BNB Chain Spotlight: Ellipsis.Finance

Another week, another BNB Chain Spotlight interview. Today we're bringing you an interview with Ellipsis.Finance. Ellipsis is an authorized fork of Curve Finance on the BNB chain. It is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) or exchange that lets users and other decentralized protocols exchange tokens with low fees and low slippage. Unlike exchanges that match a buyer and a seller, Ellipsis uses liquidity pools.

Spotlight on Ellipsis.Finance

IMPORTANT: Please note the following content does not constitute an endorsement or approval of any of the products or services of the project, organization, or individual.

It’s great to be talking to you, QS. As this is your first time under the Spotlight, let’s start with a brief introduction. Tell us what you do and what’s unique about Ellipsis.Finance?
Thanks, we’re happy to be here! As the only authorized fork of Curve on any chain, Ellipsis provides users of BNB Chain with low slippage stablecoin swaps. In addition, liquidity providers that use Ellipsis receive swap fees and EPX rewards for providing their liquidity.

My role at Ellipsis varies; however, I am a developer first and foremost.

Can you briefly introduce us to your team? What’s your team’s experience?
The Ellipsis team is built around anonymous individuals with varying backgrounds; our diverse set of overlapping and unique skills have been vital in building Ellipsis.

Before we started building Ellipsis, we had experience developing on Ethereum from before 2017, right through the bear market.

The idea behind Ellipsis came as activity started to pick up on Binance Smart Chain. We were excited to build on BSC as it was a young and vibrant developer community that had everything in place to build amazing products for its users. But it was missing a low slippage stablecoin swap protocol. And so Ellipsis was born.

What does your project provide to retail users on the BNB Chain?
With Ellipsis’ efficient algorithms, anyone looking to swap stablecoins like BUSD, USDT, USDC, etc., can do so with better rates and low slippage compared to PancakeSwap or similar DEXes.

Besides swapping stablecoins, users can deposit their stablecoins in one of our pools to receive a percentage of the trading fees. Other pools like the val3EPS pool provide users with trading fees and interest from Valas.finance and Valas tokens. Finally, these liquidity providers can stake their LP tokens to earn EPX rewards.

It provides users with a very capital-efficient way to get rewarded for their stablecoin holdings.

What does your Ellipsis provide to other projects on the BNB Chain?
Any project looking to create deep liquidity pools for their token on the BNB Chain can do so on Ellipsis. For example, the recently launched USDD: by incentivizing liquidity on Ellipsis with EPX and USDD rewards, the USDD pool managed to build over $50M in liquidity in its first week of existence.

Alongside incentivizing liquidity, projects can acquire EPX and lock it to redirect EPX emissions to their liquidity pool. These mechanics encourage people to put more stablecoins into the liquidity pool, which in turn makes it easier for everyone to trade. This has a flywheel effect, as users in the pool are rewarded EPX, and they can then lock their EPX rewards to vote on the pool to ensure a high amount of EPX rewards continue to the pool.

While stablecoins have been the predominant asset, the Ellipsis stableswap algorithm also provides liquidity and price stability to derivative tokens like aBNBb <> BNB pool from ANKR or the dEPX <> EPX pool from dotdot.finance.

Ellipsis is also working closely with other projects on the BNB chain to find synergies that positively impact the BNB ecosystem. One example is Ellipsis working with Valas.finance to create liquidity pools to share liquidity between Valas and Ellipsis. This dramatically improves capital efficiency for users and both protocols.

You have to protect a lot of funds and user data. What is your security strategy?
We don’t collect user data. The contracts have been audited from their Curve days and when Ellipsis launched. Ellipsis’ contracts are immutable and thereby not open to any governance or contract upgrade attacks. Apart from this, Ellipsis does its best to educate our community about proper risk management both with our protocol and with DeFi in general.

Why did you decide to build on the BNB Chain?
Our team all had experience using the Binance exchange when it launched. When the Binance development community decided to launch a new EVM chain, we were excited about the prospect of a chain focused on providing users with the lowest transaction fees. The chain was still missing a major stableswap protocol like Curve, so it made sense for us to build it. We went for it, and it all came together.

Can you explain the recent upgrade to Ellipsis 2.0?
The original version of Ellipsis was a great solution for stableswaps on the BNB Chain, and it was useful for some projects. However, it required a change to enable projects and users to utilize the underlying protocol better. So we developed permissionless factory pools - meaning that any project could make a pool - and then added the ability for EPX holders to vote on the incentive distribution between those pools.

These changes made it possible for projects to better utilize Ellipsis’ pools and emissions and create a space where EPX holders will benefit from how these projects incentivize liquidity through voting and other protocols built around Ellipsis voting.

And as we’re getting to the end of the interview, let’s talk about the future. What do you see as the main challenge for the future of DeFi? What new features can we expect from you in the upcoming months?
As we have seen from the current events in the market, and then also the day to day happenings in our community, educating users about how to use DeFi safely, avoid things like phishing and other scams, and evaluate the risk of a given project will be an important challenge if we want to see user adoption grow. Each person is responsible for their own actions, and if we can share some knowledge to help them make better decisions and actions, then this should be a boon for the future of DeFi.

As for Ellipsis, there are always interesting projects coming up onstream with new pools. We are working on expanding our dApp to include more sections with data about each pool and the overall protocol. Things are happening in tandem with other projects that we cannot comment on at this time, but we can say it is a very exciting time on the BNB Chain. There seems to be a lot of building happening!

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