For a very long time many community members have requested us to share in detail what happened with Stakeborg, and the reasons why this relationship was broken. The team did not want to share this information because they felt that it was simply not a nice story to share. However, to start a new chapter in the history of Swingby, it is important to disclose this situation and to be fully transparent.

We are a team of developers that relied strongly on our external advisors and unfortunately our founders made the decision to outsource most of our key non-development functions. Stakeborg was an important investment and marketing partner and our marketing activities were mainly left to Stakeborg, while external advisors were engaged for business development and financial related functions, the core development team focused on building a product that was robust, fail proof and relevant.

Relations with Stakeborg started to sour when Stakeborg started to accuse the team of employing tactics to keep the prices low (which would not make sense for any point of view). The team disclosed all their crypto holdings and their activities, as well as countless explanations to why this was simply not true. Even though all the effort to clear their doubts, Stakeborg stuck to their beliefs.

Soon after, Stakeborg came back again to insist that they wanted to buy out the entire team’s token holdings at a very negligible amount. The proposal was not feasible given that Stakeborg had no plans on how the development would continue after the buyout (e.g. how the tech and dev team would remain or work together with Stakeborg’s team (if they had any) on the project) and that internally, the team was split on what the value should be.

As Swingby tried to find solutions to improve the situation and collaborate to make the relationship a success again, Stakeborg stuck to their ideas. They still requested to buyout the team without any development plans and lowered their offer price instead. They continued thinking the same even after it was shared with them that some of the team members were not willing to go ahead with their extremely low offer price.

The team is committed to continue developing the project and to make sure it becomes a success with or without the collaboration of large companies. The expenses and maintenance costs of the whole infrastructure is always present, and from time to time some tokens will be sold. If this was a rugpull we would not have continued to develop and would have exited like Stakeborg did earlier.

Stakeborg probably no longer holds any tokens with Swingby as they have indicated many times that they are upset with the outcome. To us however, Stakeborg was a great partner during the better times and we still hope that perhaps someday our differences can be set aside for the better of the project.

Why DAO?

Ironically, the idea came from Stakeborg themselves when we were discussing about the buyout. At the same time a few team members decided that it would be a great way of realigning objectives and finding new talent that could help reset the direction of the project that was marred with many bad decisions made as to non-dev functions. We still have a strong development team that is constantly working on developments and technical issues.

At the same time, this would help Swingby to be better engaged with the community and to work toward full transparency with the community members that have stuck with us. DAO community members have certainly given many great feedback and suggestions that the dev team have spoken on internally but unfortunately not really engaged and deliberate further with the community on. We also regret that our initial fumbling with the DAO meant that many of our community members were not pleased with how certain proposals were made and that communication is still seriously lacking between us and the community but will strive towards improving that going forward. We will be releasing further information on how we intend to better engage and work with the community while working with a team of experts who would guide us along the way.

It will take time for us to better some of these issues and we hope you will stick around as you have to date.

Going forward

SkyPools — why delay? When?

Launching both the DAO (on short notice) and SkyPools together was no easy feat. As you can see, we have failed in launching the DAO smoothly at the expense of not engaging the community well enough. SkyPools is supposed to be a very important launch for us and with our track record of not getting compromised (security wise), we wanted to keep it this way. This meant intensive auditing, checking, testing, discussions at the dev level and stepped up weekly long dev calls to troubleshoot etc.

While we have delayed this multiple times, this time is final and our launch date is going to be March 29, 2022. Keep this date in mind, Swingby folks!

Roadmap going forward

We’ve found it cumbersome to commit to specific timelines, and we’re looking for more participation from the community in development matters now that Swingby has become a DAO. On this note, if any developers would like to join the team (either part-time or full-time), we’re hiring and can make arrangements for regular payments — subject to DAO approval.

Our team’s current targets, and areas for which we’re seeking talent, are as follows:

• SkyPools Launch
• Chaos Node Deprecation
• SkyPools Expansion / “Swap Mining” Initiatives
• Layer 2 Integrations (Watch This Space!)

These will be introduced as DAO proposals in time to come and we welcome any feedback on any other proposed changes to the roadmap too

This has been a very long and heavy post but we hope that it has addressed some if not most of the concerns that you guys have. Thank you for sticking with us to date and for believing in us. We understand the anger and frustration for the lack of communication but we will strive to do better.

As the last month to complete 2021, December has been an action-packed month for us. Despite the holiday season, we’ve been busy shipping things, both on the development and the community front.

SkyBridge BTC LP APR Boost 👨‍🌾

In December, we increased the rewards for Bitcoin liquidity providers on Skybridge by 25%, reaching around 17% APR at the time of writing. This is so that we can create optimal liquidity on SkyBridge and an optimal swapping experience on SkyPools when it launches.

With this APY Boost, you can now earn higher APYs on your Bitcoin in a trustless and secure manner on SkyBridge. If you’re a Bitcoin hodl-er, go ahead, stake your Bitcoin and earn those yeidlds today!

December Dev Updates 🛠

Despite December being a month of holidays, the development team has been busy building and shipping away.

On the SkyPools front, this is what we’ve worked on:

• Release SkyPools on Ropsten Testnet
• Released new SkyPools UI: https://skypools.swingby.network
• Added limit on the number of loops to clean up SkyPools pending transactions & optimize gas costs
• Added multiRecordSkyPoolsTX function and tests
• Taproot branch is ready for merge

On the DAO front (which we’ll elaborate more below), we have been busy upgrading the platform to include Metanode staking.

• Added Metanode staking on the DAO UI
• Reduced current Metanode unbonding period temporarily from 30 days to 1 day via software update (This is to help Metanode move to ERC-20 and stake on the new UI. The unbonding period will be reverted to 30 days after the successful transition. More information will be shared shortly.)
• Deployed DAO UI on Fleek (Dapp Hosting Service)

SkyPools Testnet Launch & Giveaway 🚀

Finally, after months of talking about SkyPools, we were so happy to finally launch the SkyPools Testnet on the Ropsten network. To celebrate this milestone, we put together a giveaway of a total of 100,000 $SWINGBY to our community.

Over the course of 2 weeks, we have received over 3,000 transactions to the SkyPools contract, and over 800 submissions for the giveaway. Thank you so much for your help testing SkyPools with us!

From these 800 submissions, we have also successfully drawn 20 winning entries. Congrats to the winners — we‘ve airdropped 5,000 $SWINGBY for each winning entry! If you received a DM from us but have not received your airdrop, do let us know and we’ll look into it.

Thanks to all your help, we managed to get high volumes of transactions interacting with SkyPools and there were no major security and smart contract issues. That said, we have identified a couple of issues and have been fixing them accordingly. Over the next week, we will be re-deploying the smart contracts with the fixes soon on Ropsten.

SkyPools: Road to Mainnet 🧱

Naturally, the next question is — wen mainnet?

