[REVIEW] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Symphony Finance

Project name: Symphony Finance

Author name and contact info (please provide a reliable point of contact for the project): @kakashi @Rohan @Roland @Pankaj

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

L2 recipient address: 0x49646c840f3F59de4Ab10E0F938477D50889607B

Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: Cycle 8

Grant category: DeFi

Is this proposal applicable to a specific committee? DeFi Community

Project description:

A novel yield-optimized trading protocol that earns you extra yield while trading crypto.

Symphony DEX is the composability layer that aggregates prices and liquidity across all DEXs and DEX aggregators, providing you with the best prices and fastest execution speeds for your trades. This way, you can buy and sell tokens more capital-efficiently than ever. Your trades keep earning yield on safe protocols like Aave, Yearn, etc. till the time they execute.

Symphony also offers limit and stop loss order features, allowing maximum flexibility for various trading strategies. These features help protect you from depegs and let you DCA effectively during market dips - while still earning you interest.

Along with being the only yield-generating DEX, Symphony DEX is also a certified gnosis-safe standard platform, allowing users to control their digital assets with much more granular permissions. It is the perfect protocol for multisigs, DAOs & funds to diversify their treasuries. We are proudly backed by Aave, Balancer, and Mstable grants.

Symphony DEX is live on Optimism and, it allows you to trade tokens including $OP with limit and stop-loss order functionality. We have already integrated with industry leaders like Uniswap, Aave, Balancer, Paraswap and are open to integrating with more protocols such as Velodrome & other DEXes, DEX aggregators, and lending & yield optimizers thereby bringing more growth to the broader Optimism ecosystem.

Project links:

Additional team member info: Team - Docs

Relevant usage metrics (TVL, transactions, volume, unique addresses, etc. Optimism metrics preferred; please link to public sources such as Dune Analytics, etc.):

(As of 13th October 2022)

Order Created

Cumulative Orders (Optimism) - 2487
Cumulative Orders (Polygon) - 79702

Unique wallets

Unique address on Optimism - 1397
Unique address on Polygon - 33,490

Cumulative Volume

Cumulative Volume (Optimism) - $145,635
Cumulative Volume (Polygon) - $10,810,536

Dune Dashboard:

Competitors, peers, or similar projects:

Is/will this project be open sourced? Yes

Optimism native?: No

Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism: July 2022

Ecosystem Value Proposition:

What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?

During our research, we found that most DEXs fail to execute trades on time, even when there is sufficient liquidity and appropriate price on other AMMs. This problem was due to the design of order book-based DEXs, where liquidity from other DEXs couldn’t be leveraged.

That is a massive problem that needs to be solved, considering that we expect a huge number of new investors to enter the crypto market in the next 6-12 months. Although DeFi is generally known for its high and safe yields, a lot of inexperienced new users don’t understand the process of liquidity providing:

  • How to stake / unstake
  • Swap
  • Bridge
  • Move funds between wallets.

If things go wrong, they can’t remember what step they missed and start double-checking again. It’s a complicated and time-consuming process, especially for a common user.

In the past few months, the ecosystem saw tremendous stablecoin de-pegs like never before. Volatility led to a massive downturn in asset prices and resulted in huge capital losses for investors.

99% of DEXs don’t earn interest for you when your trades are waiting in the order book. As a result, you have to choose between earning interest and stop-loss protection. So we asked: Why can’t we have both?

Millions of dollars worth of stablecoins are waiting right now across all protocols’ order books to hit their order prices, without earning any yield. As a result, a huge amount of potential yield goes to waste.

Symphony aims to solve these problems on Optimism.

How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?

At Symphony, we understand that when you’re riding the volatility, your trades need to execute quickly. This is why we’ve built our DEX as the composability layer that aggregates liquidity across the network giving the user quick trade execution. Symphony acts as a Meta DEX aggregator giving the user the best price across all decentralized exchanges and aggregators such as Uniswap, ParaSwap, 1inch, and other liquidity sources. A small price change can make a big difference especially as trading is a matter of fine margins.

We’ve automated yield generation so users can focus on the trading. The trades keep earning yield on safe protocols till the time they execute. Symphony DEX optimizes yield on trades and auto compounds them by integrating with safe and battle-tested protocols like Aave, Yearn, etc. All one needs to do is create an order, and the yield comes automatically.

