MtopSwap Funding Proposal for $75,000

[dampbaby]

Good morning, I have some questions for the team overviewing and voting on this grant submission.

First, I am largely concerned with only 3 individuals voting on the approval of this application.

Do all requests get reviewed by the same board?

Are there metrics in place to further decentralize a vote when there are more active users? For example would a project with 100k members on discord have the same exact process we saw happen here?

What are the metrics that quantify success of an applicant? Does how the board feels about a project weigh into decisions at all? Is the board allowed to be involved in the community at all?

My last set of questions leans into wondering what the team has in place to prevent subjective decision making, if you could elaborate on that I would appreciate it immensely!

I support Mtop and their future. I’ve been watching them build and climb just like all the other projects here who want their spot. I guess I would feel a lot better here if 20/30 people voted and it was denied or if there was more explanation as to why. The time I’ve spent talking with Mtop community has been wicked and I’m blown back by not only their vision but the community they have.

Have you provided Mtop with a clear path forward to achieve success and build with our community?

Does Mtop have a way to stay in touch with the team tracking this so that they can communicate and work effectively?

Thank you for your time, I hope the team here can help the community understand how some of the process works!

[Maffaz]

Harmony quite literally make it up as they go along… It has always been this way and unlikely to change…

[HarmonyWon]

First of all, THANK YOU ALL for the support. We have created a snapshot (v2) with all the necessary requirements that Harmony requests. Please vote here: Snapshot

After only 45 minutes, we have a GREAT response with over 40 wallets voting!

@jbeltran friend, I am sorry for some of the comments left on here that were disrespectful - our community reported and hid the ones we could. We don’t condone disrespect or hate toward you or Harmony Team whatsoever. We just want to communicate to the Harmony Team @Jacksteroo that we are not building a “traditional” aggregator, and that we are trying to innovate the space in several ways:

1. As shown by our Proof of Concept video here: https://twitter.com/MtopDegen/status/1529489630789345280?s=20&t=DM-uOjmSDomyDv1NEYr8Rw, we are NOT aggregating price/liquidity like a typical aggregator. We are aggregating DEXes and allowing for 10, 20, 30 swaps to be shown on a single page. 5 DFKs, 15 Viperswaps, 20 Sushiswaps? No problem . Note: This is just the first of over 20 products planned including Price charts attached to EACH swap (not embeds), safety features like a honeypot detector and blacklisted wallet notifications (250+ 0xs and counting), and a full portfolio manager with transaction visualizations like DFKTracker and tin.network combined. We of course, will also eventually add the typical “price/liquidity” aggregation that many confuse our product with.

2. We are using NFTs as recurring subscriptions as access to our software (SaaS). Recurring subscriptions have proven success in web2 for decades and this will emulate that - there is quite literally nobody trying this model in blockchain at the moment. Users can choose from minting 30 day, 90 day, or 360 day access to our software. This is another entirely unique idea. After a free-trial period per-user, users will mint an NFT as normal, and a web2 custom plugin reads the metadata of the NFT to allow or prevent access.

3. As shown by our extremely active Discord 100 days running, and the activity on this forum as well as our internal polling and recent snapshot, we have a VERY STRONG AND ACTIVE community. They are passionate, engaged, and dedicated - even through this bear market! We also have over THIRTY AMA recordings all fully available on our Whitepaper.

4. We have spent $30,000 on a Proof of Concept on Mainnet already that we invite Harmony Core to try for themselves - we have the login information all ready to go! This is still in development as we speak and plan to release publicly with staking in 4-6 weeks.

On a final note, I will say one requirement we did not meet was our Multisig, which was previously 3 of 5. We have changed this to 5 of 9, including several Harmony Community members such as Aaron from Hermes Defi and Bourbin from Harmonyville. This, of course, has been updated in our Whitepaper docs here: GitBook

CHEERS AND THANK YOU ALL!

[heavengod]

I am bullish about the project

• i am gone through the whitepaper , they are offering unique usecases.
• Very Healthy and loving community environment.
• Continuous performer

Please appove this project, it will add values in the Harmony Blockchain.

[Jacksteroo]

DEX aggregators are a really tough technology stack and business to run and maintain. This project IMO is really close to OpenOcean (DEX Aggregator) Funding Proposal which was brought over via a partnership discussion as we’ve been in talks with them behind the scenes for months until they were ready to post on the forum (they were already nearly done by then).

