Recap: HurricaneSwap AMA in BlockBeats Community
On 3/12/2021 at 09:00 AM (UTC), HurricaneSwap attend an AMA in BlockBeats community. The following is a summary of the entire AMA.
PART I Introduce to HurricaneSwap
Host | BlockBeats Chat
The channel will be muted during the first part of the AMA. In the second part of the AMA, we would unmute the channel to take free-asking questions from the community. The guest will choose some high-quality questions to answer.
Let’s get started then!
Could you introduce yourself first? I’m sure there are so many friends here who want to know more about such a handsome guy like you.
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
Thanks for that!
Okay then, allow me to introduce myself briefly. I’m Symington, the founder of HurricaneSwap. I am Swedish-Chinese. I was born in the United States and grew up in Beijing, so Chinese is also my mother tongue.
It’s an honor to be here today with the BlockBeats community and participate in this AMA. HurricaneSwap has made lots of new progress recently and I’m very happy to share it with you guys.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Thanks for your introduction!
After the introduction, let’s get back to HurricaneSwap itself. HurricaneSwap is positioned as a cross-chain DEX. Can you briefly introduce this project?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
Sure!
We have an official definition of HurricaneSwap:
The First Cross-Chain Liquidity DEX based on Avalanche. In other words, the first cross-chain protocol based on Avalanche.
I remember than before we officially launched, BlockBeats posted a report about us, and the definition was very clear: “This is a multi-assets and multi-chain cross-chain DEX.
HurricaneSwap proposes a completely innovative model. Our original Roke Protocol enables a completely 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.
HurricaneSwap reduces transaction steps and transaction costs, and improves transaction efficiency, without compromising safety.
hurricaneswap.com
We welcome everyone to experience our product. It is currently V1. Soon we will launch V2 which will have our core function [LP cross-chain].
If you guys want to experience V2 right away, you can visit our V2 testnet :
https://test-v2.hurricaneswap.com/#/
HurricaneSwap has been very stable since V1 launched on Oct 10, and we are continuously developing new features. There are over 40 million HCT in our single-staking pool, which exceeds 50% of the market circulation. This means that users are very optimistic about the future of our project and are willing to stay with us in the long term.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Most projects focused on asset cross-chain, and LP cross-chain is indeed a relatively new concept.
I feel like that cross-chain is one of the core advantages of HurricaneSwap. So how does HurricaneSwap differentiate from others in terms of cross-chain? How do you realize LP cross-chain?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
Ok, no problem.
Yes, cross-chain is our core advantage. Our way of cross-chain is quite unique. I call it “predatory cross-chain”. Just like a hurricane, it will take everything away when it comes.
For ease of understanding, you can see the flowchart of our product below:
The liquidity provider deposits the corresponding proportion of CAKE and USDT in the HurricaneStation on BSC and generates CAKE/USDT LP. Then the Roke Protocol will mint an aCAKE/aUSDT aLP on the Avalanche, so that users can trade aCAKE on HurricaneSwap. If the price of CAKE on BSC fluctuates sharply, HurricaneAlliance will narrow the price gap by arbitrage between aCAKE and CAKE to avoid the losses to users due to the price differences.
HurricaneSwap will introduce a PoR mechanism to obtain the amount of assets locked in the source chain and the amount of a-assets issued by Avalanche, and ensure that the threshold of the gap between the source chain assets and a-assets is 1%. Once the ratio is greater than 1%, it will trigger the fuse mechanism and veto any calls of a-assets to prevent malicious additional issuance from affecting the contract.
Because the other cross-chain tools on the market now need users to first convert their assets into stable coins to complete a cross-chain transaction, and some even require up to 5 conversions, the gas fee will be very high. Such ways of cross-chain are more suitable for [asset transfer] rather than [asset trading].
At present, many cross-chain DEXs are essentially bridges, which are cross-chain tools. For more profit, a DEX is added to the bridge.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Yes, I have experienced it personally.
Cross-chain bridge has cost me a lot of gas fees before.
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
Users use bridge to [transfer assets], which is of low demand, and use DEX to [trade assets]. On the surface of it, this mixed product of a bridge and a DEX seems to meet users’ multiple needs, but in fact, It is a compromise that does not fully satisfy either of the needs. The final result is: the profit from the low-demand need cannot be increased, whereas the efficiency of the high- demand need is reduced.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
I think that our community members already have some questions after reading this part. You can save them for the free-asking session later. Let’s move on to the next question: When it comes to cross-chain protocols, security is users’ most concerned issue. There have been cases of frequent attacks on cross-chain protocols before. How does HurricaneSwap solve security issues?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
I very much agree with you. Security is an eternal topic, especially for cross-chain DEX.
I think some of you guys would still remember the O3 incident, among many others. In fact, the main reason that cross-chain swaps are highly susceptible to theft is that most of them require users to authorize them to [transfer] users’ assets.
In my opinion, the most important difference between a cross-chain swap and a non-cross-chain swap is whether it keeps funds for LPs. As long as the funds are kept centrally on behalf of users, there will always be the risk of theft.