Symphony also solves depeg protection by providing a stop-loss order feature. With Symphony you can protect your capital from a stablecoin depeg situation, by setting a stop loss at $0,95. Your stable will keep earning yield even while it’s in the order book. If a stable depegs, your stop loss will hit and you will get out in time with no yield wasted. So your stables keep earning interest while you wait for the asset to reach your buy price. If a user wants to buy ETH under $1.2k and earn yield till it executes, they can just set a buy limit order on Symphony DEX. This way the user earns passive yield on the stables even if the order price never hits.

All in all, Symphony DEX provides a win-win situation for its users, while they maintain self-custody of their assets on Optimism.

Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?

Symphony Finance aims to spur the growth of the Optimism ecosystem by providing a wide range of features that will attract both traders & yield farmers. Symphony DEX would also attract the holders of stable assets like stable USD pegged coins, LIDO staked eth, etc. Holders can reduce losses in the event of de-pegging while keep earning yield in the background. Apart from this, Symphony is well-positioned to cater to DAOs & multi-sig wallets by successfully integrating with Gnosis safe. Symphony DEX can serve as a treasury management tool for Safe users.

By simplifying on-chain trading through Symphony DEX, we are trying to onboard the next-gen users to Web3 & DeFi. Most people interested in DeFi, especially non-native users can’t use the on-chain protocols due to high L1 gas fees and often find the whole trading process complicated. Optimism optimizes gas fees and Symphony provides automatic yields along with great trading features making it a low-risk, high-reward solution and help incentivize the new users to transition from CEX to DEX. This in turn encourages a new wave of users to explore and grow the OP ecosystem.

We already have a decent amount of users across other chains and by incentivizing activity on Optimism, Symphony DEX will be able to attract those users to Optimism and become the go-to trading DEX for all types of Web3 users ranging from an average Joe to professional traders.

With this grant distribution, Symphony DEX will be able to incentivize trading activity, utilize resources to expand our marketing efforts, and increase further developments and maintenance of our DEX on Optimism. Through sustained growth, our aim is to make Optimism the main network for DeFi users.

Has your project previously applied for an OP grant? No

Number of OP tokens requested: 250,000 OP

Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?: No

How much will your project match in co-incentives? (not required but recommended, when applicable): Our project does not have a native token yet, so we are currently unable to co-incentivize, but this can change in the future.

Proposal for token distribution:

How will the OP tokens be distributed? (please include % allocated to different initiatives such as user rewards/marketing/liquidity mining. Please also include a justification as to why each of these initiatives align with the problem statement this proposal is solving.)

Users on Optimism (55%)

$OP will serve as a direct incentive for Symphony Finance Optimism users, primarily active users and new ones, to increase trading activity on the platform. Once the traders use Symphony and experience the smooth UX along with the yield and price aggregation features, they will not want to change their DEX preference. The initial trading activity will be incentivized through this distribution and help in attracting a maximum number of users.

i) 35% OP token airdrops for limit order

For the most active traders and users on Symphony, we will distribute the OP token airdrops retrospectively after we analyze the data. We specifically chose this method to prevent boting / airdrop hunting.

Through token airdrops, we want to boost sustainable growth and minimize airdrop hunting. We can use the following metrics to analyze and disburse token airdrops:

  1. Unique wallets interacted with the protocol (OP side) for the most number of days. (Minimum 14 days)
  2. Has used (for example: Swapped at least $100 worth of crypto) in Symphony AND on another OP native project in the last X days.

This feature directly incentivizes the usage of Symphony on the Optimism Network. It will indirectly boost the OP ecosystem usage because it applies to all limit orders for every Token from the Optimism ecosystem.

ii) 20% gas refunds

20% $OP tokens will be used to cover the gas fees for the users on the Symphony DEX. The grant will be used to subsidize gasless/free trades for the users of Symphony. Each user can possibly get a maximum of 90% gas rebate. There can be a possibility that the gas fee refund allocation is more than the actual gas refunds. In that case, the remaining tokens will be allocated to the user incentives.

Marketing: Ecosystem & Community - Optimism (15%)

$OP will be used for marketing, ecosystem & community initiatives to foster user outreach and amplify our marketing efforts across various channels, through strategic partnerships and collaborations. We are growing rapidly and through this distribution, we want to boost our efforts to onboard as many new users as we can. We are also planning some creative ways to give back to the community, similar to what Aave did for lending which rewarded the user with $OP tokens. Hence, Symphony will reward the grants for content creation, and cross-promotion / collaboration with other OP projects.