While I do applaud and support the initiators and agree we can have multiple aggregators running at the same time, there could be edge cases where a new team hasn’t seen before. What if there was an attack on the price oracle, or the source of the pricing trend chart. CoinMarketCap & CoinGecko gets hit all the time (their backend API) causing some really crazy fluctuation in prices, causing a lot of degen investors with their spreadsheets and bots see really funny numbers and making the wrong decisions to buy/sell.

Let me ask this. If we’re already deploying grant treasury to one team which has a fully featured dApp launched, with an experienced team backing the business across multiple chains, and an exposure across multiple chains, should we do deploy grant capital with another one that’s solely for Harmony, effectively nearly doubling our grant giveaways? We’re also going to take on some business and product risk.

I just wanted to put these points out there. I’m personally torn here applauding the community for being passionate about Harmony-first projects, but I’m leaning towards a No. So I’ll abstain in my personal votes. We recommend a two-thirds majority to overturn a decision.

We have the ball rolling now on community voting. We’ll leave it to the community to figure this one out whether or not to overturn the decision (Vote Yes) or support the grant committee’s decision (Vote No) to back this project. I hope we can look back one day to celebrate the decision we made from the outcome of the vote.

[Jacksteroo]

@HarmonyWon

Please vote here: Snapshot

Highlighting here for @heavengod (and everyone else)

[heavengod]

@Jacksteroo Done

[HarmonyWon]

Thank you @Jacksteroo! THANK YOU for giving the community an opportunity here, and we will knock it out of the park on community vote as we have already today. We are a grassroots project, and started this with personal funding. I would assume these grants would prioritize native Harmony developers would take precedence over large established projects with a lot of funding coming from other chains.

I’d like to add 3 things in differentiating our project from OpenOcean that I hope you read:

1. We are NOT a typical aggregator whatsoever and feel that since 95% of projects on Harmony host liquidity on 1 dex, it’s not necessarily as strong of a value proposition as, say, having 50 of what is shown below on the same page + price feeds + safety features (KEY!!) + portfolio manager all in one spot. No more having 50 tabs open including 50 dexscreener tabs. Additionally, as described in our Whitepaper, we have MANY products planned.
   

Whitepaper, for reference, look under “Product Suite”: Project Description - MtopSwap Whitepaper

2. We are inviting you to try our Proof of Concept on Mainnet. Reach out to me on here or Discord (HarmonyWon#8073) - nobody has yet! Let us SHOW you why re-building the Sushiswap front-end code from scratch, and getting it down to 4,000 lines of code makes this swap FASTER than ANYONE has seen - and we will stand by that when we release and want to show you all too.

3. One key thing your comment does not mention is our recurring subscription model. ALL of these products (NOT just the aggregator!) will be under a subscription model where users mint NFTs with a 30 day, 90 day, and 360 day option - 50% USDC and 50% in our utility token $MTOP, which has outperformed many harmony coins for months running. This is a sustainable revenue model and one I do not see anyone else trying. We are attempting to flip what people’s idea of an NFT is on it’s head and use the technology to provide real utility aside from high APYs to them. The recurring aspect of this model means we will sustain our own development for YEARS to come!

I hope you take these 3 specific and unique thoughts into consideration when forming personal opinions on how we differentiate - and as always, WELCOME YOU to speak to me or try the Proof of Concept out yourself so you can see how fast it is! Years from now, we’ll remember this grant posting and think “well of course MtopSwap is different than anything we’ve seen before!”

[Alexander]

That reply was a weird flex @Jacksteroo

This is Open Ocean grant, that has been speed granted behind closed doors as you say, and a Grant post was put up just for the facade

And this is us, that have to go to begtown to see the chain we love and operate as users on, support us.

I think that as a team you need to figure your priorities ie what percentage you are willing to be Harmony first or else.

I can understand that you did an 180 degrees change from granting anything with a dao on its name, to granting no-one without a full-on product… But you need to find a way to balance this out. Nothing is black and white.

Hungry devs build ecosystems and communities. Not multi-chain projects that see this chain as another boost to their tx count.

Cheers and thank you for taking the time to assess.

