Recap: HurricaneSwap AMA
On 15/12/2021 at 10:30 AM (UTC), we hold an AMA in our community. The following is a summary of the entire AMA.
HOST
Hello everyone! After a little bit of twist and turns, our HurricaneSwap V2 has finally launched today. Thanks for your patience!
Frankly speaking, V2 is actually the real beginning of HurricaneSwap. It is the first time that LP Cross-Chain mechanism has been put into practice. We compare this version update to The Butterfly Effect, and hope that this small flap of the butterfly wings can set off a hurricane in the DeFi world in the future.
So, what exactly is HurricaneSwap V2? What problem does it solve? In which aspects has it been updated? What else can we expect from Hurricane? I think many friends in our community have these questions and concerns, and these will be answered in this AMA today. Then without further ado, please welcome Syminton, the Founder of HurricaneSwap, to join us and get started on our AMA!
Symington
Hello my friends. I’m thrilled to be here today and share with you about our HurricaneSwap V2!
HOST
This Monday we launched our “Hurricane Effect” campaign on Twitter and Telegram. Currently we have more than 20K people joining. Today’s AMA will also be broadcast simultaneously to the event group. A warm welcome to our new friends and family!
OK, now let’s move into the Q&A session.
Question 1: Please introduce to our new friends here about HurricaneSwap. Let them get to know Hurricane in the quickest way.
Symington
We have an official definition of HurricaneSwap: The First Cross-Chain Liquidity DEX based on Avalanche.
I remember that when some media reviewed our project, they defined us as “a multi-assets and multi-chain cross-chain DEX” which I think is pretty on point.
Since Hurricane proposes an entirely innovative model, we are still exploring how to define it. But to be more specific, our original Roke Protocol enables a wholly new form of cross-chain — “LP cross-chain”.
Through the multi-chain DEX liquidity pool (we call it the “HurricaneStation”), Avalanche users can trade popular assets from other chains without leaving Avalanche. Under the premise of ensuring safety, HurricaneSwap reduces transaction steps, lowers transaction costs, and improves transaction efficiency.
Question 2: You mentioned that HurricaneSwap proposes a completely new form of cross-chain. Perhaps some might question if this new form is necessary. Is the current way of cross-chain not enough? Why does Hurricane want to change it?
Symington
This concern does exist. But I believe Hurricane’s new way of cross-chain is necessary. As an experienced crypto user, I see so many issues are yet to be solved and so many needs ignored.
DeFi has been experiencing a glorious period over the past year, and it is bringing cryptocurrency into the mainstream marketplace. For some of us, it’s been a daily routine. We use different wallets and trade on different DEXs, switching on different chains to trade different assets.
But what if you want to acquire assets from another chain to the chain that you are currently on? Typically we would use the traditional way of cross-chain, which is transferring the assets from Chain A to Chain B through a CEX or a decentralized cross-chain bridge, and then trade them on Chain B.
There are many cross-chain bridges that could do this. But there are some issues. Let’s say we want to use USDT on Avalanche to buy CAKE on BSC. First, we need to have two wallets on Avalanche and BSC respectively. If we don’t have a BSC wallet beforehand, we’ll need to use a CEX or some other way to put BNB into our BSC wallet as a gas fee. This is merely the preparation step.
Then we use any cross-chain tools on Avalanche to trade USDT on Avalanche into CAKE on BSC. The cross-chain tool will find the proper router for us, and the shortest router would still take at least 4–5 conversions.
Each conversion is a transaction, which leads to gas fee, transaction fee, and slippage every time, resulting in more than 1.5% of loss in addition to the price factor, and minute-long or even hour-long wait time. Timing is crucial for transactions. Imagine if Elon Musk suddenly tweets about his support for CAKE, this traditional way of cross-chain would be too slow to react.
HurricaneSwap has solved this type of problem. The fundamental mechanism of HurricaneSwap is the LP cross-chain. Through our Roke Protocol and HurricaneStation, we map the liquidity from the source chain to the Avalanche chain. Users do not need to go through the complex cross-chain process. All they need is one account, and they can start trading assets from other chains, with the cost and time to be as cheap and as fast like trading assets on the Avalanche chain.
You can go to hurricaneswap.com and experience it yourself. We have opened the transaction of aCAKE, the synthetic asset of CAKE. CAKE/USDT liquidity staked in our BSC Station is mapped onto Avalanche to form aCAKE/aUSDT liquidity. Since we have just started adding the liquidity, the depth might not be satisfying. Later on we would open the LP farm in our BSC Station to provide more liquidity.
You all could give it a try using a small amount. It is the same as trading assets of the Avalanche chain, completing one transaction by paying gas fee and transaction fee for just one time and taking less than a minute.
Question 3: Can trading mapped assets on HurricaneSwap be interpreted as buying wBTC on Avalanche?
Symington
In terms of asset type, they are both synthetic assets. But in terms of security and scalability, the two are very different from each other.
In terms of security, wBTC may become a withdrawal gateway for illegal assets. That is, users can withdraw clean wBTC using illegal BTC, and users who receive the illegal BTC assets will suffer huge losses. This will never happen under the LP cross-chain mechanism.
More importantly, the issue of scalability represents the core value of HurricaneSwap. In theory, the LP cross-chain mechanism could support unlimited chains and assets. Any token pair staked in HurricaneStation could be mapped onto HurricaneSwap, allowing Avalanche users to trade the corresponding aToken.
