (https://chainlist.org/) and won’t really get much shorter any time soon in my opinion (even if Ethereum manages to somehow update within few years and reduce the need for certain sidechains/L2s).

I don’t intend to turn this into a feature request post of course, I’m more interested in knowing if we can set a path to really match our ambition towards supporting “All chains”.

Side note: A benefit of this could also be that any testing which requires actual transactions to be signed/broadcasted could be done cheaper on testnets for Operations/Engineering… and some of them might even be automated.

1 Like

@BeDiggy Thank you for posting this; I’m very happy to see this brought to the community for input. Overall, I think the list of items is well-selected to deliver value to our customers.

I only have one comment - to keep everyone on the same page, the engineering and Osmosis bounty teams should meet to discuss scope of engineering involvement in the Osmosis integration prior to kicking off any work on that line item.

I look forward to seeing the new features in the platform!

gm @Fireb0mb1 thanks for sharing your ideas on this. It would be great if we could just let users add the network, however, on the dapp level even if we let users plug in their own RPC endpoints, we wouldn’t necessarily get things like price data, token icons, or tokenlists. I do like your idea though of potentially allowing this, with a warning, but overall, I feel that the user experience would be compromised.

gm, thanks for your answer!

MetaMask which uses Coingecko (like us!) as their data provider for token icons/fiat price data/ticker symbols seems to be able to manage this issue while preserving a basic UX for users who do not voluntarily use custom networks/tokens with custom RPCs, so I do not understand at which point the UX would degraded for our users :thinking:

They display as much information as they can, when available. For the missing data we could do like them: no fiat value, default icons and the ERC20 token data can be retrieved from the RPC (ticker, decimals) when the user imports it using the contract address.

If we are not going to offer a wide support for EVM-chains, not just based on popularity, I think our Marketing Workstream should really consider revising the “All chains” part from our motto, although “Most chains” doesn’t ring as good obviously :smile:

Yes, good points. We just need to consider the lift required to make this an MLP (minimally lovable experience) and how much of a priority this is relative to other features at this time. Adding the ability to detect or Import custom tokens hasn’t been prioritized rn (https://github.com/shapeshift/web/issues/960). Chart data and total portfolio value is where the user experience would in some cases be compromised, but as you said we could include a message to the user regarding this. We might also need to either disable trade for certain EVMs, or could potentially support 0x trading on any network that supports it, but again would need a list of tokens or Import custom tokens to display tokens available for trading. We could give users the ability to import custom RPCs (or even selecting from a dropdown with pre-configured EVMs) with the Wallet Connect v2 integration, which KeepKey did recently in their client. I haven’t had a chance to test this out yet. This could be a good first step though, but we would need to figure out where to squeeze it in with the roadmap. This would also enable us to gather more data to validate taking additional steps.

Understood, thanks for the additional info!

Hopefully we can find resources/time for this eventually, at minimum enabling custom network send/receive for ShapeShift native wallet would put us on the same level as MetaMask, even if these balances aren’t part of the portfolio tracker side of our app.

Currently if someone wants to do this with ShapeShift they need to switch to another wallet like MetaMask and it’s potentially a way for them to stray away from our product.

yes, I’ve ‘penciled this in’ as a potential feature for Phase 2 of the new roadmap. I’m sure some other features will pop up as well that we’d like to consider in the Phase 2 strategy (which we’ll start tightening up in a couple months).