Introduction to Moonbeam Ignite: Liquidity Incentive Campaign to Grow Ecosystem Liquidity

4 min readOct 19, 2022

We’re proud to announce Moonbeam Ignite 💥, an ecosystem-wide campaign that is focused on spearheading the growth of Moonbeam network through liquidity incentives. With the recent passing of Moonbeam’s ecosystem grant proposals by the two largest protocols, StellaSwap and Moonwell, the time has come for us to ignite Moonbeam’s flame and bring awareness to the re-opening of new markets on the network.

Moonbeam Ignite: Ecosystem Growth via a Strong Liquidity Base

The fundamental building block of any DeFi ecosystem is liquidity; sufficient market depth is required to jumpstart the growth of the ecosystem to foster a conducive and robust trading marketplace. That is why liquidity mining programs represent a key strategy for any ecosystem to attract users and developers.

Ecosystem incentives represent a core enabler for attracting capital inflows, which consequently fosters a deep market that optimizes price discovery. With StellaSwap and Moonwell being the main recipients of Moonbeam’s ecosystem grants, it is only right to maximize its impact through a joint marketing campaign — called Moonbeam Ignite — to boost DeFi activity on the Moonbeam network and attract users.

As part of the Moonbeam Ignite campaign, there will be a host of initiatives down the line that will include AMAs, competitions, NFT giveaways and more to create strong awareness and engagement across Moonbeam’s awesome community!

Ecosystem Liquidity Incentives Have Begun

A total of 12 million GLMR has been allocated for ecosystem grants by Moonbeam, shared across both StellaSwap and Moonwell. The liquidity incentives will be distributed across 24 weeks.

The incentive program kicked off last week on StellaSwap, starting with four bluechip farms: DOT-GLMR, USDC-GLMR, ETH-GLMR & BTC-GLMR.

Users interested in taking part in the liquidity incentive program can bridge their assets into the Moonbeam network via Portal’s bridge and provide liquidity into StellaSwap’s farms.

New users that do not possess gas can easily do so through StellaSwap’s latest feature, swap-for-gas, which allows them to execute gasless transactions to get GLMR, Moonbeam’s native token.

Here are some guides to get started:

Throughout the upcoming weeks, more strategic farms will be incentivized sequentially. Additionally, the Moonwell community will be able to launch and incentivize new markets on their lending platform once sufficient liquidity has been built on StellaSwap.

What This Means for Moonbeam Ecosystem

The Moonbeam ecosystem will stand to gain in the following ways;

1. Foster Market Depth

With ecosystem grants, StellaSwap and Moonwell can begin incentivizing strategic assets to attract external capital (liquidity) into the Moonbeam ecosystem, which is key to a fully-functioning and robust marketplace. Greater market depth facilitates efficient price discovery, which is required for protocols such as Moonwell — and a host of DeFi applications — to operate. With incentives, there will be an inflow of new users that will be exposed to the various use cases within the ecosystem, including connected contract capabilities. Developers are more inclined towards building their dApps on a network with critical mass.

2. Enhanced User Experience

With greater total value locked (TVL) on Moonbeam, price discovery for token value would be the most optimal and slippage would be mitigated, thereby resulting in a conducive trading environment for users. Ultimately, end users will reap the rewards from a liquid market on Moonbeam from ecosystem incentives, resulting in lower slippages and a more streamlined user experience.

3. Extending Cross-Chain Connected Capabilities

Beyond ecosystem incentives for StellaSwap farms and Moonwell’s lending and borrowing markets to drive TVL, we’re also excited to prepare for the launch of Squid, a liquidity routing module that enables cross-chain swaps and payments on Axelar, in early November. This partnership has been in the works for several months, and will unlock the power of cross-chain swaps across other L1 blockchain networks. The integration with Squid will enable significant trading volumes to flow through the Moonbeam ecosystem, in the most capital efficient way. In order to facilitate cross-chain swaps, StellaSwap will launch an incentivized USDC.axl metapool. Swaps will be routed via our stable AMM and concentrated liquidity AMM, ensuring optimal trading routes with low slippage. USDC.axl will be the primary route for cross-chain swaps from Squid.

About Moonwell

Moonwell is an open lending and borrowing DeFi protocol on Moonbeam & Moonriver. Moonwell’s composable design can accommodate a full range of DeFi applications in the greater Polkadot and Kusama (DotSama) ecosystem.

About StellaSwap

StellaSwap is the first and leading Moonbeam DEX that offers an integrated gateway to the DeFi world. Users can swap, earn, yield farm, bridge assets, explore new projects and engage in NFT trading all from a single unified platform. StellaSwap’s products are structured in such a way that facilitates decentralized governance of STELLA holders, while continuing to innovate on the collective foundations by design.