StellaSwap’s Journey on Moonbeam: Achievements and What’s Ahead

6 min readMar 29, 2022

It has been more than 2 months since the launch of StellaSwap on Moonbeam network, the largest parachain on Polkadot. The journey has been intense and fulfilling at the same time, with constant product launches in a bid to create a diverse and sticky ecosystem. As fans of the original idea of Polkadot since its theoretical inception back in 2016, being at the position of the largest DEX on Moonbeam is truly an honour for us, as well as an added motivation for us to continue innovating and developing towards a more vibrant ecosystem on both Polkadot and Moonbeam.

A Philosophy of Constant Product Innovation and Development

Since launching 2 months ago, StellaSwap has been focused on driving developments to expand our product ecosystem. The core drivers of our focus are predicated on the following principles:

The central foundation of any decentralized ecosystem is a DEX, where value will permeate and can be exchanged. As such, it is vital to create a liquid and comprehensive marketplace where users can trade assets seamlessly and also partake in a wide variety of activities afforded by DeFi. That is what we’re religiously working towards.

What We’ve Achieved

Our scope of development is centered around 3 design principles:

Fostering Cross-Chain Capital Inflows towards Moonbeam
Expanding Ancillary Product Suites for Greater Ecosystem Stickiness
Driving Value-Accrual for Sustainability

These principles inform StellaSwap’s roadmap in a bid to scale the Moonbeam ecosystem and foster a viable ecosystem for dApps. Here’s a high-level look at our traction in each of the aforementioned design principles:

Design Principle #1: Fostering Cross-Chain Capital Inflows towards Moonbeam

As a relative new blockchain (parachain to be more specific), it is imperative for new capital to come to Moonbeam. Greater capital means deeper liquidity, which is vital for market efficiency and seamless trading for users. Equally important is that capital inflows represent a sign of confidence to the market, both from a technological advancement and financial arbitrage point-of-view. That is why StellaSwap has established a strong base for attracting cross-chain capital inflows for Moonbeam.

Partnership with Bridging Infrastructure Providers - Multichain, Axelar, Nomad and Celer Network: We’ve natively integrated bridges into our platform for easier navigation and more importantly, worked with partners to expand value-transfer channels with Moonbeam. This makes it easy for users to transfer value into Moonbeam. Past successful ILOs include AVAX, MATIC and FTM.
Conceived A Successful Model for Cross-Chain Liquidity Incentivization via Initial Liquidity Offerings (ILOs): In a bid to attract capital inflows, we structured multiple ILOs to attract capital from other L1 blockchains in a targeted and optimized manner.
Incentivizing Project Partner Liquidity: We’ve also helped incentivize the liquidity of projects launching on Moonbeam to increase visibility as well as leveraging on the hype of the project. These include Blockchain Monster Hunt, the first multi-chain NFT collectible game, as well as ApeCoin, the trending native token of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).

Design Principle #2: Expanding Ancillary Product Suites for Greater Ecosystem Stickiness

Our go-to market strategy was to launch with basic functionalities and scale our product offerings from there. With a comprehensive product suite, ecosystem stickiness can be created to foster utility and brand loyalty. This is also a strong strategy to mitigate against mercenary capital that lurks out there purely for financial arbitrage. To that end, here’s what we shipped;

Faucet to provide free GLMR gas to first-time users
Vaults for enhanced financial rewards
ZAP to facilitate 1-Click staking for simplicity in yield farming
Swap-for-Gas feature for more enhanced UI/UX for new users, in partnership with Biconomy
Auto-Compounding vaults for automated yield reinvestments, in partnership with Beefy Finance

Design Principle #3: Driving Value-Accrual for Sustainability

A key factor in the sustainability of any DeFi platform is value-accrual. On a high-level, value-accrual aims to maximize tokenholder value. Greater utility and composability of STELLA, which represents StellaSwap’s native token, would result in sustainability of financial incentives and therefore, user retention. More than that, an ecosystem embedded with strong value-accrual mechanism creates a fair and equitable ecosystem of true decentralization, where profits are shared and power is in the hands of the community. On that regard, StellaSwap undertook the following actions;

Token burning from treasury (TxID)
Scheduled token buyback using ILO funds
Launched xSTELLA, an auto-compounding and composable single-asset staking facility to maximize yields and value-accrual
Launched Tri-Reward Pool for xSTELLA, to incentivize long-term holding of STELLA

Effects of Converging Design Decisions + Development

The cumulative efforts within StellaSwap as well as our partners has enabled us to maintain our foothold as the leading DEX on Moonbeam.

We’re committed to working with more partners and the core Moonbeam team to further fuel Polkadot’s growth.

Why Moonbeam?

Moonbeam is slated to be the biggest parachain on Polkadat network, after securing over 95 million DOTs valued at approximately $3.8 billion USD on the first round of Polkadot’s parachain auction.

At its core, Moonbeam is designed to tackle cross-chain interoperability challenges by making it easier to deploy decentralized applications on Polkadot. As an etherum-compatible smart contract parachain, developers don’t need to rewrite their entire code, as all functionality can be “transferred” through a smart contract-based approach. It provides Ethereum developers a chance to use their favorite Ethereum developer tools to either build new projects on Moonbeam and Polkadot, or redeploy their existing Solidity projects through minimal changes.

StellaSwap is fully aligned with the vision of Polkadot and the implementation strategy of Moonbeam network, and is committed towards extending the functionalities and opprtunities of DeFi.

What’s Ahead

Our roadmap is filled with exciting developments and innovation that are aimed towards achieving the outlined objectives.

Our roadmap represents the high-level development milestones that we’re committed to achieve. Bear in mind that these could change due to various factors that include market conditions, partnership opportunities, as well as user feedback.

About Moonbeam Network

Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes. Like Moonriver, its sister parachain on Kusama, Moonbeam is expected to accumulate developer and user activity from the 80+ projects building DApps and protocols on the network. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam benefits from the shared security of the Polkadot Relay Chain and integrations with other chains that are connected to Polkadot.

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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.