I think the friends in this group 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 does not require users to authorize us the right to transfer their funds. HurricaneSwap only has the authorization to pledge and unlock the liquidity, and the liquidity can only be unlocked and returned to the original pledging address.
This solves the potential risk of theft from its source.
In this case, even when we encounter the most extreme situation, that is, all the administrator accounts of HurricaneSwap are stolen (HurricaneSwap’s administrator accounts requires multiple signatures and have sufficient security precautions, we are only discussing the extreme situations), there is no possibility of asset loss. Users’ assets are always safe.
Besides taking into account the security issues in designing our cross-chain, we also spent a lot of time and energy (and of course money) to do security audits. Every function and every part of our code has been reviewed by at least 2 security audit companies before going online.
You can see the audit reports of PeckShield and SlowMist here:
PeckShield: https://github.com/HurricaneSwap/AuditReport
In addition, our V2 is still under review by HashEX, and the audit report will be published soon.
I would also like to briefly introduce these security audit firms. Chinese users should be very familiar with SlowMist. SlowMist was the one who completed on-chain tracking and fund recovery for a couple of big security incidents happened in Defi before.
PeckShield audited first version of Avalanche. Many other large-scale projects were audited by PeckShield as well. We hired PeckShield the recommendation from Ted Yin, the co-founder of Ava Labs.
Hashem is a Russian security audit company that audited TraderJoe, and they are also very familiar with DEX on AVAX.
We should be one of the few in the market to hire three top-tier security audit institutions.
Because our cross-chain approach is so innovative and unique, we are more cautious when it comes to security.
Moreover, our V1 testnet lasted for three weeks, and our V2 testnet lasted for seven weeks. We also partnered with Immunefi and launched a bug bounty program which is worth of $500,000 to accept the white hat attack challenges from all over the world.
https://immunefi.com/bounty/hurricaneswap/
Host | BlockBeats Chat
I got it , so I think this is the main reason why your protocol can be more secure.
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
Yes, it is safer from the source
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Since it is a cross-chain, I can’t help but ask this next question, which is also a frequently asked question during AMAs:
There are so many chains that are very popular and very scalable. Why did you choose Avalanche? Do you have any plans in cooperating with projects in the Avalanche ecosystem?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
I am very glad that you asked this question!
Our team is very optimistic about Avalanche. We believe that Avalanche is designed for Defi and has great potential, which is the first and the most important reason of why we chose Avalanche.
The price of $AVAX has increased a lot recently. Zhu Su, the founder of 3AC, even said publicly that Ethereum has no future, ALL IN AVAX!
I personally don’t think Ethereum is “dead”, but Avalanche is indeed a more suitable network for high-frequency trading. It is faster and safer, because it is a truly technology-oriented network.
we chose Avalanche because we saw an opportunity for HurricaneSwap.
We are certainly not the only DEX on Avalanche, nor the earliest DEX. When we were preparing this project, Pangolin was already there, and we already knew TraderJoe. Then why making another DEX?
Because Avalanche still needs it.
Although Avalanche develops rapidly, Ethereum and BSC still have first-mover advantages because many big projects on them have the benefit of the economies of scale.
For example, people use Curve for stable coin exchange and the slippage is quite low. Does Curve have a technical or mechanical advantage? No. The low slippage is simply determined by its large scale.
And that is why Avalanche still spent millions of dollars though RUSH to attract Aave when it already has the native lending project BENQI.
The meaning of HurricaneSwap lies in this. We can quickly introduce a large number of high-quality assets into Avalanche to meet users’ trading needs. And for the avalanche ecosystem, HurricaneSwap brings in [unique assets], because Avalanche users can only come to HurricaneSwap when they want to trade CAKE.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Next up is a topic that I believe everyone would be very interested in.
Could you please introduce the tokenomics of HurricaneSwap? What is the purpose of HCT?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
Sure.
HCT is the native token of HurricaneSwap. HCT was issued on the same day of HurricaneSwap V1, and its most important purpose is to serve as an equity certificate for HurricaneSwap users. You can see that 60% of our tokens are used for farming, which is a very “Defi” approach.
And soon after the V1 launch, we launched xHCT, which provides HCT holders with more ways to earn profits.
I can also say that in designing our DAO, HCT plays a very important part, and we would add burn mechanism to it, such as voting for token listing (I think Chinese users are definitely familiar with this).
We hope that our community can be more involved in governance and project development, and so we would let the community to vote on the proportion of the transaction fee distribution in the future (Currently we are taking out 1‰ of the transaction volume to repurchase HCT, and in the future we will repurchase $AVAX or others).
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Got it, friends who are interested in this could really study what we’ve discussed just now.
So our next question comes back to the project itself. At the beginning you mentioned that HurricaneSwap is about to reach the V2 stage. What is the current progress? When is the expected launch time of V2?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
The code development of HurricaneSwap V2 is finished already. And the V2 testnet has been live for 3 weeks now. I also mentioned earlier that in order to ensure the security of V2, we have hired 3 security audit firms. All three of them have finished auditing. Hashem has raised some front-end optimization suggestions, which we are still working on.