[Jacksteroo]

When our DeFi ecosystem began to pick up late last year, we realized that there isn’t any viable DEX aggregator on Harmony. Hence, it was a good time we went hunting for one in Q1 and glad to have found OpenOcean willing and able to start discussing in April. It’s not a closed door approach, it’s just that some partners prefer not to discuss it openly until they are ready and comfortable to post things publicly. Really happy to have on of the Top 3 DEX aggregator in the world integrate Harmony.

So, not everyone operates as transparently as Harmony does, and if a partner prefers not to post things publicly, we have to respect that. Hope this clear things up, and thank you for bringing up your concern @Alexander

[HarmonyWon]

Also happy about OpenOcean, @Jacksteroo - but why are we discussing OpenOcean right now? Just above Alex’s comment I gave 3 very specific differences of our product(s) to theirs - why is this not replied to instead? I would rather discuss these very key differences that haven’t been mentioned.

Why has no one asked to test our proof of concept? It’s on Mainnet - ready to go! With all due respect - have you read our whitepaper? I linked it above Alex’s comment also - would love if you or someone on team could read it thoroughly!

Sidenote: only 10 hours in and we’re at nearly 1,000,000 ONE for Yes.

[dpagan-harmony]

@HarmonyWon

Sidenote: only 10 hours in and we’re at nearly 1,000,000 ONE for Yes.

I’m excited to see the results of this vote. Regardless of the result, I’m sincerely impressed by how passionate the community and the MtopSwap team have been around this proposal. This is what continues to convince me that our community is one of the best out there.

[Pioneer]

So happy to see you popping in and taking note of our project. We mean to build build build here on Harmony and we have the support of a very passionate community that we are so fortunate to have with us. We will keep up this momentum and not only develop a swap aggregator- but a better Harmony alongside the many other wonderful projects that you see on the forums

[Legend125]

Really happy to have on of the Top 3 DEX aggregator in the world integrate Harmony.

Well-known external projects have generally underperformed homegrown ones, despite having much larger teams and followings. They barely spend any time engaging the harmony community whereas successful homegrown projects treat this as priority #1. Our community is extremely tight knit. Projects that invest in sentiment reap the rewards of a uniquely loyal following not seen on other chains, while projects that neglect sentiment tend toward solitude. The usual strategy of wooing in incumbents may not be the best approach here.

With that said, MtopSwap has done a fantastic job engaging the audience. Personally, I don’t believe the offerings presented in the roadmap are worth the monthly subscription given that all of them exist today, albeit scattered. However, I have faith MtopSwap can develop into a great service over time. NFT-based subscriptions is a new paradigm worth investigating. I fully support this proposal.

On a side note, I believe a platform for creating NFT-based subscriptions is revolutionary. Integrating web2 payment processors is a pain easily alleviated with web3 primitives. It’s just a matter of time.

[TrickLuhDaKidz]

Who were the 3 people that voted NO?

What was their reasoning?

Radical Transparency

[Khalid]

Apologies in advance for the controversial opinion here, but I do not see this as grant-worthy right now.

One of the first things stated about this project is as follows:

We will destroy browser tabs and streamline the end-user trading experience by having multiple swaps from all major AMMs on a single, minimalistic page. We will also display a price chart for each swap module with 5-minute, 15-minute, 1-hour, 4-hour, and 1-day time frames, so you will never have to leave the page to make that trade.

I am heavily involved in the Harmony ecosystem (mostly as an investor, as most of us are), but this proposal doesn’t excite me. I don’t mind tabs. They work great. It’s literally what tabs are created for. Recreating tabs/windows in one single tab is not innovative imo and I actually find it to be more frustrating to have tabs/windows within browser tabs.

Having price charts is great, but dexscreener does that and is solid. I understand that it’s a separate tab from the actual DEX, but again that’s not a big concern for me personally. dexscreener actually lets you pop open a window to make the trade so it technically has this feature already. It also has other great features that mtop will not have, based on what I’ve seen thus far.

The monthly subscription is insanely expensive (especially in a bear market) for a service that is already offered for free in the market. If it’s more expensive than Coinbase One (the subscription service offered by Coinbase), Netflix, etc. and it has no track record, I’m going to be skeptical. I don’t see this bringing in enough revenue for a business to stay afloat.

I understand that this DEX aggregator is only the beginning, but that beginning is what the $75k funding proposal is for, so we shouldn’t consider what comes after that in this proposal.

