Dot Pulse #12 — Sushi on Moonriver & Shiden Deep Dive
Learn about the Shiden parachain, Kusama and Polkadot crowdloans, Moonriver developments, new farms and governance watcher! 📣
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This week it’s the turn of Shiden Network, the canary deployment of Astar (formerly known as Plasm). This one is a smart contract platform as well, with a stated goal of building Ethereum 2.0 on Polkadot — let’s see how they want to do that!
Shiden: The WebAssembly-first Parachain
We’ve covered Moonriver in the past edition, which prides itself as the main gateway to Polkadot for Ethereum developers. Shiden and its Polkadot parent Astar are much more focused on Polkadot-native apps and WebAssembly smart contracts, though it does support the EVM as well.
The claim of “Ethereum 2.0 on Polkadot” comes from the fact that Shiden aims to scale primarily through L2 technologies. The initial vision included Plasma, though now the focus is on deploying Optimistic and zero knowledge rollups to Shiden/Astar.
More on WebAssembly
Shiden is a great opportunity to talk more about this WebAssembly thing! It is spearheaded quite strongly by Polkadot as the supposed next evolution of the blockchain virtual machines. But Polkadot is not alone, as Cosmos is also working on something similar through CosmWasm. Also, the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap used to have the eWasm (or Ethereum WebAssembly) as a future item, though it was eventually dropped due to the popularity of the EVM.
What’s so great about WebAssembly? It’s probably the most generic framework for running complex programs out there. As its name suggests, its primary purpose is to enable fast apps entirely within browsers. The most famous example of an app using Wasm is Figma, a cloud-based vector graphics editor. Google Earth also switched to Wasm in 2020. Oh and Decentraland runs on Wasm through Unity3D.
Wasm essentially offers comparable performance to native computer apps, all while inside a browser (or blockchain, or anything else). You can imagine how powerful it could be for blockchain applications! With years of development behind it and a large community of Web2 developers, Wasm definitely has a decent starting position as the default VM for smart contracts. The Astar team is of course way more categoric about it:
Considering the matured ecosystem of Ethereum and its accessibility for new people, the EVM as it is today will be obsolete in the future. But the ecosystem won’t be going away. Instead, it will be a portal to the future. Similar to how the Internet Explorer is a portal for downloading better browsers.
So, what can you do with Shiden?
Burns aside, Shiden aims to have quite comprehensive support for the EVM — MetaMask, Remix et al. included. The support is live, and it even has a friendly drag and drop interface to deploy dApps.
One of the cooler innovations in Shiden are the dApp Store and dApp Staking features, which are a nifty way of perpetually funding developers building on it. Basically, users can nominate their SDN tokens to their favorite projects, which grants both them and the dApp a portion of Shiden’s 10% inflation (with the rest going to treasury and collators).
This is a very useful feature for bootstrapping community-led projects, who could just receive staking income from the network instead of having to raise major funding rounds. It’s quite close to running a continuous Gitcoin campaign, though most users will probably expect to receive the dApp’s tokens in return for their support. Some projects can also decide to run kickbacks and give nominators a portion of the rewards meant for them.
So far the dApp store doesn’t seem to have any exciting offerings. The few DeFi projects on it aren’t actually deployed on Shiden, which is a shame! But with time, interesting things may come out of it.
Astar vs. Shiden
Much like Acala vs. Karura, there aren’t that many differences between the canary and the “main” network (for now). Shiden is basically like Kusama for Polkadot — mostly the same thing but launched earlier.
The two communities are meant to coexist, so participants of the earlier Astar lockdrops get a significant portion of SDN tokens. Both networks include a small team share, though SDN doesn’t have allocations for seed investors or the foundation. Shiden distributed a pretty generous 22% of the supply in the first crowdloan and returned 60%, the second best of the first batch.
We got one more week left until the Polkadot auction craziness starts! You can already start to “pre-order” crowdloans through the project’s websites or some exchanges. Just today we got the first “official” crowdloans via the Polkadot JS interface. Meanwhile we still got some Kusama action ongoing.
As expected, Picasso ended up becoming the 12th project parachain with 115k KSM committed. It’s the lowest amount we’ve seen yet, which isn’t surprising as the parachain supply has increased drastically!
Active Crowdloans (Polkadot)
TL;DR: Acala immediately attracted over 3.3 million DOT ($170M) out of its 50M DOT hardcap! It’s offering 17% of supply for the crowdloan and is leading the charts so far. Check out our deep dive on its canary Karura to learn more about the project.
TL;DR: Sitting in second place with 1.1M DOT ($57M) bidding for 10% of the GLMR supply. Learn more about it in the Moonriver deep dive.