For example:

  • Host AMAs with OP industry-leading projects, make Q&As, and those who participate OR answer a 5 to 10 questionnaire, can win prizes.
  • Create a Request For Innovation campaign. Take a look at this (Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. )
  • We will choose topics related to DeFi, DEX & OP ecosystem and incentivize members to make content on the same. for eg. Make a 500-600 words article on why DEXs are essential in the global economy.
  • People write these articles, submit them to us, and we choose the best one. After that, we publish it on our Medium and the writer gets its reward in OP tokens.
  • We don’t believe in influencer shilling so we can incentivize the community with written articles/tweets/videos and distribute the funds to those who genuinely deserve it on merit.
  • We will also highlight at the end of every article that it was made possible by OP funds.

Social media marketing has the potential to attract new users to Crypto & DeFi by creating an aggressive marketing campaign in order to convert leads given the number of people that consume content in the form of short-form reels on platforms like Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for which paid campaigns will be utilized. Onboarding and educating users who are used to Web2 services to Web3 takes some investments but it can help convert a huge number of leads. We’ll also be targeting Twitter as it’s the most used platform by crypto users.

Development & Maintenance (30%)

$OP will be dedicated to the development and maintenance to ensure Symphony DEX is evolving with updated features and security measures. Currently, the Symphony Finance team runs the relayer (a bot that automatically executes trades). The fund allocation for further development of the platform will help Symphony DEX to stay ahead of the curve and continue being a pioneer in innovation across the DEX ecosystem.

Short-Term Roadmap

  • Add more tokens to get additional TVL
  • Support more protocols for execution orders such as Velodrome
  • Add more yield generation strategy to provide better APY to users
  • Boost community engagement via RFIs (refer to marketing distribution)

Long-Term Roadmap

  • Order Book Interface - Allow users to fill orders directly from the interface.
  • Support of COW (Coincidence of Wants) - Internal order matching.
  • Support more complex order types such as twap/icebergs orders.
  • More Yield - Users can choose to earn more yield according to their risk appetite.
  • Advanced Trading UI - The UI is just like CEXes.
  • Add more products to Symphony DAO.

Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed for each initiative? Shorter timelines are preferable to longer timelines. Shorter timelines (on the order of weeks) allow teams to quickly demonstrate achievement of milestones, better facilitating additional grants via subsequent proposals.

Due to the variable nature of the distribution method, it’s difficult to provide definite timelines for the program but we are aiming for it to be a 3-6 months program. We will adjust the period to try to incentivize more sustainable liquidity as we learn from the results as stated in the previous answer. We don’t want to utilize these rewards too quickly and make sure that there is long-term growth in our DEX and Optimism usage.

Please list the milestones/KPIs you expect to achieve for each initiative, considering how each relates to incentivizing sustainable usage and liquidity on Optimism. Please keep in mind that progress towards these milestones/KPIs should be trackable.

These are the relevant KPIs that we are targeting by the end of incentives. The KPIs will be measurable through Dune Analytics.

  • Exceeding 4000 unique wallets onboarded onto Optimism
  • Growth of 5-10x in the global trading volume on Optimism
  • At least 2 limit orders per wallet (to prevent airdrop hunting)

We can also add Yield earned as a metric. We think this is a very modest target. Our main focus is to onboard new users to Optimism rather than bringing volume in the first place. Even if they make a trade of value of $50, we will be happy. If we are able to successfully onboard active users then, we can even make 50-100% growth in volume. So in the long run the risk of cannibalization effect is low.

Why will incentivized users and liquidity on Optimism remain after incentives dry up?

Even after the incentives have finished, the retention value of users will be at the higher end, because there isn’t a better alternative in the market right now. Symphony’s innovative features coupled with the benefits of low gas fees and high transaction speed due to the roll-up architecture of Optimism will make users stay.

This grant will accelerate growth initially, as OP tokens will incentivize users in the initial fast growth period. After the “fast growth period” we’d retain users, because of our previously mentioned features & better UX. Within the existing set of DEXs, Symphony DEX offers a unique solution that is not only attractive but also sustainable in the long run. We are simplifying DeFi for the next wave of new users and we ensure their first stop will be the OP ecosystem.

Optimism provides some of the highest APYs across different protocols. In market conditions like this, where capital efficiency is given more priority, the yield generation feature will also incentivize traders to use Symphony DEX as an easy yield farming opportunity on Optimism, thus maintaining sufficient liquidity on the platform.

