Project update and RELAY single sided staking coming soon!

Introduction

The last several months have been filled with exciting new partnerships as well as chain integrations. Before delving into Relay single sided staking in a dedicated article which will be published before the launch date, we would like to reflect on the project and its success since the launch on August 2nd, 2021. As well as providing an insight where we are in terms of tokenomics and the decision to move now in the direction of single sided staking.

Project status

Three months post launch, we are absolutely confident that we made the right decision in pivoting from a cross-chain DEX to a dedicated Bridging as a Service provider. Developing a fast bridge, while ensuring secure and inexpensive transactions, is not simple from a technical perspective. Allocating our development resources exclusively to the core business has been much more effective than trying to develop a feature rich DEX.

Our wealth of experience for bridging and integrating new chains has made all of our bridges reliable, stable and safe. The integration of new chains became more and more smooth. As an example, our launch on Moonriver happened without a hiccup and without one single stuck transaction.

Our average transfer speeds allow users to enjoy a stress free bridging experience and take advantage of opportunities, like arbing or entering LPs with high APR or easily trading tokens exclusive to some chains.

The latest statistics were:

93% under 20 min
85% under 6 min
77% under 5 min
60% under 4 min
35% under 3 min
10% under 2min

We have been able to integrate 5 more chains since the Relay launch: Moonriver, Shiden, Fantom, IoTeX and Harmony. And we won’t stop there, we love to build! Our knowledge and expertise enable us to integrate EVM compatible chains quickly and with a very high degree of reliability. In a matter of literally hours, we have been able to provide token bridging options to partners on our supported chains. Free of charge, unlike some competitors that may charge a project 1 to 2 ETH depending on how slow (1 to 3 weeks) they would like their tokens to be listed.

After Quickswap on Polygon, our first partner, we have onboarded quite a few new ones who are using our bridge for their tokens or providing liquidity for transferred tokens by our bridge:

Qi Dao
SolarBeam
Moonswap
FreeRiver
Boltswap
Trader Joe
Canary Exchange
Ghoul Finance
ApeSwap
Artemis
More soon on Harmony and Moonriver

A small IDO in July allowed us to secure a treasury for funding a development team during 12 months. This gave the team some cash flow runway until the bridge revenue model became profitable. The good news is that only 3 months into the launch, the platform is already profitable. We are 100% committed to making this project a success story.

Our tokenomics model works!

Tokenomics pivot at launch

When we decided to concentrate on bridging instead of being a cross-chain DEX with general features, we also revised our tokenomics to address the following pain points typically affecting a token value:

High(ish) total supply
High emissions
Sell pressure
Utility of the project token

We made the RELAY token deflationary with buy back and burns from the bridge fees, limited its supply and aimed to reduce sell pressure by suppressing Relay emissions, except for exceptional and limited campaigns in collaboration with partners.

The utility of the token is to allow Relay tokens holders to earn native gas tokens (like AVAX, MOVR, etc) or partners’ tokens (QUICK, SOLAR, MOON, etc) when providing liquidity with the RELAY token as a pair.

We came up with this innovative approach in crypto space by placing the collected bridge fees at the heart of the tokenomics. This approach is so innovative and valuable, that we are already seeing some copycat models from competitors. The good news is that Relay will share a much more substantial portion of the bridge revenue with its token holders.

Our tokenomics are 100% based on the number of bridge transactions and not on the value amount of the transactions being bridged.

How do we increase bridge traffic? By providing more opportunities to bridge thanks to new chains, partnerships, liquidity partners and/or bridge integration in a dApp.

Bridge fees spending

Please check our white paper for more detailed information, the bridge fees were allocated to be spent as follows:

Thus far, we have activated the liquidity providers rewards and buy back + burn mechanisms.

Model is working

In September, we bought back and burned 17K RELAY from the bridge fees collected from the previous months. We recently did it again, this time with 25K RELAY. This is on top of the 1.124M RELAY burned in October following the end of the ZERO to RELAY OTC swap campaign.

As it stands, the maximum total supply has been reduced to 8.718M, down from 10M initially.

Moreover, our bridge volume is steadily increasing, which in turn leads to an increase in bridge revenues, with the potential of bigger buybacks and burn:

So far, we are very pleased to observe the success of our model and the bridge volume trend going up as we integrate more chains and conclude more partnerships.

RELAY single sided staking

Let’s summarize again our approach to the tokenomics, the Relay token utility, and the benefits to our bridge users:

Limited RELAY emission
Traders, arbers: Fast and secure bridge
Token holders: Buy back and burns, deflationary mechanism
RELAY liquidity providers: Earn gas tokens (AVAX, MOVR, etc) or project tokens (QUICK, SOLAR, MOON, etc)

The single sided staking request often came up in the community as a low risk investment option. We could have offered a traditional low APR single sided staking limited in time and emitting RELAY. We estimated that it didn’t bring enough value, nor for the stakers, nor for the core tokenomics, and wouldn’t have satisfied anyone. And we wanted to stay true to our promise of reduced RELAY emissions.

In our mind, we always have the benefits for the bridge users and RELAY investors:

Bridge users: Being able to do it safely and quickly. That’s why we mandated a Halborn audit for example.
RELAY liquidity providers: Earn gas tokens
RELAY holders: How to help the ones with a lower risk appetite to still make their investment grow without compromising the tokenomics.

We decided to make single sided staking happen, but with a twist: Instead of RELAY rewards, you will earn native gas tokens (AVAX or MOVR for example) like the RELAY liquidity providers, but without any risks of impermanent loss! This massively expands the utility of the RELAY and will create buy side demand.

A fifth mechanism will be added in the bridge fees revenue distribution, which will evolve to:

The details of how it will work and how it will be funded, will be communicated in the next article. Single sided staking will be made available during the month of November.

The future

We have other major releases in the pipeline for November/December

Full revamped UI of the dApp

Make our bridging interface more user-friendly and visually appealing.

Dashboard

This one has been promised over and over again, but not yet fully delivered. It may feel like kicking the can down the road from an outsider’s perspective, but our absolute focus has been on integrating new chains and technical groundwork for our partners. The partner demand and available opportunities ramped up dramatically beginning in September and we simply could not ignore this as it is the foundation that will make everything else work.

All the bridge data is available on the chains (that’s the beauty of the blockchain, all the data can be queried, nothing can be hidden!) and some members of the community have taken the initiative to extract them in the meantime.

Chains and partnerships

Relentlessly adding more chains and on-boarding more partnerships!

About RelayChain

The race to bridge DeFi is over with RelayChain. Almost instantly add cross-chain swaps to any DEX or dApp. Earn bridge fees in ETH, MATIC, DOT, BSC, AVAX, HECO and more. Become a partner with the most interconnected name in DeFi and secure your bridge benefits early.

Our readable whitepaper: Bridging as a Service for DeFi by RelayChain Downloadable whitepaper: Bridging as a Service for DeFi in PDF

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