This week, we asked IJS Technologies to write a blog post about their last few months. With a grant announcement late last year and an upcoming AMA, we wanted the OAX community to learn more about the project: what it started as when we first spoke to them and how it has evolved over time post-grant.

When we first started learning about IJS’ project, we were impressed with their ideas of building an open-sourced DeFi based concept of token swaps and their dedication to decentralized governance resonated with the team. Here’s a peek at how things started (from their perspective), and we look forward to seeing you in our upcoming joint AMA. Come with questions!

OAX Foundation X IJS Technologies: So, What’s Next?

The summer of 2020 sparked a lot of interest in the DeFi space with the launch of the COMP token leading to the yield farming craze and a spike in the trading volume on the leading DEX UniSwap. On the heels of a defunct yield bearing stablecoin project based on the CDP concept of MakerDAO, we shifted our attention towards the DEX and its automated market maker (AMM) model. The simplicity of the Constant Function Market Maker (CFMM) of UniSwap provided an elegant solution to the pricing of swaps and captured the imaginations of our dev team to help solve the issue of slippage and impermanent loss experienced by users at the time.

The initial concept was to take UniSwap and add governance to allow modifications on risk parameters such as swap/protocol fees to adapt to the ever changing DeFi market conditions. From here, accompanying AMM pools is a concept of “liquidity queues” with oracles providing the spot market prices to allow users to always swap at market with no slippage and liquidity providers earning complete fees (without sharing) when their liquidity is used.

My team at IJS approached OAX Foundation to seek feedback on our proposal for a new DEX. OAX is one of the OG communities in DeFi since its beginnings in 2017. Having seen the changes in the market and with it the evolution of DEXes, it was important for us to learn from the veterans in this community. We were super pleased with the positive response to the point where we were awarded a grant by the Foundation to pursue our development.

With the grant, we were able to put our heads down, focus on realizing this new DEX and just BUIDL-BUIDL-BUIDL. As we all know, DeFi moves fast and since we received the grant - there have been a lot of new players into the space including the likes of SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, BakerySwap, BurgerSwap and other delicious offerings - leading us to aggregators to help us find the best prices and taking farming to super soldier serum levels.

So our DEX has evolved into OpenSwap, a 1-stop DeFi hub that evolves with the constantly changing DeFi space. We believe that multi-chain is here to stay. Our goal is to remove the friction of exchanging assets across chains. OpenSwap will start with a place for you to access liquidity from multiple providers, our own AMM pools, staking, and farming. The liquidity queues will come next with the ultimate goal of providing cross-chain DEX swaps and true value farming allowing liquidity providers to use LP tokens as collateral to borrow stablecoins. OpenSwap will be initially deployed on the Binance Smart Chain with future plans to be on Ethereum, Polkadot, and a chain nearest you.