WingRiders is a DEX based on Cardano. In this article, I explore its characteristics and give my opinion about it. Cardano needs a DEX that integrates well with 3rd party applications and embraces the scalability challenges ahead as DEXes tend to not be that good at the “heavy load” game. WingRiders wants to bring together the latest concurrency updates of Cardano and the simplicity of use with a nice UI that can be used with all the wallets of the ecosystem.
1. What Is WingRiders?
WingRiders is a DEX for Cardano, just like Maladex. The project is powered by VacuumLabs, one of the most widely respected developers in the Cardano space from its inception. You can find the WingRiders website here:
But first, let’s start at the beginning: what is a DEX?
A DEX is a place where where you can trade tokens against other tokens on a given blockchain. The new tokens you get by swapping a native asset (e.g: ADA) can be staked or farmed to generate a yield.
WingRiders is using a specific type of technology to handle the swaps called Automated Market Maker (AMM): it’s a modern technique coming from the decentralized world executing swaps within liquidity pools using smart contracts. AMM DEXes are defined in opposition to Order Book DEXes that require you to trust a middleman entity to back the trades:
AMM is securing the swaps with a liquidity pool for the reserve of tokens A/B and is using smart contracts to execute the transaction. So, in short: WingRiders is a AMM DEX based on Cardano, it backs swaps using smart contracts on the top of liquidity pools without a middleman.
To check what liquidity pools are available, you can go to the pool page of their website, you’ll find a list of liquidity pools with different native tokens that you can trade:
It’s then possible to stake your tokens within stakeable pools. These rewards accumulate over time and are redistributed back into the liquidity pools:
Or you can also farm your tokens allowing you to gain additional rewards like additional tokens or NFTs:
2. How to use WingRiders?
First, you need to connect the wallet you’re using to store your ADA (top right of the homepage):
What I like about it is the fact that it’s possible to use a web wallet or a cold storage wallet like Trezor or Ledger.
Once it’s done you can access the “portfolio” part of the website allowing you to add liquidity:
You can now swap some ADA against some FIRE:
Then this FIRE can go to a FIRE liquidity pool for staking or farming.
You can also go to the “Governance” part of the website unlocked if you own some WRT token, the token of the platform:
To use this dashboard, you simply need to swap some ADA for WRT. Here for 100 ADA, I can get 84.43 WRT:
3. The roadmap and the whitepaper
The roadmap goes up to 2023:
The next steps are integration of a voting system, improved farming and contracts as well as decentralised batching.
A money market is also planned for 2023.
The whitepaper targets various objectives:
-Trust: the smart contract scripts responsible for the swaps will be audited and open source
-Fairness: the goal is to have no bias towards any participant
-Reliability: the funds locked by the DEX smart contracts can be redeemed any time
-Security: the critical part of the code will be audited and open source.
-Anonymity: the platform can be used anonymously with ADA native tokens
-Simplicity: a clear and simple UX
-Affordability: the DEX aims to minimise transaction fees with a deterministic transaction cost
-Opportunity: opportunities for staking and farming are part of the design
One of the big bet of WingRiders is to be scalable using bulk transactions in the future. It’s one of the features allowed by the UTxO model of Cardano. “Bulk transactions” strategy splits the interaction with smart contracts into two phases. In the first phase actors with intention to interact with a smart contract would create request UTxOs. In the second phase the requests are collected and resolved in bulk in a single transaction. The drawback of this strategy is the trust placed on the party creating the second phase transaction. A big advantage is intuitive user experience as there is no upper limit on the number of requests created in one block, effectively solving the concurrency issue.
Here is an example of a bulk transaction for a swap request to handle concurrency in an optimal way:
In the case above, 3 transactions are executed at once.
4. WRT as an Investment
WingRiders comes with a governance token called WRT hosted by the Cardano blockchain:
The tokenomics is very transparent which I like:
In comparison with other DEX projects on Cardano, WRT total number of tokens is 100,000,000 (100 million), or approximately 1/20 to 1/50 of the total token supply of other Cardano DEXes. This influences relative price point, and has the added benefit of providing a lower threshold for a clear influence stake in the future of the project.
The vesting period is 30 months with a regular and linear release of tokens:
Why WingRiders? They explain it to you:
They really have some points here. They are indeed the first ones to wrap ETH, BTC and ERC20 tokens but also bringing a functional staking and farming with 3rd party integration. With WingRiders, I really feel that Cardano is going to the next level with a product integrating all of the latest developments on Cardano (AMM, multi-wallets, multi-tokens and bulk transactions to come for scalability).
5. Conclusion
I’m planning to invest in WingRiders through their WRT token. I also plan to use it to diversify my assets on Cardano while generating a nice yield. I like the documented approach of the DEX (whitepaper, lightpaper, clear tokenomics and vesting) as well as the fact that they’re trying to embrace scalability by design from the start. The marketing, the team and the roadmap seems solid making WingwRider a reliable player to deliver THE ultimate Cardano DEX we’ve all been waiting for. Read about it, give it a try and let me know what you think about it in the comments or on Twitter.
Thanks for reading.
n.b: this is not financial advice