As a team, we are happy with how successful the SkyPools Testnet went and we do not think we are far away from a Mainnet Deployment. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be running further tests and final checks before preparing for deployment on Mainnet.

If there are no further delays or mishaps, we should see a Mainnet deployment of SkyPools in February 2022.

Let’s DAO it together in 2022 🤝

In the first article of our article series, we talked about Swingby’s vision for the multi-chain future and the values we live by:

1. Trustless 🗝
2. Simple to use ✨
3. Community-owned 💎

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African Proverb

As we look back on 2021, we went fast, but alone to ship our Product. Within a year, we launched SkyBridge and completed SkyPools (to launch in 2022). We lived by our values of creating something that is Trustless and Simple to use.

Looking forward at 2022, we want to go far, together with you. That’s why, we’re happy to share that Swingby will be evolving into a DAO in 2022, helping us double down on our last value (Community ownership).

It wasn’t easy keeping this under wraps (we’ve been dropping hints on Twitter & dev updates) as we’re really excited about involving the community to achieve our vision together. To kick off 2022, we will be setting up the DAO and announcing more details in the coming weeks. Do look out for an announcement post dedicated to Swingby’s DAO soon!

Once again, we’re really excited to DAO this with you & hope you join us on our journey in 2022.

LFG 2022! 🚀

• 👨‍🌾 Provide Bitcoin Liquidity & earn 17% APR on Swingby SkyBridge
• 💵 Swap Bitcoins on Swingby SkyBridge
• 👋 Hang out with us on our Discord server
• ✉️ Subscribe to our Substack
• 💬 Join our Telegram
• 💬 Follow us on Twitter

Hi Swingby community,

With every passing week, we are getting closer to the end of 2021 and our SkyPools Testnet launch. Today, we’ll be sharing more exciting updates from the development team in November, as well as things to look out for in December.

December has always been an exciting month for us at Swingby. Last year, we launched SkyBridge in December. This year will be no different, so we can’t wait to share the news with you!

Swap volumes: 200 BTCs in November 2021 📈

From January to November, BTC swap volumes are now at 2,500 (approximately $125M at current price). This means that in November alone, Skybridge helped users swap 500 BTCs worth of assets between BTC and WBTC.

During the last week of November, we also saw an ATH in weekly swap volumes, reaching $12.7M USD.

As mentioned in our previous articles, Skybridge plays an important role in facilitating SkyPools swaps, so seeing this lift in volumes makes us really excited.

BTC Liquidity Provision Rewards: 25% Boost incoming 💰

As a recap, to create optimal liquidity when doing SkyPool swaps between BTC and ERC-20 tokens, we need to increase Bitcoin liquidity provided on Skybridge. To incentivise BTC liquidity sustainably, we announced that we will be reducing Metanode staking rewards to 30% and increasing BTC liquidity provision rewards when Testnet goes live.

Today, we have more details to share on the increase in BTC liquidity provision rewards. After much discussion and planning, we will be increasing the rewards for BTC liquidity providers by 25%.

The increase in BTC liquidity provision rewards and reduction in Metanode staking rewards will take place when the Testnet launches. We will release a Tweet 1 week before the changes happen, so do look out for it!

Meanwhile, if you’re a BTC hodler, you can start providing BTC liquidity and earn 33% APR on your Bitcoins!

November Dev Updates 🛠

In November, the developers have been working on the final updates for SkyPools’ testnet launch, more specifically:

• SkyPools Smart Contracts are deployed on Ropsten
• SkyPools frontend interface integrated with Smart Contracts
• SkyPools undergoing QA
• DAO contracts (based on Barnbridge’s governance) are deployed to Testnet for initial exploration

SkyPools Testnet coming on 17 December 🚀

Given the above progress, we are happy to announce that SkyPools Testnet will be coming to you by 17 December. All SkyPools contracts will be deployed onto Ropsten Testnet and made available for testing. With this deployment, you will be able to swap from native BTC into ERC-20 tokens (and vice versa) using Testnet tokens.

To test SkyPools more rigorously and comprehensively, we need your help to test SkyPools. In exchange for your help, we’ll be running giveaways and campaigns, so that you can win more $SWINGBY tokens from us.

More news will be coming soon on the giveaway shortly, so do give us some time in December if you want to win some $SWINGBY tokens!

November’s done, join us for an amazing December!

• 💵 Swap Bitcoins on Swingby SkyBridge
• 👋 Hang out with us on our Discord server
• ✉️ Subscribe to our Substack
• 💬 Join our Telegram
• 💬 Follow us on Twitter

Update: 👋 Dear Swingby community, we’ve heard your discussions and concerns, hence we are updating the timeline for Metanode rewards reduction Metanode staking rewards will only be reduced when the SkyPools Testnet is launched.

Hi Swingby community,

November has been a pretty busy month for the entire Swingby team as we continue to prepare for the testnet launch of SkyPools. We have been focusing on the tech & product over the last few articles, so today we will be switching gears onto something else.

We will be talking about another pillar that is crucial for Skybridge’s success today, as well as SkyPools’ success tomorrow — network & liquidity incentives

A primer on Network Incentives

In Web3 and decentralised projects, a project’s success is normally more than just building a great technical infrastructure and product. To achieve decentralisation, Web3 projects typically have many stakeholders, users and network participants working together to achieve its vision.

To ensure that the network and product serves its purpose, all stakeholders in the network need to act in an incentive-aligned manner. This makes designing and aligning network incentives really crucial for a project’s success.

When done correctly, the network serves its purpose and provides value to the investors, validators, users and other participants. When done wrongly, all sorts of things can go wrong — bad actors can steal funds, do double-spends and more.

As networks bootstrap, grow and mature, the priorities, constraints and stakes for securing the network can change rapidly. Hence, it is essential for teams to have a pulse on network incentives and adapt as the network matures.

Our Network Incentives Today

Today, there are 3 network participants that contribute to the success of the Swingby Network and the Skybridge product.

1. Metanodes ⛏
2. SkyBridge liquidity providers 💰
3. Users 🧑‍🌾

Metanode Rewards ⛏

Metanode operators run nodes and bond $SWINGBY tokens to ensure the security and consensus on the network. Whenever a swap happens on Skybridge, Metanode operators receive 2/3 of all swap fee revenues.

Initially when swap volumes and revenue were low, we allocated 52% APR staking rewards to incentivise Metanodes to secure the network.

This has helped us bootstrap and grow Skybridge to over 1,900 BTCs in swap volume this year, bringing in sizeable revenue for Metanodes and security for the network.

Skybridge Liquidity Providers 💰

Next, Skybridge liquidity providers provide BTC and its variants on each bridge, such as WBTC/BTC for the ERC-20 bridge and BTCB/BTC for the BEP-20 bridge. By providing liquidity, users like yourself are able to swap your BTCs trustlessly across chains.

