Basic Information

Network Detail

Brief Introduction

Sifchain is an omni-chain decentralized exchange aiming to create a fully communicating crypto trading environment. By bridging multiple blockchain ecosystems and providing a high transaction processing infrastructure with Cosmos SDK, Sifchain will be enabling seamless transfer, spot trading, and margin trading of assets from more than twenty blockchains.

Social Media

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History

Sifchain was founded in September 2020 to allow asset transfer and trading between communication-constrained blockchains and to make highly performing cross-chain trading a core part of DeFi. With its Omni-chain vision, Sifchain started working with a similar ideal with ThorChain. That’s why the San Francisco-based protocol also includes people from the former ThorChain developer team. Contrary to the limited asset portfolio covered by ThorChain, Sifchain aims to serve up to 20–25 blockchains.

After its founding, Sifchain spent several months developing the Sifchain DEX and Ethereum-Cosmos Bridge Peggy on the testnet. Announcing Peggy, the Ethereum-Cosmos bridge, was a significant development as the project aims to ensure a smooth flow of liquidity across multiple blockchains when it will launch on the Mainnet. Peggy was the first step towards this goal, and Sifchain has completed it, making Ether and limited ERC20 tokens available on Sifchain. Subsequently, on February 19, 2021, the project carried the technology developed on the testnet for months to BetaNet and presented the native token of Sifchain to the community with Rowan’s public sale. At the same time, the project offered Liquidity Mining and Validator Subsidy programs to build a strong ecosystem and launched a four-month airdrop program that will reward Rune holders, Atom holders or those who have completed Sifchain KYC. In the future, the requirements of these programs were changed and their scopes were expanded.

In August 2021, Sifchain migrated its BetaNet to Cosmos v0.42 which is the infrastructure that supports IBC and will enable Sifchain to interact with the other blockchains developed with the Cosmos SDK. With IBC, Sifchain will allow double pegging and create new possibilities of communication with Ethereum-based chains but also act as a bridge between ecosystems by enabling originating tokens on Cosmos blockchains to be transported through it. IBC is a part of Peggy 2.0, an enhanced bridge network that is currently under development. Peggy 2.0 will allow Sifchain to communicate with EVM-compatible chains and increase both the number and the volume of ERC20 tokens supported on Sifchain.

Feature

A more performant platform

Built with the Cosmos SDK, Sifchain processes substantially more transactions per second than Ethereum, making it 100x more efficient than the current leading DEXes. This equates to faster trades and lower fees.

Cross-chain communication

Sifchain will target 20–25 blockchains (such as Ethereum and Stellar) for cross-chain integration. Sifchain’s goal is for new blockchains to consider cross-chain integration as essential as a wallet or block explorer. Liquidity from all cryptocurrencies can then be accessed on-chain, allowing the coordinated deployment of capital from all cryptocurrencies by DAOs. Sifchain uses a two-way peg protocol which results in the swap of pegged tokens.

Hybrid orderbook & continuous liquidity pool

Sifchain combines the best elements of liquidity pools and order books for optimal order execution. While decentralized exchanges are currently dominated by liquidity pool algorithms optimized for token swaps, Sifchain will rethink the formulas used for liquidity pool algorithms from first principles of complexity theory to implement adaptive AMMs suitable to limit orders and token swaps alike.

Trading on margin

Sifchain allows traders to use margin on their trades by borrowing from the liquidity pool. Interest is set based on market demand and liquidity supply. This increases returns for liquidity providers in two ways — it provides interest as a second revenue stream in addition to swap fees and increases the size of swaps, and thus the size of swap fees.

Industry leading technology and partnerships

Described in part above, we are rethinking the formulas used for liquidity pool algorithms from first principles of complexity theory to implement adaptive AMMs suitable to limit orders and token swaps alike. The Sifchain team is fortunate to be collaborating with some of the most adept market makers, traders, and complexity theorists in the cryptocurrency industry on this endeavor.

Truly decentralized governance

SifDAO will be launched alongside Rowan’s public sale and will receive a vested allocation of Rowan independent from the Sifchain team’s reserves. Our DAO community will play an ever expanding role in the direction of our exchange, and piece by piece, SifDAO will inherit the core team’s responsibilities until it is entirely responsible for Sifchain’s continued management.

Network Status

Click here for more information.

Roadmap

Q1 2022

Launched Front-end Provider Initiative

Launched Ethereum to Cosmos Token Transfers

Q2 2022

Protocol Monetary Trade Policy (PMTP)

Omni-EVM

Continue Omni-EVM integrations

Q3 2022

Margin Trading

CosmWasm Integration

Interchain Accounts

Q4 2022

Shared Security

Liquid Staking

Borrowing & Lending

Burn-auctions

SifUSD

2023

Peggy 3

Prediction/advice markets

Limit Orders

Novel GameFi support

Novel NFT support

Novel tech tree support

More information about recent times can be checked here.