We have shown signs of growth despite bearish market conditions. There is a clear market fit for Symphony in the industry and it’ll continue to grow along with the broader crypto market.

Symphony has the potential and capabilities to grow in the long term and with the right incentives, the chances of more users getting attracted to use Symphony on Optimism are very high.

Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability:(smart contracts addresses relevant to the proposal, relevant organizational wallet addresses, etc.)

YOLO: 0x3ff61f4d7e1d912ca3cb342581b2e764ae24d017

12 Likes

have used symphony on polygon and matic, a good experience+yield…keep up guys

2 Likes

One of the most innovative feature I’ve seen in DEXes. Imagine actually being “paid” to open a limit order. It’s ingenious

2 Likes

Symphony DEX has saved me many times with the amazing stoploss feature notably was during the UST (Polygon chain) depeg crisis where I naively aped in :joy:

Earning yield while trading is cool but being able to sell $OP token almost at it’s ATH while I was in bed is one of the reason I’m giving kudos to the Symphony Finance team for coming with this great initiative, I bought $OP at a lower price now, placed it again on Symphony DEX patiently waiting for the magic.

With Symphony Finance, Multi-Tasking is achievable in DeFi :100:

We need to onboard many projects like Symphony into Optimism Ecosystem, TBH

2 Likes

i’ve been a long time user on polygon and AVAX and love how Symphony is user friendly making it easier to earn yield while waiting for orders to be filled.
i hope they the collective boost their efforts by making it easier for them to onboard users into Optimism Ecosystem.

3 Likes

I like symphony dex for these following reasons.

  1. Its fast and reliable
  2. A quick accessible interface
  3. I get to send token to a different wallet if i wish just as am converting my token
1 Like

I have been using Symphony finance for some months. Back in the days when they dex only existed on Polygon network.

I personally this project has great potential and will bring more value to Optimism network.

One of the innovative idea about symphony finance is the ability to earn yield while waiting for d order to close. I find this fascinating.

I think Optimism network is lucky to have this great developers from symphony finance.

2 Likes

Thank you for your proposal.

The product makes sense and can be beneficial to Optimism users. 3 questions for clarification:

  • “Your order will be executed when the price of 1 token reaches the limit price.” Does this mean someone else can create a small order within your limit and the rest of your Ask will be potentially filled with a worse price? Or would your order be split up into multiple trades?
  • To determine the value-add, we’d love to get a bit more (quantitative) insight into the product economics. What is the (%, total, net) advantage over using other DEX aggregators or yield managers. And, how big + how long do limit orders need to be in the pool to make additional gas costs from transactions worth it? Do you have any calculations that you can share?
  • The roadmap on the website details little next steps/dates after multi-chain expansion? Any insight?

Re Proposal:

The stated goal of onboarding users, incl. current users from other chains, is good use of grant funds. The innovative project can potentially add value to the Op ecosystem and its users.

  • Traction:

    • It’s good to see you already deployed on Optimism, integrated protocols & gained first traction
    • Adoption is little so far with about $11M total volume (most during LM 2.0 campaign on Polygon)
    • $50K total value locked according to DefiLlama. (Is this equal to open limit orders?)
  • Distribution:

    • The Op distribution is a bit broad which makes it hard to a) assess positive impact of the proposal and b) retrospectively evaluate the success of this grant proposal.
    • Can you give more detail on spending the 40%? Any concrete plans on incentive programs?
    • 60% for “discrete use” in form of marketing and further development is a bit unclear. Generally, grants can be used for development work but it would be good to understand what kind of features would be unlocked, added and consequently help Op users. The marketing proportion seems relatively high.
  • Ask is pretty high for a small project where the value-add to the Optmism ecosystem is yet to be seen and no co-incentives are added.