To incentivise liquidity provision, these liquidity providers earn around 9% APR in sbBTC without any risk of impermanent loss or asset risks. You can farm your Liquidity Provider positions and earn an additional 24% APR in Swingby tokens, bringing your total yield on BTCs to around 33% APR.

Skybridge Users 🧑‍🌾

Lastly, we have the users who do swaps across BTC chains and providing 0.20% swap fees to the Metanode operators and Swingby as a protocol. The continued usage of Skybridge helps provide revenue & incentives for Metanode operators to continue securing the Network

So far, the incentives for the Metanodes and liquidity providers have served us well in providing over 1,900 Bitcoin swap volumes without any bad actors or attacks.

Looking to the future

Over the past 1 year, we have moved from milestone to milestone — from our initial bootstrapping phase, to growing Skybridge liquidity and now preparing to launch SkyPools.

Looking towards the future, we envision SkyPools becoming a core tool for DeFi users to move between Bitcoin and assets on other chains. A risk-on user will use SkyPools as a first-mile swap to invest in a ERC-20 asset. A risk-off user will use SkyPools as a a last-mile swap to take profits into BTC.

The question we asked ourselves was — are our network incentives well-prepared in helping us achieve our vision?

SkyPools, as a product, depends on Skybridge liquidity to facilitate the cross-chain swap between Bitcoin and other chains. With current liquidity averaging at around 13 BTCs (USD750,000 at current prices) on the ERC-20 bridge, this is insufficient and will become a bottleneck in enabling SkyPools to achieve its full potential.

Hence, while we prepare for the eventual launch of SkyPools, it is crucial that we place our focus on increasing Skybridge liquidity.

Updates to Network Incentives

As we move beyond the network bootstrapping phase towards launching Skypools , we are announcing 2 changes to our Network Incentives

1. Increase in Skybridge Liquidity

As mentioned above, current Skybridge BTC Liquidity is a bottleneck to an optimal SkyPools experience. To incentivise greater provision of liquidity on Skybridge, we plan to increase the liquidity rewards from the current 33% APR today. This will enable greater throughput for users to swap between Bitcoin and Bitcoin variants for SkyPools.

We are finalising these plans to increase rewards for liquidity providers and will be announcing the increase and timelines soon.

2. Reduction in Metanode Rewards

To make this increase in liquidity sustainable, we will be reducing the Metanode Rewards from 54% APR to 30% APR.

The 54% APR Metanode Rewards has served us well in kickstarting and providing incentives provide incentives for Metanodes when the swap volumes were low. A year and 1,900 BTC in swap volumes later, earning the 2/3 share of Skybridge swap fees is gradually becoming a sustainable revenue source and incentive mechanism for Metanodes.

As a network, we are really appreciative towards the Metanodes’ role in securing the Swingby network and building the foundations we have today. Today, we have a very healthy Bond to Liquidity ratio, suggesting that we have enough security & bonding to graduate beyond the network bootstrapping phase.

As we prepare for Swingby’s sustainability as a network, lowering Metanode rewards becomes an inevitable choice. Furthermore, as we launch SkyPools, we are excited for how much more we can accomplish together in terms of swap volumes, BTC liquidity and Metanode revenues.

Updated: This change will come into effect when testnet is launched.

To summarise the changes, please refer to the diagram below

So what happens now?

1. If you’d like to start earning 33% APR on your Bitcoin & help provide liquidity on Skybridge, we invite you to start providing Bitcoin liquidity on skybridge.info today.
2. If you are a Metanode operator, no further action is required from you

Have questions or thoughts? Talk to us on Discord!

• 💵 Provide BTC liquidity & earn 33% APR on Swingby SkyBridge
• 👋 Hang out with us on our Discord server
• ✉️ Subscribe to our Substack
• 💬 Join our Telegram
• 💬 Follow us on Twitter

Hello there Swingby community!

October has been an exciting month for both crypto as well as the Swingby team and we’re excited to bring you:

1. Our October updates
2. Team Ask-Me-Anything

1. October Updates

As the Swingby community should know by now, the Swingby team’s main focus for the entire Q4 is on getting SkyPools to testnet launch. As described in our last article, our main focus is to enable smart contract interactions for SkyPools.

Here are some development updates that bring us closer to the SkyPools testnet launch:

• Updated TSS Library and Node-Installer
• Integrated Smart Contracts into the Skybridge nodes
• Currently testing SkyPools Smart Contract testing Ropsten network
• Currently undergoing internal QA and security review for SkyPools
• Almost completed SkyPools UI

Aside from SkyPools launch, the team has been improving the user experience by standardising our Navbars and headers on the Swingby main site and SkyBridge Explorer.

Also, we have improved our Beta message on our SkyBridge swap widgets, so that you have a less intrusive and more user-friendly.

2. Team Ask-Me-Anything!

Last week, we tweeted out an AMA post, asking for you (our community members) to ask us anything and we’ll answer them! Over the past weeks, we received over 70 replies to the Tweet and we’re going to answer the more salient questions today.

Among these 70 replies, 5 community members who asked questions will receive a 1000 $SWINGBY airdrop. To choose the winners for this giveaway, we were looking for the most well-asked or fun questions. Curious if you won the giveaway? Read on till the end where we’ll announce the winners!

Meanwhile, let’s get started with the Swingby October AMA.

General Questions 💡

1. What is Swingby?

Swingby is a trustless cross-chain bridge that empowers liquidity to move freely between Bitcoin and EVM chains (ETH mainnet & BSC currently).

As a product, Swingby is:

1. Trust-minimised on all levels
2. Simple to use
3. Community-owned

For a more in-depth explanation of what is Swingby, you can read our article here on the Past, Present and Future of Swingby.

2. Who are Swingby’s intended users?

As a trustless cross-chain bridge in an increasingly multi-chain world, we want to target all DeFi users who want to move assets freely across chains to discover new DeFi and Web3 opportunities.

Living and breathing the Decentralised ethos of DeFi, they typically prefer true ownership of their assets and use decentralised, trustless and permissionless products instead of centralised ones (e.g. DEXes vs CEXes).

Looking Forward: Roadmap & Marketing 🚀

3. What is Swingby’s roadmap beyond Q4?

During Q4, we see ourselves staying laser-focused in launching, optimising and increasing the adoption of swaps via SkyPools. As an infrastructure to enable smart contract interactions across chains, it is not easy to build and launch something as complex and powerful as SkyPools. That’s why we’d like to spend our time being more careful and measured in our launch.

That said, once we have launched the infrastructure to do swaps, we will be in a much better place to use this as a foundation to launch other use cases. In 2022, when we have successfully launched and grew the adoption of SkyPools, there are some areas that we are really excited about, such as

1. Extending SkyPools functionality towards other EVM chains
2. Enabling SkyPools for other DeFi use cases such as lending, etc.

