Hey folks, as I mentioned a while back we’ve been exploring ways we can launch some of our core functionality on Solana as a more trustless complement to what we’ve currently got running on Forte. As we get closer to being ready to deploy some Solana programs that developers can build on top of, we’ve been looking at various dimensions of usability around the RLY token itself.
Currently, Solana offers several trust minimized bridges to move back and forth from Solana Tokens to ERC20 tokens; Wormhole in particular is a popular one. While the existence of these bridges means that we have the ability to move RLY tokens back and forth between Ethereum and Solana and immediately have access to all of the ERC20 RLY liquidity available across DEXes and CEXes, I think the Solana ecosystem is robust enough that we can create better options for users by building up Solana native liquidity.
In particular, I’m proposing that we incentivize onchain liquidity on Solana DEXes in the same way we have on Uniswap and Balancer to date. The high level steps would be:
Deploy a token to Solana pegged 1:1 to ERC-20 RLY via existing bridges
Allocate RLY as liquidity incentives on Raydium for trading pairs involving this token on par with what we’ve allocated for the Uniswap and Balancer pairs
Post any questions, comments, or feedback here and we can put a formal proposal in front of the RLY Network Association board incorporating any feedback if there’s general support.
It’s exciting to hear the Solana programs are getting closer and will establish $RLY multi-chain. I think the developer community is ripe for something more stable than just issuing their own SPL token. I absolutely support native liquidity opportunities - would you build on Serum? The negligible transaction costs would make it much easier to participate.
Some additional color on the initial post in response to @mrq02 request form discord…
The core technology of the RLY Network is a set of functionality intended to make it easier to create tokenized economies. The first instantiation of this functionality was deployed to a private side chain developed by Forte and the first instance of a developer building on top of this is Rally.io. We have been looking into what it would be like to have this functionality exist across multiple blockchains; and in particular looking at Ethereum L2s and Solana as our initial target blockchains. We’re getting close to the point where we can deploy some of this functionality to Solana.
One of the primary ways in which the RLY Network supports new tokenized economies is primitives that allow developers to build tokens bonded to the $RLY token. $RLY exists as an ERC20 token on Ethereum mainnet; so when applications are built on top of the RLY Network where functionality exists on other chains, a key aspect is ensuring that the $RLY token can flow freely between chains. On Rally.io (and the underlying Forte chain) this is done via the trusted bridge setup to allow users to move RLY back and forth from Ethereum to Forte (“bridge in/out” as presented on rally.io). We can do the same on Solana via existing trust minimized bridges such as Wormhole and you can see some examples of our developers experimenting with these bridges on Solana block explorers
While that public bridge functionality technically gives us everything we’d need to allow developers to start building on top of the $RLY token on Solana, it doesn’t necessarily enable a great user experience. A Solana user looking to interact with an application that uses RLY on Solana would need to switch over to Ethereum, acquire $RLY, and bridge it to Solana. While this works, we could create a better user experience if it were possible to acquire $RLY directly on Solana. To do this, we would want to build Solana native liquidity for the $RLY token.
The familiar corollary would be fiat based transactions on Rally.io vs. acquiring ERC-20 $RLY and bridging in. While the latter works, the former is often a better user experience. And we can enable a similarly high quality user experience native to Solana where the complexity of other chains and bridging is removed if there is enough liquidity backing the $RLY token native to the Solana experience. This proposal would seek to incentivize that native Solana liquidity for the $RLY token in order to support this improved user experience.
A summary of pros and cons as I see them:
pros
easier for Solana users and developers to use/build the RLY token without interacting with Ethereum bridges
introduction of the RLY token to the broader Solana ecosystem via its most used DEXes
additional opportunity to distribute RLY via incentives for positive contributions
opportunity to add substantial depth to RLY liquidity by expanding to new markets
cons
further fragmentation of liquidity; RLY is tradable on dozens of markets currently, each additional market creates more fragmentation and arbitrage possibilities
potentially “cannibalizes” existing liquidity providers (moves liquidity providers from Uniswap to Raydium vs. finding new liquidity providers)
opportunity cost of RLY Network Association directing budget towards liquidity incentives vs. other uses
On the whole, I believe the pros far outweigh the cons and $RLY liquidity native to new chains where we bring RLY Network functionality makes application development easier, provides a more sensible/contained user experience, and introduces new users to the RLY Network ecosystem.
From the SuperLayer side we’re really excited by and supportive of this direction.
We’re building several products utilizing the RLY token on Solana (stay tuned for Q1 2022 launches!). Solana Native RLY liquidity will allow us to launch products faster, build more intuitive user experiences and ultimately onboard more new users onto the RLY Network.
This is a critical time to allow developers to provide the best user experience and iterate quickly, and Solana seems to be the scaling solutions of consumer devs (music, gaming, social). If Solana native RLY liquidity unlocks that ability for RLY while maintaining flexibility in ERC-20, this sounds like a good idea.