Staking Pool

Click here for more information.

Teams and Partners

Teams

Partners

Funding

Refer from crunchbase.

Funding Rounds

Sifchain Finance has raised a total of $3.5M in funding over 1 round. This was a Seed round raised on Aug 15, 2020.

Investors

Sifchain Finance is funded by 8 investors. BitScale and NEO Global Capital (NGC) are the most recent investors.

Technolgy

Code

GitHub Homepage

Repositories：27

Submit language：Go丨TypeScript丨JavaScript丨Jupyter Notebook丨Python

Total number of main contributors：2

Tech Knowledge

Sifchain is an application-specific blockchain built on top of the CosmosSDK and provides an efficient decentralized exchange using the high transactional power of the Cosmos blockchain and allows cross-chain asset transfers using the pegged versions of tokens originating on other blockchains. To send assets from one chain to another, token owners lock their funds on Sifchain’s Cosmos-Ethereum bridge Peggy, and in return get newly minted pegged tokens on the other chain (e.g. locking ETH to get cETH on Cosmos or locking Rowan to get eRowan on Ethereum). With the implementation of IBC and Peggy 2.0, Sifchain users will be able to transfer assets from EVM compatible blockchains to other application-specific blockchains from Cosmos SDK, expanding Sifchain’s communication reach to a broad spectrum of blockchains.

Sifchain’s decentralized exchange aims to implement a hybrid system that leverages both central exchange type order books and decentralized exchange type liquidity pools. While the more precise matching mechanism of order books enables submitting limit orders, the AMM-integrated liquidity pool enables Sifchain to determine the market fee structure between trading pairs. Sifchain’s liquidity pools, a.k.a Continuous Liquidity Pools (CLP), prevent sudden demand spikes that translate into a great increase in token price by adjusting pool fees. CLPs allow asymmetric liquidity provision with which LPs don’t need to provide both tokens from a pair but can add Rowan or any other token as they demand. Since Sifchain uses its native token Rowan as a trade settlement intermediary, CLPs are constructed with Rowan as one token, and another external token such as BTC or ETH (or at least a pegged version thereof running on Sifchain). For instance, when a cBTC/cETH trade takes place, the information about the price comes from two separate CLPs, one containing cBTC:ROWAN and the other cETH:ROWAN. In this way, Sifchain employs CLP and AMM mechanisms together to set prices without the need for oracles. In addition to that, as every CLP requires to contain Rowan in the pool, the total value of external assets in CLPs works as a function for determining the lower bound of Sifchain’s market cap, creating a 1:3 ratio between market cap and TVL.

Although Sifchain doesn’t allow order books and margin trading at this stage, the final version of its decentralized exchange will offer both margin trading and limit orders as well as spot trading. However, the matching mechanism of the orderbooks is not similar to the central exchanges. When users place a limit order in Sifchain’s order book, they lock the funds corresponding to the amount of token they want to buy at the desired price, and swap takes place only when the price in the CLP comes to the requested price.

Ecosystem

Governance

Inspired by Compound, YFI, and Synthetix, Sifchain will make use of decentralized governance with SifDAO.

SifCore (the core team of Sifchain) is very focused on the development of SifDAO and a total transition of governance power over all aspects of the protocol. We expect to follow best practices from metagovernance including the restructuring of SifDAO’s governance on a regular (most likely quarterly) basis.

For true self-sovereignty, Sifchain’s development should be self-funding and self-sustaining. We look to models like Linux and Wikipedia as examples of institutions that have maintained the funding needed to continually produce critical open-source resources. We’re exploring a partnership with a research lab at UC Davis to formalize properly funded open-source development as a hallmark of Sifchain’s governance.

We want the market’s inherent super forecasting abilities to be turned towards optimizing Sifchain’s development. Governance will engage market-based performance evaluation within SifDAO through tools like alpha bonds. Wherever possible, we want the market to govern Sifchain through on-chain crypto-economic incentives for SifDAO members.

Feel free to see our Tweets on how the SifDAO will take shape, or join our Discord to get involved in the DAO’s operations.​

SifDAO

SifDAO is composed of holders of the ROWAN token. We are currently a nascent entity in the process of researching, iterating, and implementing processes and structure that suit our mission to build powerful financial infrastructure for the new era of commerce.

Economic Model

Token Functions

Token Type: ERC-20 until Migration

Token Uses: Vote, Work

Sifchain’s utility token Rowan works as a payment intermediary on Sifchain’s decentralized exchange. It is used as a settlement layer for the trades of assets originating from multiple blockchains. As Sifchain’s continuous liquidity pools are constructed to have Rowan traded against another external asset, users will always need to interact with Rowan if they are willing to trade on Sifchain’s decentralized exchange. There is also a network fee paid in Rowan when trading on Sifchain. When users resort to Peggy to transfer their Rowans from Sifchain to the Ethereum Network, their Rowans become eRowans, one-to-one representations of Rowans.