    • imo, it’s reasonable to ask projects to match liquidity/APY boosts achieved through Op grants.
    • Some additional insights into value-add may already improve this point & justifiy a certain Ask for a unique, innovative product on Optimism without co-incentives.
    • Additionally, a reduction in the Ask amount would potentially limit the “risk” Op takes and you’d still be able to prove your contribution to Optimism user growth & trading efficiency within a smaller scope before applying for additional grants.
  • KPIs:

    • A combination of (unique) user onboarding & Total Trade Volume/Market Share Growth is reasonable for a DEX. In your specific case, DEX execution prices (vs. others) and especially yield earned could also be interesting to define the value-add of using Symphony vs. other aggregators.
    • What do you mean with “Growth of 5-10x in the global trading volume on Optimism”*? Does this mean you want to grow your cumulative volume on Op from $150K to $750K - $1.5Mio? Or are you refering to market share? Again, 250K Op for $1M additional volume (potentially cannibalization effect?) would be a high Ask

Generally, we are not the biggest fans of grant funding for marketing use as we believe collaborative projects should run marketing anyways - especially when there are incentive programs funded with Op tokens. That’s why it could make sense to scale down the marketing proportion in favor of more direct user incentives.

However, we do also see that there is a very high focus on pure monetary incentives & TVL in the Op ecosystem so far and we believe that specific marketing efforts can indeed bring new users to Op - whether that is for a betting market, game, a first touchpoint on Optimism, or a quality trading interface & experience.

Hence, no need to share secret plans but it would be good to get a bit more insights to evaluate the proposal. Thx

3 Likes

Thanks for this detailed feedback @ScaleWeb3.

Your order will be executed when the price of 1 token reaches the limit price.*” Does this mean someone else can create a small order within your limit and the rest of your Ask will be potentially filled with a worse price? Or would your order be split up into multiple trades?

Actually, we aggregate prices across DEXes and DEX aggregators and we use FCFS. So, your order will be executed first if there is liquidity. Currently, we don’t support iceberg orders. That’s in our future roadmap to support different types of orders.

To determine the value-add, we’d love to get a bit more (quantitative) insight into the product economics. What is the (%, total, net) advantage over using other DEX aggregators or yield managers. And, how big + how long do limit orders need to be in the pool to make additional gas costs from transactions worth it? Do you have any calculations that you can share?

  1. Compared to the Gelato limit order protocol on Polygon, the transaction cost is 50% cheaper.

  2. A $1000 order takes anywhere approx 66 hours to earn more profit than the cost of the extra gas fee paid as compared to the 1inch Limit Order. But the point to note here is that most of the 1inch Limit orders are canceled. It might be because of a lack of incentives for the executor, the 1inch team will not be able to run the relayer because of the unstainable business model as of now. This delays the execution of limit orders which ultimately causes monetary loss.

Here is the spreadsheet that demonstrates the time taken to recover the extra cost paid on Symphony DEX:

Comparing average fees for a transaction on 1inch Limit Order Protocol with Symphony DEX assuming ETH is priced at $1500.
tx details

Taking the example further and assuming the yield to be in the range of 5% APY, the order will earn back the fees paid as yield in ~ 66 hours.
calculations

Taking the same example, a chart illustrates the interest accrued over time.

Hence, in our example comparison with 1inch limit order, not only will the user recoup the extra transaction cost in around 2.5 days of yield but also continue to earn interest as per their order value and time period without any hassle on Symphony.

The roadmap on the website details little next steps/dates after multi-chain expansion? Any insight?

Short-Term Roadmap

  • Add more tokens to get additional TVL
  • Support more protocols for execution orders such as Velodrome
  • Add more yield generation strategy to provide better APY to users
  • Boost community engagement via RFIs (refer to marketing distribution)

Long-Term Roadmap

  • Order Book Interface - Allow users to fill orders directly from the interface.
  • Support of COW (Coincidence of Wants) - Internal order matching.
  • Support more complex order types such as twap/icebergs orders.
  • More Yield - Users can choose to earn more yield according to their risk appetite.
  • Advanced Trading UI - The UI is just like CEXes.
  • Add more products to Symphony DAO.

$50K total value locked according to DefiLlama. (Is this equal to open limit orders?)

Yes.

Distribution:

I agree with your point and, am happy to share a detailed/revised version of our token distribution plan:

  1. 55% Incentives for OP users
  2. 15% for marketing
  3. 30% Maintenance & Development

55% Incentives for OP users

i) 35% OP token airdrops for limit order

For the most active traders and users on Symphony, we will distribute the OP token airdrops retrospectively after we analyze the data. We specifically chose this method to prevent boting / airdrop hunting.

This feature directly incentivizes the usage of Symphony on the Optimism Network. It will indirectly boost the OP ecosystem usage because it applies to all limit orders for every Token from the Optimism ecosystem.

ii) 20% gas refunds

20% $OP tokens will be used to cover the gas fees for the users on the Symphony DEX. We will offer gasless swaps on the Optimism network via its MetaDEX aggregator. The grant will be used to subsidize gasless/free trades for the users of Symphony.