We are really excited about the future, but want to be measured in sharing what is to come in our product roadmap. Rest assured, we will keep you updated on the roadmap in the coming months when the SkyPools launch is on track.

4. Any plans for a BEP-20 to ERC-20 SkyBridge?

Yes, in line with our vision to connect the various chains in the increasingly multi-chain world, connecting the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum ecosystem is definitely important to us.

However, in the meantime, we stay focused on launching SkyPools but will watch the space closely to observe any market needs for a BEP-20 to ERC-20 bridge. When the market need arises and we’re going to focus on that, we will surely update you then!

5. Can you tell us more about Swingby’s marketing plan?

As a team, we are focused on making SkyPools become a reality, hence even the marketing plan will surround the SkyPools launch. To support the SkyPools launch, we will be having :

• More articles & content
• Liquidity incentives to drive liquidity on SkyBridge
• Community engagement & activities
• Media & press outreach

Let us know how you think we can do better, and we’d love to incorporate your ideas into our plans.

6. With SkyPools launch, do you have any plans to increase swap volume & liquidity on SkyBridge?

Yes, when SkyPools launches, we are expecting there to be more volumes passing through both SkyPools and SkyBridge. The current liquidity today will not be sufficient to support the growth we want to achieve. Hence, we are working on more marketing and liquidity programmes to increase the SkyBridge volume.

As an educational point, for SkyPools to work smoothly, we will need to increase liquidity on SkyBridge and not SkyPools. This is because SkyPools taps on the existing liquidity pools on AMMs like Uniswap, Sushiswap and Balance via Paraswap.

7. How is the Swingby team’s runway looking like?

The Swingby team has sufficient funds and a healthy runway to sustain ourselves for around 2 years. As a team, we are committed to spending our resources in a practical and sustainable manner, so that we can make an impact on the multi-chain future.

Token Talk: Governance, Network & Metanodes 💰

8. Are there any plans to use the Swingby token for governance?

Yes, with the launch of SkyPools, we are planning to give Swingby token holders a bigger role in the governance of the Swingby ecosystem. We are still working out the details, but potentially, you will be able to decide on things like SkyPools parameters and how we launch Skypools.

Stay tuned for more updates!

9. Are there any plans for token burns?

We have done token burns in the past before, and are open to doing more in the future. However, given the launch of SkyPools and the upcoming introduction of Swingby governance, we do not want to risk any implications on the tokenomics, governance and network security.

That said, if we plan for any token burns, the community will be the first to hear of it!

10. Can you tell us more about the Swingby Chaos Nodes?

Swingby Chaos Nodes are priming Metanodes that were meant to bootstrap the network. They are run by a select group of strategic investors and community partners to secure the network. These Metanodes do not receive any staking rewards.

As priming Metanodes, they have a low bond amount, reducing any barriers for community members like yourselves to run your own Metanode to secure the network. As more community members start to set up your own Metanodes, these Chaos nodes will be less relevant in securing the Swingby network.

On the flipside, these Metanodes are also set up as a safety net, in case any Metanodes stop securing the network suddenly. Instead of having a ‘power vacuum’ where the network security and decentralisation drops drastically, these Metanodes will step in to secure the network, ensuring security and continuity of the system.

11. Will there be any changes to the number of Metanodes? How would that affect Metanode operators?

At the current volumes and liquidity, our team’s calculation and economic modelling has shown that having 50 Metanodes is more than essential in securing the network. For now, we do not foresee any changes to the number of Metanodes and Metanode requirements.

We are actively monitoring our volumes and growth, and will inform the community and Metanode operators if there are any changes to the Metanodes requirements.

Community ✨

12. Can we expect a live AMA sometime soon?

Yes. We are planning a live AMA as we get closer to launching SkyPools. When we have passed the technical hurdles of launching SkyPools, we definitely look forward to hanging out with you guys again.

13. How can the community help to add value to Swingby?

Great question! There are many ways that the Swingby community and token holders can contribute to our cause.

The easiest way would be to subscribe, follow, share our articles when we publish them. We’d also invite you to join us in Discord to hang out with us and discuss just about anything.

If you’ve more time, we’d love if you can become community stewards to welcome new members, answer their questions and just ensure everyone’s having a good time in the Swingby community. That would definitely make things a lot easier for Jacob, Ferreira and Sagar.

Finally, if you’ve more resources and would like to help secure the network, you can try spinning up a Metanode yourself and also earn rewards at the same time!

Just for Fun 🎲

14. What is something invisible that you wish people could see?

Perhaps Covid-19? That’ll probably make things a lot easier around the world

14. It’s now 2030 and Bitcoin has taken over the global economy. Does the Swingby community go to the Moon or Mars?

Senga: By then, we’ll end up going to both the Moon & Mars. You can probably purchse land on Mars and the Moon with crypto. But who knows? Let’s ask Elon

15. Ferreira and Sagar work day-and-night 7-days-a-week. Do you plan on giving them a Christmas bonus? If not, why the hell not?

Yes, for sure! Meanwhile, do give them some love in Telegram and Discord yea?

16. It seems like Jacob enjoys going to pubs. In the future, does he have plans of starting his own pub? Will Swingby holders get a discount?

Jacob: As a Brit, I do indeed love frequenting the pubs! Some of my favourites include “Oyster Shed”, “Wetherspoons” and “The Walrus”.

One day, when Swingby reaches the moon, I’ll definitely launch my own franchise named “SkyBar”, Swingby holders can pool liquidity to earn 20% APR (paid in beer and steak pies)”

Announcing our 5 winners 💎

We hope that October was as fulfilling for you, as it was for us. As promised, here are the winners for the Twitter AMA giveaway. Congratulations to the following 5 Swingby community members for asking great and fun questions!

• Stefan Popescu
• Swingby Maxi
• Pauna Mihai
• Rares Ciobanu
• Danut

Please DM us on Twitter with your ERC-20 address, and we will airdrop the 1000 Swingby tokens to you over the next week.

We hope you enjoyed this AMA & Dev Update and look forward to sharing more updates in the future! 👋

Have more questions? Hang out with us & ask away!

• 👋 Hang out with us on our Discord server
• ✉️ Subscribe to our Substack
• 💬 Join our Telegram
• 💬 Follow us on Twitter
• 💵 Swap Bitcoins on Swingby SkyBridge

Today, we’d like to go deeper into what our team does best — the technical workings behind our products. That’s right, we will be going under the hood and sharing more about the technical upgrades that make SkyPools possible.

For the technical folks and diagram geeks, you’ll be in for a ride!

Technical Overview: What goes into the SkyPools update?

🎯 Main Objective: Enable Smart Contract Interactions

For the SkyPools update, the team’s main objective is to enable smart contract interactions to empower Swaps over SkyPools. This means that Metanodes will be able to sign transactions that invoke smart-contract functions once a consensus is formed.