Active Crowdloans (Kusama)
TL;DR: Offering 15% of supply, right now in first place with 152k KSM. The project is essentially a Decentraland on Polkadot.
TL;DR: Offering 8% of supply, second place with 28k KSM. The project is an NFT platform for Polkadot/Kusama.
TL;DR: Offers 10% of supply, currently third place with 9k KSM. It’s a network promising privacy through Trusted Execution Environment hardware. Keep in mind that there is a referendum to cancel this crowdloan (more on it later).
Active Farms
Earn KAR by staking on Karura DEX
Yields are now 23% APR (or 47% with loyalty bonus) for KAR/KSM.
KSM/LKSM farm has 16% APR (54% with loyalty)
KAR/kUSD offers APR is 47%, 68.1% with loyalty.
Earn KAR + BNC (Bifrost tokens) when staking kUSD/BNC
APR is 116% with loyalty, 35% without.
Moonriver’s farms continue steady. As before, the following section is not vetted. Rug risk is high on Moonriver, though the farms below have been around for weeks. Still, fundamentals are basically absent. Proceed at your own peril.
Earn SOLAR in a classic Pool1/Pool2 arrangement, Pool2 yield is mid triple-digits, but there are a few juicy Pool1s with 100-200% APR.
Earn MOON in another Pool1/Pool2 set of farms. Yields at 500% for the Pool 2s, a few 100% Pool1s here and there.
Sushi is live on Moonriver, y’all!
And also we now have Etherscan on Moonriver, though it’s called Moonscan of course.
So now you can use the basic Sushi features on Moonriver, which is swapping and adding liquidity. Sadly no farms, xSushi, Kashi or anything else just yet! But this is just the beginning.
The farms will come soon enough, we already have a list of tokens that will receive 25,000 MOVR ($10M) in liquidity mining rewards.
These are MOVR, WBTC, BNB and USDT paired with WETH, a USDC/USDT pair, USDC/FRAX and MOVR/MIM. The team also mentioned that KSM and KAR will be added for liquidity mining after XCMP is launched on Moonriver.
Unfortunately the farming isn’t live yet, so for now you can just get ready by bridging through AnySwap or Meter. Sushi prepared a handy tutorial to cover the process from A to Z.
Sushi project will also receive 2.5 million GLMR for the eventual Moonbeam deployment, which is roughly the same percentage of total supply as on Moonriver.
Sushi has definitely been a trailblazer of new deployments, with now 13 different versions pushed to most EVM-compatible chains. Their core remains tethered to Ethereum, with mainnet and Arbitrum holding by far the most TVL. We’ll see if the launch of the farms will bring the long-awaited frenzy of activity to Moonriver!
The launch of Moonscan is also really important to support DeFi, as every experienced farmer will surely know.
So that’s it, we can officially say that Moonriver is ready to start DeFi season!
Last call for starting Astar Crowdloan Event — Part III.
A detailed post from the Astar team explaining how to participate in their crowdloan and what happens after staking DOTs.
Astar Welcomes Commonwealth Labs & Webb Technologies as Core Companies Behind the Protocol.
Astar Network had a mini-merger by joining forces with Commonwealth Labs, the company behind Edgeware, and Webb Technologies, a zk R&D company, primarily to gain presence in the USA.
Acala Crowdloan Details — The Path to a Community-Backed Launch on Polkadot.
Dan Reecer lists different ways to participate in Acala’s crowdloan, how to get additional bonuses from contributing, as well as featuring the Acala’s dedicated podcast event.
Parallel Finance — October 2021 Updates
Parallel Finance shares their past milestones, such as securing the 10th Kusama parachain slot, as well as the upcoming ones, such as launching Heiko on Kusama, Polkadot crowdloan, product updates and more.
(Polkadot) Referendum 42 to upgrade Polkadot Runtime to v9122.
(Polkadot) Referendum 41 to add Shell as the first parachain on Polkadot, which will eventually become Statemint.
(Kusama) Referendum 151, aimed to help Bifrost with upgrading to version 0.9.12.
(Kusama) Referendum 150, a community initiative to remove the Integritee crowdloan. Due to low turnout and not unanimous voting, it looks unlikely to pass for now.
(Kusama) Referendum 149, fixing an issue with the XCM version subscription between Kusama and Statemine.
(Kusama) Motion 391, makes the case to lower the cost of opening HRMP channels to just 5 KSM.
All info in this newsletter is purely educational and should only be used to inform your own research. We're not offering investment advice, endorsement of any project or approach, or promise of any outcome. This is prepared using public information and couldn't possibly account for anyone's specific goals or financial situation. Be careful and keep up the honest work!
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