Reporter’s View: DeFi in Arweave in Year 2023

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Author: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Henry @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Decentralised Finance is a major use case of blockchain technology. In the Arweave ecosystem, there are not many players but the few players have done good jobs in supporting the ecosystem with DeFi services. The story of the growth of DeFi on Arweave cannot be complete without the contribution of everVision. Two of its products, everPay and Permaswap support many projects with payment infrastructure. Permaswap stepped up to fill the space of Verto when the latter ceased operation.

everPay

A product of everVision, everPay, a gasless, instant multichain payment protocol built for Arweave and beyond has played a major role in the decentralised finance category of the Arweave ecosystem. In 2023, over 20.6 million trades were processed by everPay with 16,564 wallets and 29 listed tokens including $ANS, $MAP, $ACNH and $AIKEK. The project proved during the year that its use case is not limited to payment but extends to being a tool for other projects to build their payment structure; tipping on Discord and other social apps and even NFT-related activities. everPay is perceived by many as the easiest way to get $AR in the Arweave ecosystem. It partnered with Decentland Labs’ Arweave Name Service (ANS) to support domain transfers. It also facilitated payment services for many projects including PermaDAO, Metabox, Rareweave, 4EVERLAND and Molecular Execution Machine. For PermaDAO especially, everPay has been instrumental in incentive-distribution and ensured convenience that contributed to community development.

To improve user experience and safety, everPay introduced risky address detection. It is a feature that helps ensure fraudulent addresses get flagged and transfers will not be allowed to the said address for security purposes. It also added a feature that helps to hide assets on its app and automatic gas calculation tool.

The project also released integration tools for developers. It released a Python SDK and a JS SDK to make the integration of everPay into Java Script and Python projects easier.

Glacier, a project building composable, modular, scalable L2 data network for large-scale Dapps and GenAI benefitted from everVision’s infrastructure tools including Arseeding and everPay.

In what can be described as a way to connect Web3 and Web2, everPay partnered with Legend Trading to enable crypto purchase with 40 fiat currencies. It also partnered with Asia Digital Bank. everPay ensured safety by partnering with MIST TRACK to boost its anti-money laundering API and financial security. It improved access to its services by introducing EverID which makes login possible through email. More than 100 people signed up to test the EverID tool. In July, it celebrated passing one million transactions with a snapshot of its ecosystem members which cuts across network, wallet and partnership categories. In September, it reached 10 million transactions. The everScan tool’s user experience was improved to conduct search using ANS; boost data loading speed; display comprehensive transaction data.

For Web3 projects, how much transaction they can handle is important to how seriously they will be taken. Towards the end of the year, everPay showed the strength of its infrastructure by testing that it could process more than 250 million transactions in a day. The project also improved node operation by making it easy for new nodes to  launch in a few seconds.

Permaswap

Built on the everPay protocol by parent company, everVision, Permaswap is a real-time cross-chain decentralised exchange in the Arweave ecosystem that offers zero gas fees, slippage and 100 percent permanence. It launched its beta phase about a year ago after completing two testnets. It was an achievement even Forward Research, Arweave’s research and incubator firm was thankful for. First week into beta and the stat was impressive. In four months, Permaswap passed $2 million swap volume.  In less than two months, it open-sourced Permaswap client to give users the assurance that the application is safe; make the network more transparent; and promote secondary development. Permaswap also announced breaking the total liquidity mark of $250,000. The first PST to be traded on Permaswap was the $ArDrive/$AR pair as well as other trading pairs. It subsequently listed $STAMP, $ANS, $ACNH, $ARCO, $AIKEK and others. It also added the $U token, becoming the only platform where $U can be swapped. It also released a security audit report where it says the BlockSec audit team did not find any high or medium level security risks. Following the audit report, it announced punitive measures against bad actors to maintain a healthy network.

The project engaged community members in building its platform. An example was the competition to build Permaswap’s dashboard. Another example of Permaswap engaging the community was the launch of Permaswap Project Guild in partnership with PermaDAO. In May, Permaswap released a new dashboard with features such as pool analysis, user analysis, order data and overview. Permaswap implemented a series of features on its platform throughout the year and one of them is focused on increased privacy, which helps users hide their assets from the view of unauthorized persons.

Permaswap also updated its API to facilitate better user experience. One of the first set of integrations Permaswap had was with RedStone as a price data source for Arweave tokens. The collaborative relationship between Permaswap and everPay and Legend Trading can be described as building a bridge to link Web3 and Web2. Permaswap also explored the world of NFTs. It partnered with everPay on an NFT auction programme that also served as a liquidity mining ticket on Permaswap.

BazAR

BazAR, a digital content marketplace was launched in the middle of the year 2023. It was built to be an atomic asset marketplace with means of payment being the $U. Being an atomic assets market allows asset to be stored as an Arweave ID. This allows users to ensure their asset is stored fully on-chain, and cannot be deleted or modified. Atomic assets can be fractionalized, and the BazAR marketplace supports this feature natively. It operates like the user interface of the Universal data Licence and Universal Content Marketplace. At its inception, BazAR supported the Universal Data Licence (UDL) which allows content creators to specify programmable parameters for aspects of monetization such as length of the license term, currency used for payments, and the licensing fee. The UCM is a protocol designed to facilitate seamless and decentralized trading of various digital assets on the permaweb. It goes beyond NFTs to the exchange of images, music, videos, papers, names, components, and applications. BazAR refined its user experience by allowing content filtering by lowest, highest or the Stamps they have and updating its streak widget and leaderboard. BazAR extended its use case and demonstrated composability by allowing Fair Protocol’s AI-generated contents to be sold on its platform. It also added several atomic asset collections.

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