Building Better DEXs with Stellaswap

Problem

The team at StellaSwap relied heavily on using Excel spreadsheets to manage their contact book of wallet addresses and details of people on their payroll. 

Before discovering Request Finance, there was no good way to easily make many crypto payments to different wallet addresses, and certainly not in a readable format that made bookkeeping easy.

Solution

Request Finance has saved the team a lot of the time they used to spend on doing repetitive tasks.

No more copy-pasting wallet addresses from a spreadsheet. Everyone gets email confirmations when the payments clear on-chain, without having to copy the transaction hashes from a blockchain explorer. 

The operations and finance lead uses Request Finance to process crypto payroll and expenses to team members, and pay crypto invoices from community ambassadors.

Done with a single click

Previously, the company used to spend two hours just manually processing crypto payments. Now, all of that is done with a single click

Increased efficiency and productivity 

The ability to make batch payments and schedule recurring crypto payments allowed the StellaSwap to standardize the finance workflow. Plus, the app is incredibly easy to use!

Request Finance stood out against other alternatives as the team needed a crypto payments solution that could support blockchain networks like Moonbeam.

“Our operations and finance lead uses Request Finance to process crypto payroll and expenses to our team members, and pay crypto invoices from our community ambassadors. The app is incredibly intuitive to use and allows us to standardize the finance workflow. Previously, we used to spend two hours just manually processing crypto payments. Now, all of that is done with a single click.”‍

 Aziz Zainuddin, Co-founder of Stellaswap

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About Stellaswap

‍Much like the system of fractional reserve banking today, centralized crypto exchanges can do nearly whatever they please with your deposits - including gambling them on high-risk ventures. Imagine if a valet service could lend your car out for Uber rides, food delivery, or go drag-racing while you were having dinner at the restaurant.

As history has repeatedly shown, from the collapse of QuadrigaCX in 2019, to FTX in 2022 - centralized exchanges can and have gone out of business, along with customers' deposits. That’s where decentralized exchanges (DEX) like StellaSwap come into play. Traders who use a DEX to buy or sell cryptocurrencies are fully in charge of their assets, including their own wallet.

StellaSwap is the largest, and one of the first AMM-based DEXes on the Moonbeam parachain network. To facilitate the most optimal price discovery for assets on Moonbeam, StellaSwap uses automated market makers (AMMs) - protocols that rely on different mathematical formulas to price assets. This is unlike order book exchanges where customers submit orders and wait for them to be filled.

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Where StellaSwap differs from other popular AMM-based DEXes is its hybrid model. It relies on a standard AMM (constant product model), as well as a stable AMM (constant product + constant sum model), to price assets. But even then, the team says that this alone suffers from high-slippage; making trades more expensive for end-users. Consequently, trading activity suffers, which limits fee payouts to liquidity providers.

Drawing inspiration from Uniswap v3, in August 2022, StellaSwap partnered with Algebra to launch a better DEX called Pulsar. It allows liquidity providers to ‘concentrate’ their liquidity in specific price ranges, where trades actually occur. will earn a higher share of fees and rewards.

The team estimates that this new “concentrated liquidity” AMM design will improve yields for liquidity providers by increasing liquidity utilization rates beyond 100%, compared to an average of 5%-10% that StellaSwap currently has. They believe that it also is able to execute trades with extremely low slippages that can surpass both centralized exchanges and stable AMMs.

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With over $1B in cumulative trading volume a year after going live, the StellaSwap team serves more than 10 thousand users, with an incredibly lean team of just 14 employees. Currently over 85%-90% of all trading activity on the MoonBeam network happens on StellaSwap.

The team says they are focused on improving the user experience to attract non-DeFi natives, and upgrades like a universal router to ensure the most efficient trade routing across their three different AMMs.