Sifchain has a delegated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that requires agents to have Rowan in their wallets to become blockchain validators. Other participants of the Sifchain network can delegate their Rowan by staking through validators and earn rewards from block finalizations. Alternatively, when Sifchain introduces SifDAO after launching on mainnet, users will be able to participate directly in protocol governance by owning Rowan, or indirectly by delegating their tokens as well as their voting power.

Launch Distribution

Sifchain distributed the rights of 32.5% of the total Rowan supply through three private investment rounds in 2020. On February 19, 2021, Sifchain launched on BetaNet with a public token sale event run on the Ethereum network to distribute 70 million eRowans within 7 days. The registration period to participate in the sale was from January 11 to January 29 and required investors to complete KYC. During the sale period, Sifchain employed a TVL model with a bonding curve that updated the token price with each transaction and limited the maximum percentage that can be purchased from the pool in a single trade to 2%. The pool started with 8,750,000 eRowans and was fueled with an additional 364,000 eRowan every hour for seven days (168 hours) in total until February 26. At the end of the round, $26,370,000 USDT was collected in exchange for 64.2 million eRowans.

Initial Supply Breakdown

Launch Style: Airdrop, Crowdsale

Initial Supply: 1,000,000,000

Supply Schedule

General Emission Type: Inflationary

Precise Emission Type: Dynamic Emission

There is dynamic emission recalculated each hour based on three parameters: the bonded amount of Rowan in stake, desired amount of Rowan, and the estimated block quantity. Although Sifchain doesn’t currently use this feature, once it launches IBC, it will initiate inflationary block rewards to incentivize validators.

Apart from the tokens distributed during the public sale, circulating supply increased with the rewards for Liquidity Mining and Validator Subsidy Programs, and airdrops. At least 66.5% of the total supply will get unlocked one month after Sifchain launches on mainnet.

Consensus Mechanism

Sifchain uses Tendermint’s Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism with certain additional use case-specific adjustments and creates a secure and dynamic trading environment. Like THORChain, Sifchain has an Incentive Pendulum that balances the reward structure for both validators and LPs. The network is in a balanced state when the value of Rowan staked by validators is twice the value of all assets deposited in liquidity pools. If the value of staked Rowan rises above this level, validators will receive fewer rewards while LPs will receive more. This shift encourages users to deposit more assets into liquidity pools. The opposite outcome will occur if the value of staked Rowan falls below twice the value of assets within liquidity pools. Sifchain actively observes the validators on its network, punishes those who participate in malicious activity by slashing its staked tokens and permanently banning them from the consensus set (top hundred nodes measured by the total staked amount that are responsible for validation). The protocol updates its consensus set every block to maintain an active and reliable consensus mechanism. Since Tendermint is a PBFT consensus mechanism, it takes a block as finalized after getting the approval of 2/3 of the validators. In this way, it is more reliable compared to chains that offer probabilistic block finalization. Currently, validators are rewarded with the network fees in each block, therefore no additional token gets minted during the validation process. However, after the Validator Subsidy program ends, Sifchain will enable its dynamic inflation mechanism and reward validators with freshly minted Rowans.

Validator

The top 100 holding addresses can become its validators:

As of 2022–5–10, the last verified EROWAN number of active nodes is 39817 (US$0.118436/EROWAN).

https://www.mintscan.io/sifchain/validators

Top 10 addresses

Last 10 addresses

Delegation

Any Sifchain user can delegate their tokens to any number of validators on the network. Delegating to a validator entitles the user to a share of that validator’s block rewards based on the commission rate (see below) set by the validator. Delegating to a validator does not give that validator direct control over the delegator’s funds. However, the delegator does assume the risk of being slashed (see below) if the validator misbehaves.

When performing a delegation, we recommend you do due diligence on the following: Ensure the node validator you are delegating to is one that you trust and have faith to not get slashed. Remember, if you delegate to them and they get slashed, then your delegation will also get slashed.

Check these 3 rates of the node validator:

Commission Rate — This represents the percentage of the delegator’s rewards retained by the validator in exchange for providing access to Sifchain’s staking system. For example, if this rate is set to 25%, then you as the delegator will get 75% of the reward while the node validator will get 25%.

Maximum Commission Rate — The node validator can change their commission rate at any time and that change will be represented in 24 hours. The maximum amount they can set their commission rate to is indicated here. For example, if the node validator’s maximum rate is set to 100%, then they are able to change their commission rate to 100% at any time.

Maximum Commission Rate Change — This is the maximum daily increase possible. For example, if this is set to 5% then the most a node validator can change their rate by in a single 24 hour period is 5%.

The top 100 node validator list and their staked/delegated amounts. It’s important to do this because you want the node you are delegating to, to be a part of the network to ensure you are also earning rewards.

We recommend that you continuously monitor your delegation and the node validators that you have delegated to.

Please reference our guide on Delegation here for additional information.

Competitors

Related Readings

Summary Link