Swim x Cega AMA

Swim Protocol

• 5 min read
Swim x Cega AMA

September 6th, 7pm EST

While our team makes great strides towards enabling the multichain efforts of other protocols via our SDK, conducting AMAs is a great way for our community to learn more about new projects & the resources at their disposal. For those unfamiliar with Cega, Cega Finance is an exotic structured products protocol that creates vaults for investors which are safe and provide high yields. Topics covered in our AMA with Cega include native asset bridging, Swim's design, and details about our roadmap & long-term goals.

Speaker Intro

Troy Tsui, CEO of Swim

  • Graduated from Berkley where he studied math & computer science
  • First job was as a quant trader at SIG until 2017, when transitioned into crypto and joined Alameda Research
  • In 2021, Troy witnessed the massive adoption of DeFi and the proliferation of L1s which led him to enter the building space and work on a multichain solution to help connect the various ecosystems on different chains

Vic, Technical Co-Founder of Cega

  • Before building Cega Vic worked on a machine learning startup with his twin brother, who’s also a co-founder of Cega
  • Went through Y-Combinator during 2020 and ended up pivoting to a few different things until they ventured into crypto
  • Before working on his own companies he worked at Tesla on their referral program

Swim Intro

Goal: connect the multichain world in two fashions: 1) native asset bridge 2) smart contract cross-chain calls

Typical users: Anyone that wants to move assets across chains (in native asset form), beyond just the EVM<>EVM space

  • Includes all sorts of DeFi participants: people traditionally moving money around looking for strong yields; during influx of high NFT demand we see the movement of profits being taken out of ETH and flowing into Solana; as well as with projects like StepN directing the flow of assets

User experience while bridging: under the hood —> there’s quite a lot that goes under the hood happening on both the source & destination chains

  • Swim looks to package a bunch of the Wormhole primitives to help present the users with an experience as simple as stable swapping - with various features like slippage and seamless cross-chain bridging
  • Focus on simplicity: Swim’s goal is to abstract all the cross-chain technicalities away from the user

Multichain AMM vs. Single Chain AMM

Multichain AMM's are not as well defined & have various different approaches:

  • Hub and spoke model where an AMM that lives on one chain reaches out to another AMM - in this case, is basically the same design as a single-chain AMM
  • Native assets reservoirs existing on every different chain with some kind of pairwise function to go between chains, which is quite different than a single-chain AMM
  • Hybrid model, coming new to Swim, where you have AMMs on every chain with a routing logic that goes between the chains - this design gives you the pros of both designs, while mitigating the negative attributes
  • With the pros being that you are able to tap into all the liquidity that’s there, with the USDC on Solana facilitate every transfer and not being split (n-1) times if you connected to n chains, while also providing the advantages of a pair-wise function that only requires a single bridging transaction (i.e. fast bridging)

Hybrid model coming soon to Swim! Be sure to stay tuned for more info on our pool restructure, along with updates on our Propeller (single-click swaps)

Propeller / Relayers

  • Users have the choice of interacting with transactions every step of the way, which may require multiple approvals / clicks
  • We’re implementing a trustless crank, which means that a user can send USDC from Ethereum for USDC on Solana with one transaction
  • We encode all the smart contract calls, have the Wormhole guardians read it, put the package VAA on Solana, and then allow users to claim their assets on Solana and receive their native assets on the destination chain - all package with the first transaction.
  • Our relayer at no point has custody of your assets - Users always have custody of their assets!

Wormhole

  • When deciding to enabling cross-chain swaps, Wormhole aligned with our long term priorities: 1) decentralization 2) the technical backing 3) how extendable it is to other chains
  • Wormhole at the time was the only cross-chain messaging system that could supported many non EVM-compatible chains
  • Wormhole team has been fantastic to work with and all team members are super intelligent
  • Decentralization in terms of the guardians: similar to validators on a blockchain - the decentralization depends on the number of validators & the way cross-chain validation works, in terms of having a material stake if they defect (if they defect they lose a lot of money)

Security & Safety

Past few quarters we’ve seen how exciting cross-chain protocols can be, but also the security risks they entail

  • Bridges by design make them one of the biggest targets due to 1) high TVL that's prone to attack 2) most cross-chain infrastructure is quite complex and relatively new with tons of updates happening on several chains (Attack surface is large)
  • Many of the hacks that have occurred have not been complex bridging hacks having to do with cross-chain smart contracts - they are more frequently the common hacks you see in the space

Swim’s Prioritizing Safety

  • After every hack we have upgraded our security practices; we’ve implemented active monitoring for when collateral of Wormhole does not match the market cap
  • Both Swim & Wormhole have implemented several safe guards focused on protecting our funds against any malicious actions
  • Our CTO is constantly enhancing Swim’s security practices; various preventative practices to protect against the most common attack vectors

Growth / building in a bear market

  • During a bull market there are so many exciting developments that can be distracting which captivate the bull market sentiment
  • When the bear market hit our team switched gears - going on a long dev push with an extreme focus on building out features including: expansions, pool restructure to optimize bridging, our relayer to enable single-click
  • All developments are focused on getting us closer to our ultimate goal of enabling other protocols multichain efforts in the form of our SDK

SDK

  • Example: Lets say your Frixtion on Solana - to allow users to deposit any assets across any chains, without having to deal with any of the cross-chain complexities
  • Goal would be to allow users to connect their wallets and then Swim performs all the smart contract calls on the backend, facilitating the movement of assets across chains without needing any additional wallets, gas, ect.

Swim outlook

  • Along with all the developments mentioned earlier, we’re gearing for many exciting initiatives with our multichain SDK, focused on plugging that into as many protocols as possible, including both Solana native dApps and other protocols across any of our supported chains
  • Expansion towards new highly demanded chains remain a top priority - we're very in touch with general L1 demand and are in constant communication with our community who facilitate feedback
  • In general, if your bridging, come check out our bridging experience at swim.io/swap; if you ever have any questions or feedback please reach out to our team on Discord at discord.gg/swimprotocol

Keep up with Swim’s latest developments and announcements:

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