I watched the proof of concept video and I’m very concerned that the user has to select the DEX manually… I hope this will be automatic in the future to provide the best trade. In it’s current state, crypto newbs will likely select a DEX with low liquidity for their pair and eat slippage losses for no reason. I think it shouldn’t even launch in the current state (assuming that hasn’t changed). It will do more harm than good.

Also, we need to recognize that @jbeltran questioning the false response about previous projects worked on was a really good move. Helping with community moderation in another project IS helping to build the project so the argument that they didn’t help build it doesn’t really jive. They are asking the right questions.

My reason for posting this here is that I believe the Harmony team is justified in their handling of this proposal, but happy to see where this goes and thank you for contributing to the Harmony ecosystem. Pretty cool to see the Harmony team have the community decide on this one.

[HarmonyWon]

controversial opinion

These are welcomed, understandable, & appreciated! Your critiques are thoughtful and I’d like to respond with point by point counter-arguments below.

Preface
Overall, I think there is some context missing here:

1. Our list of planned products and features is very long. Our day 1 product will not be our day 30 or day 90 product (not even close) - many of your arguments assume we will never add things like blacklisted wallet notifications, honeypot detectors, price/liquidity aggregation, price feeds, contract revoking, a full portfolio manager and transaction visualizer, etc. Part of the reason we are asking for a grant is to develop these features, which is not cheap. Our end-goal is to be a one-stop-shop and add a $50/month (just over $1 a day) in value propositions - and users who choose our $400/360 day option will be grandfathered in to all our future product additions. I invite you to take a look at our https://mtopswap.gitbook.io/mtopswap-whitepaper/overview/roadmap

2. Context is important - what are most other tokens offering in terms of direct value or utility? We are an SaaS. Look around - it’s all high APYs, mostly unreleased/unfinished Games, and many don’t think about long-term sustainability in mind. For us, recurring subscriptions could solve this very important issue.

3. Innovating and doing things drastically differently is risky and difficult. We are doing 3 particularly unique things here - NFTs as recurring subscriptions (sustainability), re-writing the Sushiswap front-end from scratch (speed), and a multi-swap aggregator (tab reduction). In particular, “speed” was missed in your assessment of value. This thing is FAST - we took hundreds of thousands of lines of code and reduced it to just over 4,000. I can’t wait to show people. With innovation comes risk - we know this and are going for it. I’m personally tired of people simply accepting what we’ve known for years and trying the same thing over and over. With innovation also comes confusion, however upon release a lot will become a lot clearer.

That in mind, let me address your critiques specifically below:

I don’t mind tabs

Although some may agree with you, this is an opinion many others do not hold, including myself - keeping track of dexscreener + different product URLs is not only confusing to experienced DeFi traders, but especially to NEW traders. Having everything in one place will objectively lower this barrier of entry that confused the hell out of me and many others upon first landing in the space. Again, this is just 1 of many value propositions we are offering. Eventually, we will be a one-stop-shop for literally everything DeFi users need.

frustrating to have tabs/windows within browser tabs.

We will not have tabs or windows within tabs. We focus on UI and simplicity!

Having price charts is great, but dexscreener does that and is solid

Again, this WITH all the other planned features is the true value-add. Having a price chart directly next to where you can trade X 50 modules is not something dexscreener offers. Only one at a time. With ours, you will literally have 100 swaps with 100 price charts if you wanted. Look at Trader Joe’s success - of course many of their features already exist, but they succeed because of their simple UI and aggregation of available features. Trader Joe XYZ | Leading Decentralized Exchange

The monthly subscription is insanely expensive (especially in a bear market) for a service that is already offered for free in the market

1. Bear markets are temporary cycles. Our pricing is meant to be permanent

2. Link me a project where you can have 15 DFKs, 25 Viperswaps, and 30 Sushiswaps open simultaneously. Link me a project that uses NFTs as recurring subscriptions for sustainability of the protocol beyond assuming people will ape the token for high APYs forever.

3. You are missing a few things here - arbitration opportunities, being able to track your entire port in real-time, and SPEED of swap. We are objectively faster than any other swap and if you DM me on Discord, I will let you see for yourself. Everyone will in a few weeks, anyway.