15% for marketing

Symphony will reward the grants for content creation, and cross-promotion / collaboration with other OP projects.

For example:

  • Host AMAs with OP industry-leading projects, make Q&As, and those who participate OR answer a 5 to 10 questionnaire, can win prizes.
  • Create a Request For Innovation campaign. Take a look at this (Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.)
  • We will choose topics related to DeFi, DEX & OP ecosystem and incentivize members to make content on the same. for eg. Make a 500-600 words article on why DEXs are essential in the global economy.
  • People write these articles, submit them to us, and we choose the best one. After that, we publish it on our Medium and the writer gets its reward in OP tokens.
  • We don’t believe in influencer shilling so we can incentivize the community with written articles/tweets/videos and distribute the funds to those who genuinely deserve it on merit.
  • We will also highlight at the end of every article that it was made possible by OP funds.

30% Maintenance & Development

As mentioned earlier, $OP will be dedicated to the development and maintenance to ensure Symphony DEX is evolving with updated features and security measures. Some of the features that we are looking to integrate into Symphony are as follows:

  • COW (Coincidence of Wants) - Internal order matching.
  • Order Book UI - It will allow takers (users) to fill orders directly from the interface.
  • Support more protocols for execution orders such as Velodrome.
  • More Yield - Users can choose to earn more yield according to their risk appetite.
  • MEV Protection - An essential feature for large-size trades. Help Symphony DEX better serve multi-sigs & DAO with big treasuries.
  • Advance Trading UI.

The fund allocation for further development of the platform will help Symphony DEX to stay ahead of the curve and continue being a pioneer in innovation across the DEX ecosystem.

Ask is pretty high for a small project where the value-add to the Optimism ecosystem is yet to be seen and no co-incentives are added.

Symphony has not launched its governance token. We are currently working on tokenomics, and upon the launch of the token, we will allocate a good amount to the community as liquidity incentives. Symphony has worked perfectly and brought in much value even without token incentives so far since launch, and we have confidence that it will remain so in the future. Given the value that symphony’s features bring to the OP ecosystem, The $OP incentives will act as a bootstrapping mechanism to attract many more traders and investors within and from outside the chain, who are expected to stay with us for the long term.

KPIs:
What do you mean with “Growth of 5-10x in the global trading volume on Optimism”*? Does this mean you want to grow your cumulative volume on Op from $150K to $750K - $1.5Mio? Or are you refering to market share? Again, 250K Op for $1M additional volume (potentially cannibalization effect?) would be a high Ask

I agree with your point here. We can add yield earned as a KPI. “Growth of 5-10x in the global trading volume on Optimism” means growth of 1-1.5M in total trading volume. We think this is a very modest target. Our main focus is to onboard new users to Optimism rather than bringing volume at the first place. Even if they make a trade of value of $50, we will be happy. If we are able to successfully onboard active users then, I think we can make even 50-100% growth in volume. So in the long run the risk of cannibalization effect is low.

Finally, thanks again for taking the time to read the proposal and providing feedback. I will love to answer any further questions you have. We will also incorporate your suggestion and update the proposal accordingly.

1 Like

Thank you for this great reply, especially the details on product and competitiveness to other solutions.

The product is unique & innovative and we’d like to see Symphony fully integrate quality apps on Optimism and consequently offer traders on Optimism a superior experience.

Re: Adjusted Distribution

  • The 30% part for development funding is well-reasoned and will help additional projects on Optimism as well.

  • Happy to see the increased incentives (55%) for Symphony users on Optimism. We like the approach of retroactively distributing rewards as that can indeed limit opportunistic APY hunters. (Maybe someone else can also comment on this IF they prefer more details on this significant amount of the total grant distribution). Maybe a 100% gas fee refund is not optimal and someone will deplete the funds. Hence, it could be better to refund “only” 90%.

  • The reduced amount (15%) for marketing in combination with a clear focus on qualitative onboarding funnels & educating new users is a good use of Op grant funding.

The adjusted distribution reflects your goals of user onboarding very well and we are impressed by the level of detail that you put into this.

As Optimism grants hasn’t funded many young, innovative projects with a focus on user onboarding yet, but rather larger projects which might add TVL, we see a good value-add and support this adjusted proposal as it is.