Initially, the first application of this upgrade is to enable any-to-any coin swaps over the Ethereum network, but you can imagine a world where Bitcoin can be directly used with all DeFi applications in the future.

The Development team’s effort is heavily focused here, which we’ll share more in the second part of this article.

🎲 Side Quest: Improve user experience & security

As a sidequest, we also aim to improve the user experience and security for bridges made on SkyBridge. Users will see faster transactions and a more seamless user experience from these updates. These technical upgrades are as follows:

CMP & FROST Integration

CMP (ECDSA) and FROST (EdDSA & Taproot) vastly improve the performance of the underlying cryptography that powers Skybridge. This implementation helps us:

• Reduce the number of signing rounds required to form a consensus massively
• Reduce the amount of processing overhead
• Add support for parallel processing, significantly speeding up signing rounds.

This upgrade creates a better user experience through faster transactions and reduces the complexity of Metanode processing for Metanode operators.

Implementation of BIP32

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 32 enables Skybridge to create unique Bitcoin deposit addresses for each swap. This helps us identify & handle your swaps uniquely without needing you to send in Bitcoin with long-running decimals currently.

As a user, sending exactly how much you want without running decimals will greatly improve your user experience. For Metanodes, the new identification method under BIP32 also reduces the complexity of Metanode operations.

This sums up the objectives in the SkyPools update from a technical point of view. With that, we’d like to dive deeper into the main focus of the SkyPools Update — the Smart Contracts & Transaction Flows enabling Swaps over SkyPools.

Under the Hood: Smart Contracts & Transaction Flows

The Skypools update allows the existing Skybridge to enable Bitcoin holders to participate more directly in existing decentralized finance protocols that were not possible before. Two major flows make up the primary features of Skypools.

Flow 1: Swapping native BTC to ERC-20 tokens

This flow first converts native BTC to wrapped BTC tokens (BTCt) on the applicable EVM network (WBTC on Ethereum), before executing the swap to ERC-20 tokens.

On the SkyPools UI, we make a GET request and a PUT request to ParaSwap v5 to request full transactional data for the swap. From here, the user is required to initiate the swap on the UI to begin the following process.

When user initiates the swap, the first part of the flow involves converting native BTC to BTCt (i.e. WBTC)

1. User initiates the swap request to wBTC and deposits BTC. This request includes the user’s Ethereum wallet address to allow the receipt of tokens
2. Metanodes execute the cross-chain conversion from native BTC to WBTC.

Once the nodes have executed the cross-chain conversion to WBTC, the next step is to execute the swap from WBTC to ERC-20 token.

1. SkPools allocates the WBTC tokens in a balance for the user’s wallet address.
2. User decides whether to continue with the ERC-20 token swap or withdraw WBTC
3. Once User clicks ‘Swap’, this calls the external function on our smart contract to execute the swap using data from the API PUT response.
4. Swap is completed & token is sent to the user.

Flow 2: Swapping ERC-20 tokens into native BTC

The second flow works in the opposite direction from the first, allowing users to deposit ERC-20 tokens to the contract and swap it to native BTC in 1 transaction. There are 2 steps in this flow as well, to first swap the ERC-20 tokens to WBTC and then do the swap from WBTC to n active BTC.

In the first part, the user needs to swap the ERC-20 tokens to WBTC. First, we get the pricing data from ParaSwap V5 by doing a PUT and GET request. With this data, we display it in the SkyPools UI for the user to initiate the swap.

When the user initiates the swap from ERC-20 to wBTC,

1. User first deposits ERC-20 token to the SkyPools smart contract
2. User executes ParaSwap swap to WBTC. At this stage, the SkyPools smart contract records the pending cross-chain transaction & other associated information for the bridge later on.

After the swap is successful, we begin the second step of the process.

1. Once the swap is successful, the SkyBridge picks up the transaction to start the swap
2. A SwapTokensToBTC event is emitted to Metanodes to execute the swap.
3. Once consensus is achieved, SkyBridge Metanodes send native BTC to the receiving wallet address.

In the event of a failed Skypools transaction, such as with an invalid receiving native BTC address, the user will be refunded with BTCt (WBTC on Ethereum)

With that, we hope that we’ve managed to share more about the technical upgrades going into the SkyPools update, as well as how the smart contract and transactional flows work in a SkyPools swap.

While enabling smart contract interactions sounds simple in theory, we have realised that the devil is in the details where the edge cases needs to be accounted for carefully. This should give you a good idea as to why we are taking some time in preparing for our launch.

That said, we are still on track for a Q4 testnet launch and will keep you posted on any technical updates!

For the technical folks, what do you think?

We’d love to know if you have any thoughts and feedback. Join us in our Discord to discuss more!

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• 💵 Swap Bitcoins on Swingby SkyBridge

Picking up from our article on the Past, Present and Future of Swingby, we’d like to share a bit more about the future of Swingby today. Yes, you guessed it right — that would be SkyPools.

It was a few months back when we first teased SkyPools, but as the development team has been hard at work building SkyPools, we’re pleased to share a bit more about SkyPools ahead of our Q4 testnet launch.

1. How SkyPools work

2. First application of SkyPools: Swapping BTC into ERC-20 tokens

3. SkyPools beyond swaps

How SkyPools works

As we should be familiar now, Swingby’s SkyBridge is a trustless cross-chain bridge that empowers liquidity to move freely between Bitcoin and EVM chains. Despite bridging over $81M of Bitcoin to Defi, we believe that this is barely scratching the surface of DeFi and we want more to do.

For many users, the beauty of Defi lies in composability, where we can pick and choose any Defi legos we want in our investment strategies. Hence, it’s very rare to do a single asset bridge (such as BTC to WBTC) and stop there. In reality, most users hop onto some other liquidity pool, farming or staking product after transporting their Bitcoin into Ethereum.

With that, bridging BTC variants is really only the first step in a multi-hop journey in the world of Defi. Hence, we thought to ourselves — Why limit ourselves to only the first step (aka a bridge)? What if you could bridge your BTC and immediately tap into the world of Defi legos in 1 transaction?

Enter SkyPools.

SkyPools is Swingby’s answer to the question. SkyPool is an upgrade to SkyBridge, giving the SkyBridge superpowers to interact with smart contracts after the bridging of Bitcoin is completed. At the heart of every Defi application is the smart contract — if you can interact with smart contracts, you unlock the power of these magical Defi legos.

Hence, by combining the best of both worlds, transactions made on SkyPools consist of 2 parts:

1. Bridge: Bridge Bitcoin from 1 chain to another trustlessly
2. Smart Contract Interaction: Interacting with smart contracts to do ANY Defi action you want

This enables us to interact with any smart contract, meaning that the possibilities are endless. Whatever Defi, NFT, Web3 application you can dream of, the SkyPools mechanism can make it happen.