4. Developing software is expensive. Quality financial software is expensive - look at Adobe… $50 is just over $1 a day and we spend far more than that on weekly obligations. With arbitration opportunities, and being able to swap QUICKLY on new pairs or other opportunities can easily make this back - and that’s JUST the multi-swap aggregator. Not including the long list of other features we have planned as mentioned in the Preface - people will be grandfathered in if they choose our 90 or 360 day options and will save even more in the process.

5. Every user will have a 1-week FREE trial to try and judge for themselves.

I watched the proof of concept video and I’m very concerned that the user has to select the DEX manually…

We have price impact indicators just like other DEXes. Also, 99% of Harmony’s tokens have their liquidity hosted on a single DEX. Finally, we WILL have price/liquidity aggregation after release but felt it’s not nearly as much as a value add as a completely unique multi-swap aggregator that is attempting to innovate. Judge us upon vision, not on Day 1 release

I don’t see this bringing in enough revenue for a business to stay afloat.

We have put lots of thought into this, and our overhead is quite low. Half of the mint will be in USDC which will allow us to have a sellable asset to continue development. Based on our social numbers already (off the charts), people see the potential. Join our Discord and see for yourself! Additionally, our plan to go crosschain (slowly and carefully) and expand our userbase + 1-2 AMAs every single day + having recurring subscription based SaaS when 99% of other projects aren’t thinking in terms of 5-10 years in the future, mean we are again - attempting to innovate and taking that risk by using a model that has 15+ years of provable success (recurring subscriptions).

Again, thank you for your comments! I hope you take part in the free-trial and consider that this funding is to attempt to develop something different, not more of the same

[Ace]

Hey there, first of all it’s always great to see projects trying to build real utility, Kudos to the team on that.

The thing I wanna see addressed is barrier to entry, if the entire project revolves around user experience, how long would it last before someone just undercuts your price points ? Building frontend is not really going to be that hard, a bored dev could just do it as an open source project in their free time which is where the real problem would be.

I understand that you have features planned but most of the presented ones are frontend focused which does not look great, I feel you should share more of your core features. Do you have custom routing contracts planned ? or do you have some sort of batching system planned ? I think that’s where the real value would come from and not just the frontend functionalities.

Also Multiswap aggregation should not be synonymously used with tab reduction unless you have best-route finder algo in place. I am guessing you do but the point hasn’t been conveyed well.

I see you have mentioned arbitrage opportunity with multi module in one page exchange systems ? That’s realistically never gonna work, people do that in 1 or 2 blocks with bots, no one clicking buttons and making multiple transactions is going to win against that.

Overall I like that the team is putting in the work and it’s always refreshing to see utility brought into the ecosystem and all my remarks should only be seen as constructive criticism that helps this project grow and nothing else.

[Pioneer]

Hey friend!

Appreciate the constructive feedback; this is exactly the type of discussion we hope to hear on the forum and elsewhere!

What exactly do you mean by ‘batching’? Are there tools that EzTools might be able to implement into our dapp to bolster the UX, in your opinion? We aim to build something that is necessary for traders on Harmony, and hopefully also to appeal to those members of our community by way of offering robust safety features (ie: honeypot detection, wallet blacklist monitor, and many more).

Yes, at launch we will have only multiswaps, which in themselves are unique only to our project afaik. Soon after (month 1 I would estimate) we aim to complete and deliver to mainnet the liquidity aggregation (think ‘best price’ route). In regards to competition, our code is not open source and it has all been written from absolute scratch (in terms of the project-specific files). We are offering more than a pretty front end with a great swap module idea. We are offering a team of talented individuals that will build, adapt, and convince users of our worthiness. Factually, we also bring unique skillsets to the table that go beyond that of one ‘bored dev’ We spend immense amounts of time building and creating roadmap features that will be meaningful for the community.

All that being said, I would like to hear from anyone if there are specific features that you do not see everywhere and that would be a good value proposition for the community.

[Ace]

Hey,

That’s good to know you have liquidity aggregation planned (which is what I’d say you should be advertising more than tab reduction). Along with that I believe your project is well suited to port over something close Furucombo and I genuinely believe that should be the way to go even for your initial release.

Again, not telling you what you should do, just a suggestion there. If you can bring in a combination of 1inch + Furucombo to Harmony (which I believe your team is entirely capable of), that can be a game-changer.

With that said, I am very satisfied with your answers for most part and do look forward to reaching out even for a potential EzTools partnership. You have our team’s support for the grant.

Wishing you all the best.