Evolution from DeFi to SocialFi

Within the past year, we have seen improvements and upgrades in features that have significantly enhanced user experiences, and have accomplished so much within a short time frame.

We launched OpenLeverage on Ethereum in December 2021, onto the BNB Chain in February 2022, and onto the KuCoin Community Chain in April. Since our launch, protocol adoption has proliferated and we have surpassed milestones of more than USD 14.4 million TVL and over USD 795 million in trading volume. Our partnerships have extended to collaborations with prominent DEXs and exceptional partnerships, with many more in the pipeline to further grow the OpenLeverage ecosystem.

The OpenLeverage Community Council and Global Localization Ambassador Cohort were established in September 2022 to capture more community input, with the ultimate goal of transitioning to a DAO in the future.

Our mission is to build OpenLeverage into a completely permissionless, multi-chain deployed, features-rich, competitive, widely integrated with ecosystem partners, capital efficient, and community-driven and developed lending and trading platform. With a solid permissionless DeFi market, OpenLeverage will gradually evolve towards SocialFi — the fusion of a social network for decentralized finance.

Limit Order

As the most requested feature from the community, limit order has completed its smart contract audit with Peckshield and is currently under final development and testing. It will be beta-released by the end of October to enable traders to buy, sell, take profit and stop losses at set prices in a decentralized process.

The new limit order feature will be accurate, safe, reliable, and flexible as we support partial fills with multiple DEXs to automatically reduce slippage and capture the best prices.

Multichain Strategy

Having already established a presence on the Ethereum, BNB, and KuCoin Community Chains, our ultimate goal is to deploy onto the top 10 chains by TVL. We aim to continuously build onto new chains that emerge with applications and TVL growth. We will continuously work with big players in each ecosystem to make sure integration is optimized, and the best opportunities captured are enabled with permissionless lending and margin trading.

The best side-chain candidates are Avalanche, Polygon, Cronos, and Fantom. With the rapid growth, development, and adoption of Ethereum Layer 2, we are also considering putting Arbitrum and Optimism deployment in priority along with our partners.

By the end of 2022, we aim to have two more chain deployments.

Lower Fees

From the feedback received from the community and our partner, high transaction fees currently stand as the most needed tackled problem to attract more trading flow.

Implementing solutions for lowering fees is on our priority list. Our goal is to reduce overall fees to less than 0.1%, which is more economical than other DEXs by working closely with partners that support major pairs.

We intend to lower fees across Q4 2022.

Smart Vault for Improved Capital Efficiency

Starting Q1 2023, a Smart Vault will be built on top of lending pools that will automatically and efficiently route the best rates for lenders. Lenders can deposit and no longer need to worry about manually switching between pools to earn the best yields. The Smart Vault will be real-time adjusted so members can enjoy the best rates, and balance the utility rate across lending pools.

Overcollateralized Borrowing

Currently, when users borrow money, they have to create and lock their position in a smart contract. An overcollateralized borrowing feature will run on a smart contract that enables borrowers to take 50–90% of the value of their collateral for other opportunities like yield farming, trading, or even personal living expenses. This will be enabled for ALL pairs that have sufficient liquidity on DEX.

This is especially practical in the bear market when HODLers can still hold on to volatile assets but at the same time maintain liquidity, helping communities not have to sell their assets and reducing the selling pressure of projects.

Meanwhile, majors and stables holders can enjoy higher yields when yields for stablecoins are low.

We aim to have overcollateralized borrowing live in Q1 2023.

Ecosystem Integration

As the center of DeFi growth, DEXs will remain the major integration partners of OpenLeverage by providing us trading liquidity on various assets.

As integration progresses, we aim to become a middleware for DeFi. On the one hand, we source liquidity from yield aggregators to lending pools; on another, we deeply integrate with trading venues and DEXs to enable more market trading flow.

We will gradually improve the GUI to improve the user experience and make it more optimized and trade-friendly. With improvements underway from community input, the interface will be faster and users can manage their positions better.

As we mature, we foresee institutional users trading via API and running algorithmic trades. These will be automatic, high-frequency, and strategic, using programming languages that will enable professional and institutional traders to make trading decisions and increase trading flow.

We will also enable protocol traders to trade easily. Protocol traders are asset management-type protocols that manage money and trade on behalf of their clients. Protocol traders use smart contracts to hold assets, are very decentralized, and can long, short, or short the hedge. Their smart contract will be very integrated with our smart contract.

Retail and institutional users will require wallets, which will also be an important integration point into our system.

All of these integrations will be implemented on multiple chains, aligned with our multichain strategy. We aim to be a middleware by integrating ourselves as a fixed, crucial block in the blockchain ecosystem. This is a work in progress as we are continuously integrating and building the OpenLeverage ecosystem.

Community Requested Features

With the election of the OpenLeverage Community Council, councilmember @happystar has successfully created and passed proposal OLIP-5 “Proposal to Close and Convert Leveraged Positions,” which enables users a new way of handling leveraged positions by converting leveraged positions to spot positions by simply repaying assets and interest borrowed.

This feature will enable users to perform arbitrage trades between DEXs and even CEXs, with lower transaction costs and leveraged liquidity support. This proposal will allow OpenLeverage to serve more application scenarios and more use cases. This specific feature is estimated to be out in October 2022.

Other features that community members and OpenLeverage Community Council propose will have discussed timelines for implementation.

DAO

We plan to launch a community-own DAO in Q2-Q3 2023. By that time, all tech upgrades, token allocations, and technical departments will be done via DAO and will be automatically executed based on the DAO’s decision. We intend for the OpenLeverage protocol to mature and grow before implementing this decision, which is approximately 9–12 months after our token launch.

Building Up for SocialFi

As a fully permissionless margin trading protocol, OpenLeverage is adamant to fulfill our goals of being community-oriented and decentralized, yet it has the potential to be so much more.

Being different from other DeFi protocols that only support transactions on major pairs, our open and permissionless market structure is in the best position to connect projects, communities, and KOLs, where they could come to know each other better with Web3-styled social interactions and have more opportunities by being in such a powerful social network.

DeFi markets are fast, volatile, and long-tailed, and by this very nature, we have seen retail users, projects, and markets find it difficult to find and collaborate with each other. These are not very efficient characteristics for projects to attract the right user base — users are trying to find the next value projects/tokens while KOLs find it challenging to build reputation or cash in with their skillset of identifying profitable opportunities in the fast-moving markets.

Our aim is to fuse social aspects and decentralized finance to further enhance our features in Web3. We believe that SocialFi is a much-needed derivative component in a permissionless market that will improve trading opportunities for users and projects.

We should see the beta release of our first SocialFi component in early Q1 2023.

Come to Discuss

If you have more ideas on improving OpenLeverage or any questions about our roadmap, join our Discord (#product-feedback) to discuss.

Also, find our latest build on GitHub and join our Discord (#dev-chat) for more discussion.