To start, the first type of smart contract interaction we are launching is AMM swaps. AMM swaps are easily one of the first interactions any users have with Defi. Regardless if you are a trader, yield-farmer or just a liquidity-pool provider, AMM swaps are necessities that everyone uses. Hence, we decided to launch Skypools with AMM swaps first.

Swapping tokens via SkyPools

Using the Bridge + Smart Contract Interaction model, this is how you can swap BTC into any ERC-20 tokens via SkyPools.

Here, we wanted to create an experience that had the quintessential security of Swingby, coupled with the great user experience and liquidity of today’s Defi apps. Over the last year, AMMs like Uniswap and Sushi, as well as LP/AMM aggregators like 1inch and Anyswap, has created a high bar when it comes to swaps. Users have come to expect nothing less than quick and easy swaps, deep liquidity pools and low slippage.

Hence, to give you that great experience you expect, we will tap on the existing liquidity pools on Uniswap, Sushi and Balancer via AMM aggregators like Anyswap and 1inch. This should give you the best of both worlds — maximal trustlessness and deep liquidity for your swaps.

To give you control over slippage, our SkyPools UI will have slippage tolerance controls you are familiar with. Just like swapping on AMMs, if the slippage is beyond your tolerance level, the swap will not happen and you will have your funds back.

Furthermore, we are adding a feature where you can eject your WBTC from the swap if you changed your mind along the way. This is particularly useful if market conditions such as price has changed, causing you to prefer holding your assets in Bitcoin instead. You will be able to eject the WBTC from the swap and have your Bitcoin in wrapped form.

With swaps coming to SkyPools, we are stoked to see what kind of DeFi strategies you guys will come up with to leverage on your Bitcoin holdings. To illustrate the potential of SkyPool swaps and inspire you guys to degen fearlessly, let us run through a couple of scenarios below.

Use case 1: Swapping your Bitcoin into any tokens

Let’s say, I am Bob — someone that loves my Bitcoins but have been feeling some FOMO being left out of the DeFi season. I want to look for higher yields as well as high-potential projects to invest in. Perhaps, Bob thinks highly of ETH and wants to buy some ETH.

Swapping Bitcoin into ETH without SkyPools

Previously, in order to invest in ETH, Bob needs to first bridge his BTC into WBTC via Swingby SkyBridge. Bob uses Swingby Skybridge instead of centralised bridges as it is trustless and non-custodial

Next, he goes to Uniswap to swap WBTC into ETH. Here, Bob would need to first approve the WBTC spend and then swap WBTC to ETH. This process is troublesome as Bob needs to hop around and manage different platforms.

What about with SkyPools?

With SkyPools, in 1 step, Bob selects ETH, confirms the slippage tolerance and clicks Swap.

The next step? Bob would need to send his BTC to the SkyBridge address for the bridge & swap process to start.

From here on, we will swap his Bitcoin to Wrapped Bitcoin via SkyBridge, and then swap his WBTC to ETH via our LP aggregators.

Just like this, Bob receives the ETH in his wallet without having to switch across different platforms and wallets. Now he can start hodling ETH, providing liquidity pools or start staking thanks to SkyPools. You’re welcome, Bob!

Use case 2: Taking profits into Bitcoin

Here’s another scenario — let’s say that Bob is happy with his DeFi gains and wants to move his funds back to Bitcoin — the OG cryptocurrency that he trusts.

Bob uses the SkyPools interface to select ETH and BTC, and clicks Swap. The same process in use case 2 happens in reverse, where we swap ETH to WBTC via LP aggregators, and then use SkyBridge to bridge the WBTC to BTC.

Within just 1 platform (i.e. SkyPools), Bob achieves the ETH to $WBTC swap, and then receives the BTC in his Bitcoin wallet.

Say goodbye to complicated transfers, centralised exchanges and jumping across different platforms! With SkyPools, you can efficiently swap, bridge and move your assets across chains easily and efficiently. For those of you with heavy Bitcoin stacks, now is the time for you to give your stacks the superpowers of DeFi!

Beyond swaps

But we’re not done yet! At first glance, SkyPools might look like a product only for swaps, but we assure you it is not. Remember when we said, that it is to combine the SkyBridge trustless bridge, together with any smart contract interaction?

Yes, we mean it by any smart contract interaction — AMMs and swaps are only the start. If we can interact with AMMs to do swaps, can you imagine what we can do with other smart contracts?

What if we could connect with lending protocols such as Aave and Compound, allowing you to bridge and lend your Bitcoins out in 1 click?

What if we could connect with NFT projects such as Open Sea, allowing you to bridge, swap Bitcoins and buy NFTs in 1 click?

The possibilities are endless here really, and we’re really early in the journey. What kind of use cases can you dream of? We’re stoked to find out more about the crazy, unthinkable, degen use cases that you can think of. Let us know, and we’ll do what we are best at — build!

Meanwhile, in our next article, we’ll dive deeper into the technical overview and smart contracts behind SkyPools! For the geeks and builders, you’ll be in for a treat 🛠

Join our community & tell us what you think!

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• 💵 Swap Bitcoins on Swingby SkyBridge

👋 Hello all present and future Swingby community members,

We hope you are doing well in this exciting year for crypto. With the rise of multi-chain DeFi, NFT bull markets and institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies, 2021 has been an interesting year for crypto.

Over the last 3 quarters, the Swingby team has had our heads down building products while observing the shifts in the cryptosphere closely. As a team, we’ve been typically less vocal about our progress, achievements and thoughts about the space, but this is about to change. This is because the recent developments in crypto make us really excited about our vision of the multi-chain world, our upcoming roadmap and our role to play.

Hence, we believe this is the right time to share with you (our community):

1. Where we’re at now (i.e. the Past) — Our vision, history and progress so far
2. How the cryptosphere is evolving (i.e. the Present) — A multi-chain world with more Bitcoin adoption, L1/L2 landgrabs and regulatory scrutiny on CEXes
3. Where we’re headed (i.e. the Future) — SkyPools

1. Where we’re at

Where we began — A vision of a free & multi-chain world

In early 2018, a team of cryptography enthusiasts saw the rise of different Layer 1 chains and envisioned a multi-chain future — one where different chains enabled different use cases, one where users would swap between these chains regularly.

The world we envision is a multi-chain universe where there is free movement of users, assets and liquidity between different worlds. This freedom can only be achieved when the power to swap across chains are taken from the middlemen gatekeepers and returned to the common man.

In this new world, swaps should be:

• Easy or even invisible, such that anyone can do it by themselves
• Non-custodial, such that no one else ever has custody of your assets at any time
• Ubiquitous, such that everyone can do whatever, wherever, however, you want

Our first product — SkyBridge

In February 2018, a couple of us from Binance, Bitfinex, Tether came together to create Swingby Network — a non-custodial cross-chain bridge using Multi-Party Computation-based Threshold Signature Scheme as well as a network of Metanodes.

