Minswap Stableswap: Achievements, KPIs and Learnings

This Article is part of the final Milestone for the Minswap Aiken Stableswap Audit + Bug Bounty Catalyst Proposal. We’ve come a long way since the Catalyst Proposal, let’s take a deeper look!

Key achievements

• Collaborated with Cardano media company Cardano Spot around 2 educational articles about Stableswaps (see here and here).
• Hosted a Twitter Spaces with Mehen and Indigo Labs (2 of the largest stablecoin issuers on Cardano) to discuss Stablecoins on Cardano and the Minswap Stableswap.
• Worked with TxPipe, a Cardano development company, to audit the Minswap Stableswap.
• Open sourced the Stableswap code and shared it with all the Cardano community along with a Bug Bounty to compensate anyone for finding bugs.
• Launched the Stableswap on mainnet and coordinated with Cardano content creators to get more visibility.
• Launched an ADA Incentive Program for the Stableswap to increase Liquidity and usage.

KPIs

In the initial Catalyst Proposal, we laid out a series of KPIs to measure the success of the Stableswap.

Quantitative Measures:

• Stable Assets Liquidity: how much stable assets liquidity is the Minswap Stableswap capturing across Cardano? → More than 90% of all Stable Pools Liquidity on Cardano, with the only other Stableswap Pool being on WingRiders.
• Stable Assets Volume: how much stable assets volume is the Minswap Stableswap capturing across Cardano → Volume is similarly dominant, with the only other Stableswap on Cardano WingRiders having 0$ Volume over the last 24 hours in Stableswap Pools.
• Monthly Unique Active Wallets: how many monthly unique wallets are using the Minswap Stableswap? → Minswap had 17k active wallets as of last month.
• Throughput improvements: how does an Aiken based (Plutus V2) Smart Contract improve throughput of DeFi dApps on Cardano? → thanks to Aiken, the throughput of the Minswap Stableswap is around 8 orders, even up to 12–13 orders per batch. This is a big improvement from Minswap V1 (4 orders). But it is less than the AMM V2 (28 orders) because the stableswap calculation is more complex.

Qualitative Measures:

• Composability across Cardano DeFi: how are other protocols using the Minswap Stableswap to offer new features for their users and enhance composability across the ecosystem? → so far, there has been no interoperability. We hope to change this through a Stableswap SDK for which we submitted a Catalyst Proposal for Fund 12.
• Open Source usage: how are developers finding the Aiken Minswap Stableswap useful? → the code was open sourced along with a Bug Bounty where vulnerabilities discovered were compensated.
• User Feedback: constant feedback from the community around the throughput, features and user experience will be gathered and used for improvements → a Form for sharing of feedback was shared with the community. The feedback was not much, and it mostly highlighted lack of liquidity, volumes and incentives.

Key Learnings

The Key Learning was about the importance of incentives. The Minswap Stableswap is a good product, but none will use it if the incentives aren’t there for it. We observed that after adding 30k ADA for the Incentive Program, Liquidity grew 4x the amount of before.

Community members noted in the feedback form that there is a lack of liquidity for traders and a lack of rewards for LPs (compared to other chains) to bring in stables in significant size. We need bigger incentives to attract usage of Cardano DeFi products, which is one of the reasons the Minswap community put up this Proposal for Fund 12.

Reflections about the Stableswap

The Cardano ecosystem has come a long way since we proposed the Stableswap. Back then, Mehen USDM had not launched, and now it has a 4.4mn USD market cap.

Since then, Intersect has set up a Stablecoin Working Group to grow Stablecoin adoption. It was there that Minswap Labs and Fluid Tokens had the idea for a Smart Token DEX and submitted a Catalyst Proposal. Smart Tokens bring a plethora of capabilities, some of them are necessary for big Stablecoin players like Tether and Circle if they want to deploy USDC/USDT. They also make RWA like stocks or commodities easy to bring on-chain to Cardano.

It is clear that more and more stablecoins will be deploying on Cardano, the Minswap Stableswap is the perfect tool for them to be traded with minimum slippage, and maximum convenience.