Since launching Radix’s first-ever grants program in December the projects participating in this round have made some incredible progress along their journeys to becoming core builders in the Radix ecosystem. 

Each week RDX Works will dive into the team behind the project, the journey to their Radix revelation and what makes their project unique. So, without further ado, here’s all you need to know about CaviarSwap: The Radix-native decentralized exchange.

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What is CaviarSwap?

CaviarSwap operates on the Radix network in a centralized form, once smart contracts go live with the Babylon Mainnet, it’ll go from a centralized exchange to a decentralized exchange. CaviarSwap aims to provide a safe and efficient swapping experience and bring a suite of professional products to Web3 users, builders and entrepreneurs. 

Their goal is to build a pool styled DEX so clean, fast and capital efficient for the user that people would flock to use it. Which is why they built their DEX on Radix rather than on the Ethereum network. 

“Radix is fast, clean, cheap, simple, safe and (theoretically) very very scalable. Building dApps on the EVM is slow, heavy, expensive to run, complex, and the chances of a hack or exploit are high alongside not being very scalable.”  - CaviarSwap Team 

The unique selling point of CaviarSwap is their ability to provide single pool liquidity, which makes earning yield far more capital efficient in comparison to using competitor DEX’s like UniSwap. 

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What makes CaviarSwap different?

CaviarSwap has recently introduced its second-generation engine, the CaviarSwap V2 Engine, which enables users to add liquidity in a single token. 

Unlike typical pairwise automated market maker (AMM) pools that require users to add XRD with their tokens in the correct ratios, the V2 engine allows users to deposit the token(s) they care about and add liquidity to the CaviarSwap V2 pool. This feature provides greater capital efficiency, making it easier for users to earn a yield on their tokens.

By participating in adding one or more tokens as liquidity, users can capture a share of the transaction fees generated by CaviarSwap V2. Adding liquidity is a straightforward process, and users can make their tokens earn a yield by contributing liquidity to the pool.

CaviarSwap V2 offers a better liquidity provision experience as it is more capital efficient. Users earn more for the liquidity they add because they only need to stake one token instead of selling half and buying the other for pairwise staking. This feature also gives users 100% control over the exposure tokens when staking XRD.

Overall, providing liquidity in CaviarSwap V2 is a better option for users looking to earn a yield on their tokens. To learn more about how to add liquidity to CaviarSwap V2, please refer to their official guide.

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Low fees that benefit everyone

Liquidity Providers earn a proportion of the Transaction fees that go through CaviarSwap V2 Pools.

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Fees earned from Liquidity Providing

When any trade goes through on a CaviarSwap V2 Pool, transaction fees are taken (see below) and these are attributed to all tokens (in the pool) that aided the trade.

• 80% of all transaction fees on trades go to LP providers
• 20% of all transaction fees goes to FLOOP stakers

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Base fee structure for trades executed on V2 Pools are:

• 0.50% with no FLOOP (sFLOOP or C2FLOOP) discount
• 0.10% if the sum of your FLOOP, sFLOOP, C2FLOOP is 1.0 or bigger

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Who are the founders?

Meet Oliver Scott Simons and Chris Colman, the founders of the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) startup, CaviarSwap. Their aim is to democratize financial products and push the boundaries of finance and technology.

Oliver holds a degree and Masters in Mathematics from Imperial College London and has had a successful 14-year career in top Tier 1 banks, trading and running derivatives and exotic derivatives trading desks. His passion for innovation, optimal hedging strategies, and electronic systems led him to build a private algorithmic trading business with Chris, called Invariance. 

In 2015, frustrated with the lack of innovation and restrictions on personal trading in the banking industry, Oliver left to pursue his passion for building things and innovating finance and tech. He spent the following years studying and consulting for banks, eventually building a small financial services startup that still runs today.

Chris, on the other hand, spent nearly 8 years at Cambridge University, where he did a degree in Physics and Theoretical Physics, followed by a graduate course in Computer Science and then a PhD in Physics. He started his career trading currency derivatives and eventually moved to Singapore, where he ran several global trading businesses for Barclays Investment Bank as a Managing Director. 

Although banking was financially very rewarding, Chris missed the earlier days in his career when he was building trading models and actively trading and craved doing something entrepreneurial. 

He subsequently left banking a couple of years after Oliver and followed a similar path of taking courses in Deep Learning, building quantitative trading models, and trading cryptocurrency. From 2019, Chris has been involved in a boutique asset management firm that he and a few former colleagues set up in Singapore - Vantage Point Asset Management.

The founders first worked together in 2005, and after spending many years working in top tier financial institutions, they realized they made a good team. Their passions for finance and technology led them to build their DeFi startup. For Oliver and Chris, DeFi is an inevitability that will eventually reach everyone, just like the internet now plays a huge role in all our lives wherever we live. 

They strongly believe that DeFi is the natural next step for finance, and for individuals to get involved in. Traditional financial products are often opaque or not accessible to the masses, and Web3 has the potential to democratize these products. 

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How did the project get started?

The project began with a vision to create innovative DeFi products that could revolutionize the financial industry. The team behind the project had already established a reputation within the crypto community through their Algo trading company, Invariance, and their validators, CaviarNine. However, they recognized the limitations of the current blockchain infrastructure and sought out a solution that could support their ambitious goals.

After researching various blockchain networks, the team discovered Radix and were impressed with its technical capabilities. They realized that Radix's unique approach to consensus and its architecture that could handle complex financial transactions made it an ideal fit for the DeFi space. The team decided to start building dApps on Radix.

Despite the lack of smart contracts on Radix, the team saw this as an opportunity to spark their creativity and laid out a roadmap of what was possible to build now and in the future. They asked themselves what dApps they needed to create today to deliver truly innovative DeFi products for the future.

As the team continued to develop on Radix, they became increasingly convinced that it was a better option for their project than Ethereum. Radix is faster, cleaner, cheaper, simpler, safer, and theoretically more scalable than building dApps on the EVM. These attributes allow for rapid development and deployment of dApps and make iterating new ideas feasible. 

CaviarSwap is currently available to use as a cDEX. For more information on the project, head to the website, follow the project’s official Twitter account, or join the CaviarSwap Telegram channel.

To stay in the loop with the Radix Grants Program and be first to hear about updates on the upcoming cohort 2, join the developer program.