To us, it was important for Swingby to be

1. Trustless
2. Simple to use ✨
3. Community-owned 💎

Trustless
First, to ensure that Swingby was truly trustless, we had to minimise the need for our users to trust our software, code and Metanodes in blind faith. Using TSS MPC, we ensured the power to access your funds is as distributed as it can be so that no 1 entity can influence the signing and do evil during a swap. Furthermore, we designed the Metanode bonding system to ensure that it is more costly to be bad actors than good stewards of the Swingby Network. On the cryptography front, we also used well-audited open source TSS technology (see audits here). Finally, when swaps are completed, we avoided minting a new asset class that you needed to trust, relying on the gold standards of each ecosystem, BTC, WBTC and BTCB instead.

On every level, anyone using Swingby does not need to trust us or what we say, but the way the Swingby cryptography, network and Metanodes has been designed.

Simple to use
Next, for the common man to be able to do swaps themselves without middlemen ‘help’, our solution needed to be so simple that anyone can use it. Hence, we designed the Skybridge to be as simple as sending your BTC to an address and receiving it on the other side. Unlike other solutions, there’s no need to go through multiple steps and do complex smart contract calls. Also, since it’s just sending BTC to an address, any user using any wallet in any country can do a swap themselves easily.

Community-owned
Finally, our last focus was to make sure that all community members can have ownership and participation in the Swingby network via running a Metanode. We strived to lower any barriers to entry for running a Metanode both financially and technically. As long as have a hosted server with some basic requirements (see below for ETH Bridge requirements) and 50,000 Swingby tokens, you can run a Metanode. We even built a Telegram bot for Metanode deployment, so you can start sharing the 0.20% swap fees without doing complex DevOps.

As a principle, we wanted to share swap revenues with our community through Metanodes because we want our community to own & share the success of Swingby together with us. We do not want to become a private company providing software and earning revenue from our ‘customers’. Instead, we want to ensure our incentives are aligned with yours and our product is used, owned and loved by the community.

Our progress so far

After months of hard work, we launched SkyBridge on Chaos Mainnet on 30 December 2020 to swap between Bitcoin and Wrapped Bitcoin. Shortly after, we also launched the Bitcoin to BTCB (BEP20) Bridge on 1 April 2021.

As a team, Swingby is rarely vocal about our progress and achievements, but we have managed to achieve some key milestones over the past 3 quarters.

• Built a distributed team of engineers 🛠
• Built a community of 38,000 Twitter followers, 1,400 Discord members 👋
• Launched Bitcoin to WBTC and Bitcoin to BTCB bridge 🚀
• Launched sbBTC yield farming 🚜
• Updated Swingby functionality for EIP-1559 🛠
• Swapped 1670 BTCs or $81M worth of Bitcoins into DeFi 📈

P.S.: To read up on our monthly dev updates, you can check out this link here

2. How crypto is evolving

While we’ve had relative success with SkyBridge, we’re far from done. In fact, as the team looks across the cryptosphere, we see a lot of tailwinds that give us confidence in our vision of the world and our upcoming product roadmap. Namely, they are:

1. Increasing adoption of Bitcoin 🏦

2. The Layer 1 & 2s Landgrab 🧑‍🌾

3. Regulatory scrutiny on CEXes 🔨

Increasing adoption of Bitcoin

Firstly, with the rising tides of institutional recognition of Bitcoin around the world, we’ve started to see more countries consider Bitcoin as legal tender — with El Salvador and Brazil as some examples This introduces Bitcoin to a whole new group of users. To these users, Bitcoin is not just a financial asset in their portfolio, but an alternative to a banking and financial system that did not work for them. We believe that this class of Bitcoin holders are going to start looking for creative ways to tap into the DeFi ecosystem, looking for yields on their Bitcoin. This is great for Swingby as a cross-chain swap solution that is reliable, cheap and easy to use.

Regardless, sitting at a $900B market cap today, Bitcoin still remains a relatively untouched asset class when it comes to DeFi with only 1 to 2 % of Bitcoin are in wrapped and swapped forms. We are truly in the early innings of the game.

The Layer 1 & 2s Landgrab

Next, Layer 1 solutions such as Polygon, Avalance, Fantom and Solana have been launching their own DeFi products (AMM, farming, lending, etc.) as well as 8 to 9-digit DeFi funds. This landgrab has started to incentivise developers, users and liquidity to flow to different chains respectively. Like explorers going on new voyages and exploring new lands, the multi-chain future slowly coalescing in front of our eyes. As these new cross-chain voyages start to take off between the EVM-compatible chains, we are well-positioned to facilitate this migration of users, assets and liquidity across chains

Of course, the fun does not stop on Layer 1s competing with Ethereum. Even within the Ethereum 2.0 space, upcoming Layer 2 solutions such as Arbitrum and Optimism have started to bring in more chain-hopping as well. For instance, Arbitrum has already consistently been hitting $1.2B TVL, despite being only launched recently. With this new age of cross-chain migration, there will be another gold rush of Degens and DeFi farmers looking for yield and opportunities across chains and we can’t be more excited to play a part here 🧑‍🌾

Regulatory scrutiny on CEXes

Finally, most cross-chain swaps today are still being done by centralised exchanges. This has worked well so far, but the tide is turning on centralised exchanges as regulators start to scrutinise the CEX industry.

Generally, this is great news for everything decentralised as more users are gradually moving their assets and investment strategies towards DeFi solutions like Sushiswap and Uniswap. With increased awareness and familiarity with using trustless and permissionless products, we believe that users will gradually turn their attention towards using trustless bridges as well. After all, isn’t it a red flag if you are doing everything permissionless, but when bridging your funds, you let a centralised entity handle that? We believe this awareness will spread and it’ll be another tailwind for Swingby.

In any case, if you are still using centralised bridges, you need to be aware of the looming risk of shutdown or service disruption when there are any regulatory mishaps ⚠️

3. Where we’re headed ✨

With the above tailwinds, we are really excited to see how the vision of a multi-chain world in 2018 becomes more real today. Launching SkyBridge and swapping over $81M in Bitcoin to DeFi has been great, but we are not done yet.

We want to do more and that’s why we have been working hard and building SkyPools. Beyond just swapping between BTC variants across chains, SkyPools is an upgrade to SkyBridge to interact with smart contracts.

To kick things off, the first use case would be to swap any asset to any asset across different chains, building on the same Swingby stack of ultra-minimised trust, an easy-to-use interface and community ownership. We are on track for a testnet launch by Q4 2021, where you will be able to swap your Bitcoins into any ERC-20 tokens 🚀

Ahead of the launch, we will be kicking off an article series on SkyPools to tell you more about the product, technology and why we are stoked to bring SkyPools to you. Subscribe to our Substack for the latest updates from the Swingby team and community!

