Proposal Title: Grant for Conveyor Labs decentralized automation protocol
Authors: Rory Graman, Founder/CEO @ Conveyor Labs
Date: May 9, 2022
Overview:
Conveyor Labs is building the first-ever fully decentralized, trustless, and non-custodial protocols to automate DeFi token swaps on EVM compatible chains (Eth, Polygon, Cronos, and BSC to name a few). We’re going to automate the $1T/year DeFi volume market.
Through a combination of decentralized off-chain systems paired with on-chain logic and validation, our protocol is able to act as the secure automated middle-man to swap the tokens in your wallet with the DEX LPs you already interact with. You own and hold your assets throughout the process from start to finish.
How It Works:
Our protocols allow a user to connect their ERC20 compatible wallet through our web UI, choose a trading strategy, and sign a single transaction to store their swap conditions on-chain. By signing this transaction, they simultaneously authorize the contract to swap a pre-defined amount of designated tokens in their wallet once their specific swap conditions are met.
Our network of off-chain decentralized Beacons initiates a swap for a user by calling the public functions stored on the contract to swap the pre-defined tokens for users when the defined market conditions are met. The values the Beacon enters are processed, verified, and computed by the on-chain contract, resulting in a secure, automated token swap without any reliance on internal or external infrastructure. Beacons have a financial incentive to confirm our transactions by receiving a small volume reward fee for each trade they successfully automate.
How Current Automated Systems Fall Short
The ecosystem we’re building is rebuilt from the ground up to allow for a fully decentralized, trustless, and non-custodial method for automation. There are three major components that are critical to safe and reliable swaps in DeFi:
Decentralization: (no internal systems are required to facilitate a swap)
- most on-chain systems today have a small number of internal or allow listed executors to facilitate swaps, which requires their services to have 100% uptime to work reliably, else your trade doesn’t happen as expected. We solve this by allowing anyone to initiate a swap for a user, and back it up with thorough on-chain computation and validation to perform the swap.
Trustlessness: (You don’t have to trust that anyone is acting faithfully)
- As mentioned above, other systems have executors that you have to ‘trust’ when executing your swap, or have upgradable smart contracts, which is a scary thing in DeFi. Owner functions can be subject to rogue internal team members who execute your trades at non-optimal times or swap into assets you didn’t approve. With our solution, there is no requirement to trust that a Beacon operator (or us) will act faithfully since our contract is immutable and zero owner functions can alter your trade outcomes.
Non-Custodial: (You hold onto your assets at all times)
- Other systems may require you to send your assets to a shared contract in order to automate. This results in a contract with multiple users’ stored funds, which is a high target for attack, and in the event that the service has downtime or is abandoned, your assets can be stuck in a permanent untradeable state. With our solution, You hold the assets in your wallet up to the point that the assets are swapped, and the result is sent to your wallet in a single TX. Not to mention that you won’t be subject to double tax for assets that implement tokenomics.
Where can you use our solution?:
We’re designing our protocol to be deployed on all chains with EVM compatibility. We’re starting with Polygon, Ethereum, Cronos, and Binance Smart Chain. We’ll have compatibility with DEX LPs from Uniswap v2/v3, Sushiswap, PancakeSwap, and Mad Meerkat. We have plans to expand to other Layer 1’s and Layer 2’s like Arbitrum, Fantom, Avalanche, Gnosis Chain, Near, and many others. If you can swap it, we can automate it.
Target Market:
Traders of all types, including Institutional Funds, Investment DAOs, everyday traders, and Token Teams can benefit from automation for the assets they hold or maintain.
We are laser-focused on Institutional DeFi traders as our primary GTM strategy, but we’re creating our ecosystem in a way that’s easy to use for all traders, with special attention towards investment DAOs
How will your proposal, if activated, benefit BitDAO?
We’re designing the system so it’s similar to using Uniswap, but more advanced in that it will automatically perform swaps when the market conditions meet specific swap criteria. With investment DAOs (specifically BitDAO in this example), there needs to be a vote for when to swap Bit to other assets. We plan on creating additional trading techniques in the future to allow for take-profit, leveraged trading, and other trustless automated trading tools.