In other words, through the LP cross-chain mechanism, Hurricane proposes a set of multi-chain synthetic asset issuance tools that is decentralized, trustless, and without asset management authority. This set of tools include the “HurricaneStation” for our liquidity providers, the asset synthesis protocol — ”Roke Protocol”, the price gap elimination mechanism — ”HurricaneAlliance”, and the multi-chain DEX — “HurricaneSwap for our traders.
Question 4: You just mentioned the issue of security, which I believe is the most concerning issue of any trader. After all, there were multiple cases of cross-chain protocols being attacked before. So how does HurricaneSwap solve the potential security problem?
Symington
Couldn’t agree more. Security is an eternal topic, especially for cross-chain DEX.
I believe some of you guys still remember the O3 incident, among many other cross-chain security incidents. From my point of view, I think the main reason that cross-chain swaps are highly susceptible to hacks is that most of them require users to authorize [asset transfer].
In my opinion, the most important difference between a cross-chain swap and a non-cross-chain swap is whether it keeps funds for the LPs. As long as the funds are kept centrally on behalf of users, there will always be the risk of hacks.
I think the friends here in our community should also be CEX users. And so you would know that there are so many security technicians in CEX, but still, they cannot avoid theft. Hackers and scientists are truly omnipotent.
However, our LP cross-chain mechanism does not require users to authorize us the right to transfer their funds. HurricaneSwap only has the authorization to add and remove the liquidity, and the liquidity can only be removed and returned to the original staking address.
This solves the potential security problems from the source.
Even when we encounter the most extreme situation, that is, all the administrator accounts of HurricaneSwap are stolen (HurricaneSwap’s administrator accounts require multiple signatures and have sufficient security precautions, we are only discussing the extreme situation), there is no possibility of asset loss. Users’ assets are always safe.
Besides taking the security issues into consideration when designing our cross-chain mechanism, we also spent a lot of time (and of course money) to conduct security audits. Every function and every part of our code has been reviewed by at least two security audit companies before going online.
You can see the audit reports of PeckShield, SlowMist, and HashEx on HurricaneSwap V1 &V2 here:
https://github.com/HurricaneSwap/AuditReport
I would also like to briefly introduce these security audit firms. Chinese users should be very familiar with SlowMist. It was the one who completed the on-chain tracking and fund recovery in a couple of big DeFi security incidents. PeckShield audited the first version of Avalanche. Many other large-scale projects were audited by PeckShield as well. We hired PeckShield through the recommendation of Ted Yin, the co-founder of Ava Labs. HashEx is a Russian security audit company. They have audited TraderJoe, and are also very familiar with DEXs on AVAX.
We should be one of the few in the market to hire three top-tier security audit institutions. Because our cross-chain mechanism is so innovative and unique, we are more cautious when it comes to security. We also partnered with Immunefi and launched a bug bounty program worth $500,000 to accept attack challenges from white hats all over the world.
https://immunefi.com/bounty/hurricaneswap/
You guys may not be familiar with the security audit process. We need to finish coding before scheduling with the institutions. When it is our turn to be audited, we’ll have to wait for a period of time for them to give us optimization suggestions. We fix them, they audit again, and we fix them again…we cannot deploy our contract until there are no more security issues. During this time, some have suggested we go online when the market was good. But we take serious responsibility for our users’ asset security, that is why we’ve waited till today, after all three firms have finished auditing us, to launch our V2.
In the short term, this may not look like a good time to launch. We also spent more budget on audits than on marketing activities. But I still want to say this to everyone on behalf of our team: I’m sorry we are late, but we had to do this!
Question 5: I believe the safe and convenient user experience is something worth waiting for! So the final question for the Q&A part is, how does HurricaneSwap plan to grow in the future?
Symington
Just like I’ve mentioned before, through the LP cross-chain mechanism, Hurricane proposes a set of multi-chain synthetic asset issuance tools that is decentralized, trustless, and without asset management authority. This set of tools include the “HurricaneStation” for our liquidity providers, the asset synthesis protocol — ”Roke Protocol”, the price gap elimination mechanism — ”HurricaneAlliance”, and the multi-chain DEX — “HurricaneSwap for our traders.
Under such a complex yet clearly divided system, HurricaneSwap will gradually integrate more chains and support more assets to be traded on Avalanche, realizing the experience of trading all assets using one wallet — a CEX-like experience.
Yes, giving users a CEX-like experience through a decentralized way is the first step we are trying to accomplish! Trading on HurricaneSwap would be like trading on Binance, using one account to freely trade any assets of any chain.
We aim to bring users easier and better transaction experience, and free them up from the complex cross-chain procedures. We aim to connect different chains through asset diversity.
We aim to take every step in this long journey safely and firmly and become the decentralized Binance or Coinbase. People who have offered either encouragement or constructive criticism along the way are all very much appreciated. I have received all the suggestions and feedback from the friends in our community. But sometimes I’m simply too busy to reply one-by-one. Innovation and R&D are all very challenging and time-consuming.
I know HurricaneSwap V2 has come a little later than expected and has let some of our friends down. But we still welcome you to come back some time, give it a try, offer us precious feedback, and help us do better and achieve more in the future.
Thank you, my friends!