2 Likes

Hello! DEX aggregation is a crowded space and Optimism already has a number of solutions. Can you provide any comparative statistics from Polygon that can help us put your stats there in context against other aggregators?

Features, Users, and Usage

  • How do orders currently gain yield on OP and Polygon (I saw yearn on your website), and what are likely next steps in yield sources?
  • (Apologies for the questions below if you have a subgraph – please lmk if you’ve got one)
  • Looks like roughly 2-2.5 limit orders per wallet. Do you have more detailed data on use likelihood? Specifically, the distribution of orders per wallet by size or frequency (which would help to identify churn and power users)? To be clear, what I’m asking for is different than the graphs on your provided dashboard, which look only at aggregate counts.
  • Do you have data on the distribution of length of time limit orders have historically been held for?
  • Any data on usage of stop-losses? Is there a risk of bad slippage or failed execution during large market swings? I’m guessing the risk would be dependent on liquidity so might be an involved answer.
  • Is the below image the most accurate volume chart in Symphony’s history, or is there something more comprehensive (ie is this missing Yolo?)?
  • Similarly, is this an accurate graph of DAUs?

Asks
Token airdrops:

For the most active traders and users on Symphony, we will distribute the OP token airdrops retrospectively after we analyze the data. We specifically chose this method to prevent boting / airdrop hunting.

  • This means that the team would have absolute discretion over how to mete out a third of all rewards. How exactly would you conduct this analysis and make decisions?

Gas swaps:

  • Given the rate of roughly 2-3 limit orders done by user to date (again, would like to see a distribution), how much in rebates do you project individual users seeing?

Marketing

  • How do bug bounties fit in with marketing?
  • When you say “incentivize members,” who would you be hiring? Existing community members?
  • I do respect the desire not to work with influencers. That said, if you don’t believe in working with KOLs, how do you intend to get eyeballs on the materials you are paying community members to create?

Maintenance and dev

  • Given the roadmap you’ve offered in response to @ScaleWeb3, can you work out which specific features you’d be building with the grant, and over what amount of time?
  • What are the anticipated product and adoption effects of these features?
  • What sorts of costs do partners incur to integrate your product?
  • How has your development to date been funded?

KPIs
My suggestion here is to specify the nature of the wallets and trading volume. I think KPIs here ought to match the kind of growth we’d want to see, so instead of unique wallets:

  • unique existing wallets onboarded onto Optimism (i.e., not new wallets), perhaps even existing wallets that hadn’t yet interacted with Symphony
  • perhaps even specifically volume two tx’s after bridging
  • some # of limit orders per unique existing wallet bridged
  • there should also be some intermediate KPIs based on marketing, such as engagements or inbound interest

Hey @OPGovWatch, Thanks for taking the time to read the proposal. Symphony is not a DEX aggregator but a novel DEX trading platform with yield-generating and limit/stop-loss features. We do have an additional feature of liquidity aggregation to ensure timely trade execution for our users. On that basis, currently, there is no other platform with these similar features on Polygon to provide comparative statistics. Please let us know if you have any additional questions, we would love to answer them.

We appreciate the time and effort you’ve put into reviewing the proposal. Your thoughtful feedback has been very helpful. We are delighted to see support from you.

We also agree with your point about the gas fee refund.

I am slightly confused by your answer as this is how you describe yourself in your proposal:

My impression is you have a novel feature in the ability to earn yield while waiting for an order to fill, but otherwise it would be fair to say you fit in the same category as other DEX aggregators and meta aggregators. Do you agree?

This is why it would be good to understand what kind of adoption you have been able to create on Polygon relative to other products your category. Some comparative statistics around volume, transactions, and wallets would be helpful.

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Looking forward to trying it out, so spread out testing new protocols. Some dapps are incredible, without L2 OP it would be way too costly, high gas is against my principals :wink::smiley:

Looking forward to trying it out, so spread out testing new protocols. I have used symphony on polygon, a good experience+yield…keep up guys

These copy paste commenters are a bit of a red flag.

2 Likes

Yes, the feature of liquidity aggregation is common but we don’t allow market orders rn. We do liquidity aggregation to provide the best rates for limit/stop-loss orders. So, it’s unfair to compare Symphony with other DEX aggregators who provide swapping at market rates only.

We asked our community to show their love, but we can not guarantee the quality of our community members’ comments.