So V2 is coming soon.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
So what are the new features of V2? How’s it different from V1 in terms of cross-chain?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
The most important new feature of V2 is [LP cross-chain], which is also the biggest difference from V1 because V1 does not have a cross-chain function, just a DEX.
In addition, we will also launch the LP-Farm to attract more users from BSC.
We have already launched xHCT in V1, which gives HCT holders more rewards. For V2, we will launch sHCT, which will support dual-reward mining and render more opportunities to partner with other projects.
An equally important feature is HCT-DAO. I have mentioned that there will be burn mechanism in our tokenomics, which will be realized in DAO.
And of course, we will constantly bring in new assets, and they would all be [unique assets]. We want to be a DEX that gives users the experience of a CEX, and do our best to meet the trading needs of users.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
In fact, this is also the goal of most DEX.
Since you mentioned that you want to be a “DEX with CEX experience”, can you elaborate on this? What are HurricaneSwap’s plans in the near future?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
This phrase came into our mind during our internal discussions, because most of our team members have worked at CEX before. Looking at how some of the top CEX became successful, you can see that most of them quickly acquired a large number of users (active traders especially) because they are the first to launch some popular tokens!
In the CEX era, to snatch the right to list popular tokens is to snatch users and traffic. This illustrates the importance of [unique assets]. This is exactly what HurricaneSwap will do in Avalanche — more unique assets, more users, more transactions.
In the future, the portfolio of assets on HurricaneSwap will be richer than that of any single-chain DEX, and our trading experience will always be better than all cross-chain DEX. I have emphasized the importance of assets many times because it really has a big room for imagination.
Imagine CAKE/JOE or XVS/QI, I think some of you guys already understand what I mean.
Another difference between CEX and DEX is the difference between a platform and a tool.
Many people would simply use DEX as a trading tool. In fact, many DEX position themselves in this way, but what HurricaneSwap wants to be a platform. So in the future we will have more functions such as yield optimizer, IDO, and other derivatives-related features.
Of course, these are planned to happen in the future, and I believe you guys would be more concerned about the what’s happening now. Our recent plans will be published on Twitter and in TG groups:
https://twitter.com/HurricaneSwap
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Got it. The future of HurricaneSwap will be towards a multifunctional platform. Thanks Symington Smith for your great answers. The first part is over, and everyone can ask questions about HurricaneSwap now.
PARTII Live Questions
@chen
How to solve the issue of price difference between the anchored asset on the source chain and the mapped asset on Avalanche?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
I have actually answered this before. We will display PoR on our website, which is similar to the design of Avalanche’s official cross-chain bridge. We will show the storage and mint data of the two addresses respectively so that users can monitor the storage in real-time. At the same time, we would also have alarms on the price difference. Our security audit companies are also helping us to monitor and avoid potential risks. Finally, we partnered with Chainlink to develop the PoR function with built-in direct fuse, which will also be live after our V2 launch.
@ to da mooon
I want to ask about LP security. I assume you would support Ethereum. Uniswap V3 makes LP NFT. If I give my NFT to somebody, in fact, I’m also giving the LP to him. How does HurricaneSwap do this?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
Well, our cross-chain approach is to establish HurricaneStation in every supported network. Station is used to provide liquidity, so the issue you are concerned about will not happen.
Station is not like building our own “platform” on other chains. I am not sure if you fully understood what I meant, so I would recommend you to experience Hurricane V2 for yourself: https://test-v2.hurricaneswap.com/#/
@DAFE ZH
LP cross-chain is more complicated than token cross-chain. How do you solve the issues of depth and slippage? In addition, how do you keep the update frequency? After all, not all chains support all LPs.
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
It is worth noting that our LP cross-chain is not like the migrate function that Sushi Swap used. It does not support all swaps in nature.
The depth of pools can be assured due to the fact that we can provide higher APR and higher transaction fee profit. The APR would be high because we provide unique assets to Avalanche users and they will be willing to come to HurricaneSwap.
Slippage is actually related to depth. Higher depth brings lower slippage. We have introduced HurricaneAlliance to quickly eliminate the price difference. If you are still worried about the issue of slippage, you could try to split a big order into several smaller orders, and you will be surprised by how quickly the HurricaneAlliance can eliminate the price gap.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Wow, so many questions. You guys can also go to the official HurricaneSwap TG community to ask more questions. Let’s take one more question.
@Akira
Is the LP cross-chain transaction fee charged in LP token or in AVAX?
Symington Smith | HurricaneSwap
We do not charge LPs any transaction fees, which is also our advantage. Transaction fees will only be charged when users trade. And 0.3% of the transaction volume will be given to LPs, which is very attractive to LPs. We will soon launch LP Farm so that LPs can also enjoy HCT rewards.
This is why we have strong faith in liquidity.
Host | BlockBeats Chat
Okay, thanks @Symington_Smith for your answer. That’s all for our AMA today. If you guys have any more questions, you can go to HurricaneSwap’s official TG community. We will also do a recap for today’s AMA. Thank you for your support!
