Spotlight

Fantom Ecosystem Spotlight – LiquidDriver

They may have been the first liquidity mining dApp on Fantom DeFi, but you wouldn’t know it: LiquidDriver has evolved quickly since launching on Fantom with a constant stream of partnerships, site upgrades, and new features aimed at increasing DeFi market efficiencies and investor yields.

This dynamic and productive team combines technical acumen, expertise in finance, and an ambitious vision honed in on the long-term viability of DeFi.

They move fast, and we were grateful to be able to steal some of their time for this fantastic interview.

1. What is LiquidDriver?

LiquidDriver is the first dApp on Fantom offering on-demand liquidity as a service.

We offer users sustainable yields for providing liquidity for our partners while driving revenue for our holders.

We support a wide variety of dApps by incentivizing liquidity for them and improving the trading experience along the way.

We aim to be a one-stop-shop for users looking to generate passive income with their assets.

2. How do you introduce Liquid Driver to a novice or someone who knows relatively little about DeFi?

Liquidity is a key element for an efficient market. Low liquidity results in high spreads and high volatility, making pricing inefficient.

In traditional finance, banks and financial institutions serve as market makers whose primary purpose is to provide market liquidity that enables investors to buy and sell with low price impact.

In DeFi, we are completely reinventing the wheel by removing third parties from the equation. When you trade on a decentralized exchange such as Spiritswap or Spookyswap, you are swapping one asset for another through pools of liquidity provided by multiple users looking to earn a portion of trading fees.

LiquidDriver aims to improve market efficiency by acting as a decentralized market maker.

We aim to provide best-in-class yields for our users while driving liquidity where it’s needed. Our focus is on building a long-lasting, sustainable model that can support projects requiring liquidity to enhance their services.

3. How did you come up with Liquid Driver/what was your inspiration?

Being early holders of FTM, we were closely following the evolution of Fantom.

As soon as we saw the infrastructure was ready to host DeFi dApps and saw SushiSwap deployed on Fantom without providing incentives, we decided it was time to solve this and start bringing liquidity on the network.

We were at the right place at the right moment and took the opportunity to help build a new ecosystem.

Going beyond technological innovation

Being able to innovate the ways you capture and redistribute value without any central party is, in our opinion, a huge value proposition for the DeFi space.

Thanks to the open-source nature of the industry, the barriers to entry are low, so when we saw that most liquidity mining dApp didn’t have a sustainable model, we decided to build our own solution.

4. What’s your background?

Dr.Liquid studied economics and mathematics. He worked as a business developer for a Fintech venture in Canada for two years before launching his own venture in the Fintech space. Before launching LiquidDriver, he was working for DEUS.finance in financial engineering.

Liquid George worked in marketing & consulting before for startups and companies and has been in the Web3 industry for five years. He is involved in several active or upcoming projects in the DeFi and DAO space, driving business development and team building.

Smartlop, our lead solidity developer, worked as a software engineer for a tech company before moving to the blockchain industry in 2019, where he worked for Pickle.finance and Harvest.finance before starting LiquidDriver.

H.P worked as a full-stack blockchain/web developer for seven years. He started by building web applications using modern Javascript frameworks such as React, Angular, and Node.js for Luxcore, Bankdex, and Aeryus Software. He then focused on Solidity development, working for different Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain projects before starting LiquidDriver.

5. Why did you decide to build on Fantom?

Back in April, the DeFi ecosystem didn’t really exist yet on Fantom.

Ethereum gas fees were already skyrocketing. We were already accustomed to Fantom’s tech: it was a no-brainer:

By leveraging Fantom's transaction speed and cheap transactions, we could build a superior product and place ourselves as a first mover in the ecosystem. Choosing which blockchain to develop on is a crucial step, and looking back, we made the best decision.

Nowadays, another key aspect that should attract a lot of developers is the community built around Fantom.

6. How did you learn about Fantom?

Dr. Liquid was an early user of Fantom. As many alternative L1 solutions started to emerge, we followed the evolution of each chain. When we started playing around with the PWA wallet, it became clear that Fantom would provide an optimal experience for DeFi.

7. How was your experience of building on Fantom?

From a technical point of view, the costless deployment and tooling made our life much easier. Once you remove the fees from the equation, many opportunities open up.

On Ethereum, as soon as you want to build complex strategies requiring a lot of gas, it becomes unattractive for 99% of the early adopters because the gas fees far exceed the potential returns.

Fantom solves this issue and allows us to build freely without worrying about the transaction fee incurred for users.

From a business perspective, it has been an amazing experience; the level of collaboration within the ecosystem is astonishing and has allowed us to innovate faster and offer new products that wouldn’t have been possible without our partners.

8. What brings you to DeFi, and what excites you most about the space?

Coming from a financial background, improving on TradFi legacy through decentralized business models is what drives us.

The industry’s openness allows us to build products readily available to all users with an internet connection, regardless of where they are located.

This is how finance should be — opening financial opportunities to the masses.

9. How did the community receive Liquid Driver?

As I mentioned previously, the community on Fantom is unique and amazing.

More than the support they offer by investing or depositing assets on our platform, the community is our number one marketer.

We also see many bright community members bringing development ideas that fit perfectly with our vision.

They contribute directly to our development by engaging in constructive conversations around the protocol that ultimately lead to constant improvements.

10. What’s coming up for Liquid Driver? Free alpha!

At LiquidDriver, we’ve always wanted to keep our roadmap agile with very short development cycles that allow us to act on feedback and integrate the latest innovations.

This is why you do not see a very detailed roadmap for the long term. We would rather start from a problem and find the optimal solution for it.

Right now, we are focused on:

How to reduce our cost for renting liquidity
How to maximize yields for xLQDR holders while increasing the locked supply
How to progressively acquire assets for our treasury
Going multichain

The current solutions being worked on are:

Leveraged farming with unidirectional liquidation
New strategies that won’t require LQDR emissions while increasing revenues for xLQDR holders
Wrapped version of xLQDR
Integration of new partners
??????? (Christmas surprise)

On top of that, we’re working on a new UI that should satisfy our degen pirates. We have other things, of course, but it is too soon to spill the beans.

11. What do you want to say to fellow developers who haven’t started building on Fantom yet?

You should join us and play around with the tech.

With all the recent integrations such as Chainlink, Covalent, TheGraph, and many more, you can be sure you will have a best-in-class infrastructure and all the tooling you need to deliver the dApp you envisioned.

Also, the developer community is always keen on helping other projects.

The best time to start was yesterday; the second-best time is now!

12. Is there anything that you’d like to mention that we didn’t ask about?

What truly differentiates LiquidDriver from any other liquidity mining dApp is that we have a team composed of great developers with extensive experience in the DeFi world and people with a strong understanding of economics.

Our number one focus is to build a long-lasting protocol by having a sound and sustainable business model.

Our current model effectively links our TVL with our valuation: TVL growth increases revenue for xLQDR holders, which incentivizes LQDR holders to lock their tokens.