If you found this interesting and have any questions, feedback or comments, come on to our Discord and talk to us! Also, we’re planning to refresh our Discord and have more activities there, so hope to see you join us on Discord 👋 🔥

🚀 The multi-chain future calls for you — join our community today!

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• 💵 Swap Bitcoins on Swingby SkyBridge

The warp-speed protocol for inter-blockchain swaps, allowing DeFi users to easily move assets between blockchains without the need for a trusted party.

Swingby’s bridge protocol, Skybridge, builds trustless bridges between BTC, Ethereum, Binance Chain, and other blockchains secured by a network of node groups that execute fast token swaps using ‘multi-party computing’ and layer 2 technology.

Skybridge allows users to move Bitcoin tokens between the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance Chain blockchains without relying on a central custodian, opening up a whole world of DeFi capabilities such as liquidity pooling and DEX trading with easy to use UX.

Swingby has launched their Ethereum MainNet and Binance Smart chain MainNet, bringing Bitcoin to ecosystems with over $20b in Bitcoin capital locked up in DeFi contracts. Building on exciting partnerships with projects such as Chainlink, Elrond, band, Waves, and Kira Protocol, Swingby aims to expand its reach to other chains and projects, adding support where the most value can be added.

So what have the devs been up to?

Yield farming for sbBTC holders

Towards the end of August, we announced a major update to the Swingby yield farming ecosystem rewards page. This update comes in the form of yield farming support for BTC, BTC.B, and WBTC Skybridge liquidity providers (otherwise known as sbBTC holders). This might not sound like much, but actually, under the hood, we’ve built an entirely new rewards mechanic that was designed specifically to help incentivize the Skybridge BTC, WBTC, and BTC.B floats to remain balance.

To understand why this is important, let’s go back to the basics. When Skybridge processes a Bitcoin to WBTC swap, the bitcoin is deposited into an address secured by the Skybridge Metanode network, and when the deposit is detected, the Skybridge Metanodes form a consensus to release the correct amount of WBTC.

The issue is, that if there is not enough WBTC to fulfill the swap, then a bottleneck is formed and swaps need to be paused. The new yield farming contracts help to reduce this issue by providing more APR to yield farmers when the Skybridges floats are balanced.

Check out our official medium article.

Core cryptography — CMP & Frost Implementations

Swaps just got a whole load faster.

At Swingby, we are not only just a bridging protocol but also one of the few contributors to the open-source TSS cryptography library which is currently being used by many high-market-cap crypto projects. We’ve previously helped to develop “one-round signing”, implement Bitcoins BIP32 for derivation path support and now we leveraging the work of the wonderful open source community to implement CMP & Frost into the Skybridge.

CMP (ECDSA) and Frost (EdDSA & Taproot) vastly improve the performance of the underlying cryptography that powers Skybridge. By implementing both CMP and Frost, we have:

• Massively reduced the number of signing rounds required to form a consensus.
• Reduced the amount of overhead.
• Added support for parallel processing, significantly speeding up singing rounds.

EIP-1559 is heree!

The Skybridge just became much more resilient to Ethereum gas spikes.

If you’ve been living under a rock — EIP-1559 is Ethereum’s latest update to their network which implements the concept of a base fee in order to improve the user experience of the chain. EIP-1599 has many benefits, but mainly, it helps to ensure that transactions don’t get stuck in “low-gas purgatory”.
This is great for Skybridge because spikes in Ethereums gas fees have previously caused swap transactions to become stuck for extended periods of time.

The implementation of EIP-1559 required us to change the way that Ethereum transactions were constructed by the network and also perform many tests on the testnet environment.

Yield farming on PancakeSwap

You can now earn extra rewards by farming your Swingby PancakeSwap LP tokens here.

The Swingby token has become much more decentralized. Last year, centralized exchanges were the main choice of Swingby traders, but now the majority of liquidity sits on DeFi platforms and as a DeFi protocol, we love this. So to further help improve our DeFi footprint, we have launched Swingby yield farming rewards for PancakeSwap.

This means that you can now earn extra yield farming APR by staking your SushiSwap, Uniswap, and/or PancakeSwap LP tokens!!

Head to our farming page.

Thanks for reading!

Want to trade Swingby? Check us out on CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap.

Get Rewards! Head over to farm.swingby.network to participate in our yield farming program or earn up to 15% APR by staking on AscendEX or Pool-X.

Skybridge: https://skybridge.info
Yield Farming: https://farm.swingby.network

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Head here to add liquidity to Skybridge and start yield farming the LP tokens here.

Last week Swingby quietly launched a new yield farming contract that provides additional rewards to Skybridge liquidity providers! By staking BTC, WBTC and/or BTC.B to skybridge, and locking your LP tokens (sbBTC) into our yield farming contracts, you can earn around 8%+ in Bitcoins and 10%+ in Swingby tokens.

Helping to improve the network

The sbBTC yield farming contract is more than just a liquidity incentive. It helps to improve the capacity and volume of the bridge by incentivizing the float to remain equally balanced.

Skybridge works by maintaining a set of liquidity pools that exist on different chains. When a BTC to WBTC swap is processed, the BTC funds enter the Bitcoin liquidity pool and the WBTC tokens are released from the Ethereum WBTC liquidity pool.

This model is unique to Swingby and allows us to support existing wrapped Bitcoin tokens such as WBTC, which is the most popular and widely supported wrapped Bitcoin token. Other chains tend to operate using the “mint-and-burn” model, such as Ren.

However, the drawback of the liquidity pool model is that swaps can only be processed as long as there is sufficient liquidity on both sides of the pool (“the float”). If users are swapping more BTC to WBTC, then it may cause a problem if Skybridge runs out of WBTC liquidity. In this case, only WBTC to BTC swaps will be available.

Dynamic reward APR

The new yield farming contract aims to solve the liquidity pool issue by offering a dynamic APR that is based on Skybridges float. If the float is unabalanced (i.e more BTC that WBTC), the yield farming APR will be normal, but if the float is balanced (i.e BTC is equal to WBTC) then the APR will be much higher. This interesting mechanic will help to incentivize network participants to add liquidity to the unbalanced side of the bridge.

How to use it

First, head to the Skybridge pool page in order to add BTC or WBTC to Skybridge as liquidity. Once you have done that, sbBTC tokens will be sent to your Ethereum address in exchange.

Next, take those sbBTC tokens and head to Swingby yield farming page and deposit the tokens into the “Skyrbidge (Ethereum)” farming contract.

Thanks for reading!

Want to trade Swingby? Check us out on CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap.

Get Rewards! Head over to farm.swingby.network to participate in our yield farming program or earn up to 15% APR by staking on AscendEX or Pool-X.

Skybridge: https://skybridge.info
Yield Farming: https://farm.swingby.network

Telegram: https://swingby.network/telegram
Twitter: https://swingby.network/twitter
Reddit: https://swingby.network/reddit
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Github: https://swingby.network/github