In the case of BitDAO, creating limit orders, utilizing a specified grid trading strategy, or deploying a DCA strategy will only require one vote to pass, and the automated swap process can be confirmed once using a multi-sig or Gnosis Safe wallet. Once that strategy is deployed, it’s completely automated based on the token amounts the DAO authorizes the contract to swap on their behalf. This could bring forth new possibilities previously not available in regards to controlled market trading, while still maintaining the high standards of decentralized community governance.
How long will it take to complete?
Our protocol development is nearly complete. We plan to deploy our buy/sell limit and stop-loss protocols to the general public near the end of June to mid-July 2022. We have a pre-planned audit through Quantstamp, a leader in smart contract security, set for the end of June to facilitate a rapid 2.5-week turnaround time for the audit to complete. We have started the initial web app designs for the trading interface, and frontend development will begin in about 2 weeks (near the end of May). The decentralized Beacon application will begin development mid-may and will be rigorously battle-tested for reliability and security
Who is involved?
There are three team members that make up Conveyor Labs.
Myself. I’m a 12.5-year Navy SEAL veteran, and a Y Combinator alumni (Charge Running W21 batch). I have over half a decade of running successful startups (no pun intended). My cofounder is a full-stack developer who specializes in Go (the language for the Beacon application) and solidity. He is also a winner of the February 2022 ETHGlobal Hackathon. Our third team member that joined the team last month is a Techstars alumni, has his masters in mathematics, a bachelor’s in CS, and is a full-stack developer.
The co-founders met in June 2021, and have been working together in a professional environment on DeFi trade automation systems. We launched a centralized MVP in late Jan, and our automated system has transacted over $275K worth of tokens. We’ve accomplished this by partnering with token teams to automate the selling of their team/dev/marketing tokens in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the charts which in turn provides them the liquidity needed to fund their project.
What are the milestones?
July
- Deploy buy/sell limits, stop-losses on Polygon, Ethereum, Cronos, and BSC
- Beacon application release
- Website development complete / released
- audit complete
- begin aggressively onboarding Institutional DeFi investors and investment DAOs for initial feedback for UI/UX optimizations
August
- Implement UI/UX optimizations & reinforce website scalability
- Begin development on Grid Trading & DCA strategy protocols
- Onboard internal customer outreach and success team for DAOs and institutional traders
September
- Audit / Deploy Grid Trading & DCA protocols
- Launch on additional L1’s/L2’s with DEX LP compatibility for each chain.
Note a more robust timeline can be found in our documentation via the Documentation link below.
Specifications:
- Raise Information
We’re currently raising a $2.370M seed round at a $30m post via safes. We have previously secured $130k from Orange DAO (a collective of over 1200 YC alum building/investing in web3) & an Angel investor. This raise will enable us 18 months of runway to grow, scale, and develop towards optimal product-market fit.
- Budget
With our team being small, and having $100k in Google Cloud credits, our monthly spend is mainly on salaries to keep the team growing, marketing tools, email, and miscellaneous administrative required spend. Our current runway ends at the end of July. We are seeking a grant/investment from BitDAO to assist us with building our product in return for a white-glove onboarding, AMA’s, and special attention for any community members, representatives, or treasure managers that want to learn more about the system, or need help setting it up.
- Add technical details and/or links to source documentation
Here are our docs highlighting the internals of the system.
Here is our pitch deck
Next Steps? If this proposal is accepted, what are the immediate action items?
We would send a safe agreement to treasury managers or approved representatives at BitDAO for review and signatures. Pending an accepted proposal, we would receive and convert Bit to usdc to safegard investment funds against market volatility
If interested, please let me know in the comments! The next step (pending community thumbs up) would be to ask for delegate votes to gain the 200k Bit to resubmit a formal proposal.
Review Process
The BIT Community and delegates might discuss and verify the following before considering proposals.
Personnel
- Is the team credible?
- Are they qualified to do this work?
Technical
- Does the proposal make sense technically?
- Does this fit into, or compliment, other projects in the BitDAO ecosystem?