Incubation Post [SCP-TBD] Roadmap Proposal Jan - Mar 31, 2023

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.