Fantom Ecosystem Spotlight – PaintSwap
What do you get when an NFT platform meets DeFi? This week, we caught up with PaintSwap to find out. PaintSwap is a unique project on Fantom that combines an NFT marketplace with a range of DeFi services.
The PaintSwap team is one of the most active in the ecosystem: they’re known for the care they take to listen to the community, their willingness to assist other builders on the network, and their dedication to constant development.
We know by now that when they say that they’re working on GameFi, that whatever they come up with is going to be good!
1. What is PaintSwap?
PaintSwap.finance is an open NFT Marketplace, Automated Market-Making (AMM) Decentralized Exchange (DEX) and Yield Farming platform on the Fantom Opera network.
Our open NFT Marketplace is currently on its 2.0 release supporting native FTM transactions to buy, sell and auction NFTs on the Fantom network.
The marketplace is built from the ground up and not cloned, allowing us to be very agile in updates and improvements. We also use fully decentralized storage, which we believe is the first protocol of its kind to do so.
The DEX/AMM side of PaintSwap offers low fees of 0.3%, which are distributed to our liquidity providers, making it arguably the “sexiest” one in DeFi. 50% of the sale fees from the marketplace are used to buy back and burn $BRUSH.
Our Yield Farms offer some of the highest APRs on the Fantom network. These returns are in part supported by our Art Gallery, which locks 50% of farmers’ $BRUSH rewards for 90 days.
We also created Ross Studio, the first video game on Fantom. We have big plans for GameFi & NFTs in the future.
2. How did you get into NFTs?
Most of the team had already explored and played with NFTs on Ethereum in the past, and very early on, we began to envision the future of NFTs beyond the current trend of art/collection. We see lots of use cases for NFTs in real-world scenarios.
We released our NFT collection early on and gave benefits to holders such as discounted fees on Ross Studio and reduced listing/minting fees on our NFT Marketplace. More features for NFTs holders are coming soon.
3. How do you introduce PaintSwap to a novice or someone who knows relatively little about either DeFi or NFTs?
We strive to make our NFT marketplace as simple to use as possible, once a user has the basics of using a wallet down.
We are continually improving the UI and introducing tooltips to make things as clear and straightforward as possible. For example, we recently implemented a zap to auto-convert FTM to BRUSH to help users settle listing/minting fees.
We have created a video on how to buy $BRUSH (our token), add liquidity and use the LP tokens in farms. For more detailed explanations, we recommend that users watch the video series put out by Finematics on YouTube.
4. How did you come up with PaintSwap? What was your inspiration for this platform, which unusually combines an NFT marketplace with an AMM?
The name PaintSwap was chosen in a brainstorming session as we felt the Fantom Network had a lot of dark/ghost/evil-themed platforms, and we wanted to brighten up the network! It also worked well with our plans for the NFT marketplace that we released after launching the farms and exchange.
Our fantastic designer Norm loved the creativity he could exercise working with the paint theme!
As for the unusual combination of NFTs and an AMM, we are confident we could be the all-in-one DeFi solution like BakerySwap on BSC, and we continue to work towards this goal.
5. What are your backgrounds?
We are one of the more mature teams within the Fantom ecosystem as far as we know: we have 70+ years of experience between the 6 of us.
All of our team members have worked on other tokens/coins/networks in some capacity, so we have a plethora of knowledge about cryptocurrency. We feel that shows in the first-class products we produce and the attention we give to security.
SamWitch - 10 years Finance, Embedded, Crypto Protocol & 3D Games Software Dev
CheeseKnight - 10 years Senior Fullstack Engineer
Dyeharder - 5 years Software Dev
Paintoshi - 26 years Software & IT
N0rm - 8 years Designer
Arod - 15 years Digital Marketing
6. How did you learn about Fantom?
We originally discovered Fantom through the ICE token from Popsicle Finance. They are a multichain yield optimizer and launched on Fantom, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain initially.
Ethereum had extraordinarily high gas fees, and BSC, while cheap, was too centralized for our liking. As we used and learned about Fantom, we decided that it was the network for us.
7. Why did you decide to build on Fantom?
Although Fantom had been out for a couple of years, it was still relatively unused when we began to learn about it.
The network itself has low fees. It’s decentralized, offers very quick finality for transactions, and has a great community – so what’s not to love!
We saw an excellent opportunity to build amazing things on it as there were not too many projects when we started, and whoa, has it exploded in the last few months, TPS is through the roof, and the ecosystem has grown so much.
It has been amazing to witness Fantom and the ecosystem breaking through and being a real competitor to Ethereum. Being part of it makes us all feel amazing, and we appreciate all the support we have gotten from everyone.
8. How was your experience of building on Fantom?
It’s been great! We’ve never had issues deploying to mainnet; there were a couple of times where the testnet had some downtime, but luckily the fees on mainnet are so cheap we just ended up using that for testing. If we had one suggestion, it would be to get TheGraph support on the Fantom Testnet.
9. What brings you to DeFi, and what excites you most about the space?
The capability to trustlessly interact with the finance sector is pretty amazing.
We feel it’s the future of finance and will become a global market at some point in the future. Some of our team are from the centralized finance industry. We saw all the efficiencies that removing middlemen could bring by enabling people to interact directly with smart contracts – it’s revolutionary.
In its current state, Fantom is leading these endeavors and makes it feasible for the average user to use DeFi, without having a terrible experience with high gas costs and congestion often seen in other networks.
10. How did the community receive PaintSwap?
When we began building in the Fantom ecosystem, it seemed crypto sentiment was relatively low, and people were unenthused in general.
But it didn’t stop us. After engaging with the community, we were the first team to have an AMA on FTMAlerts and were quickly invited to a private Project Development channel on their Discord.
We were very welcomed; it was terrific.
If we ever needed help, someone was always there to answer, particularly Doublesharp, and we also gave back and helped others. We love interacting with the community, and our Discord is super active. Come check it out – we’re always there to help.
11. What’s coming up for PaintSwap? Free alpha!
Continuing to improve and expand the marketplace is our first port of call. There is much more coming, including features that users expect, and components that they don’t know about!
We also have our second NFT collection in the works and it will have some awesome features and perks! We worked with a really talented Fantom artist for the design, and we’ll share more soon.
12. What do you want to tell to fellow developers who haven’t started building on Fantom yet?
Come build on Fantom! The community is amazing. We constantly get great feedback about what end-users actually want, which allows us to improve our products quickly!
For budding NFT contract developers our NFT-Creator-Support channel on Discord is an incredible resource with a great community. It’s one of the best places to discuss Solidity.
13. Is there anything that we didn’t ask that you’d like to add?
We are here to stay – we love the Fantom ecosystem and will continue to build and improve our products on it!
We always welcome feedback and suggestions. For instance, the World Of Uman’s creator wanted a sales bot for their Discord. We made one within a day, and after recognizing its value, we added a generic bot to our Discord to track sales. Now, many others have requested it for their channels.
So all of this is to say that your requests do not go unheard! Keep painting everyone.
Engage with PaintSwap at:
