Hydration Newsletter: Aug / Sep 2024

UX Improvements: Wallet and Liquidity Mining, 2nd Wave of Liquidity Incentives

Welcome to the August / September edition of Hydration Monthly—our bi-monthly newsletter that brings you up-to-date on the most hydrated matters.

Over the past two months, our focus has been on shipping incremental improvements to the user experience in our app. First up, our new and improved wallet flow is live. It allows users to quickly connect their accounts across all their wallets, and to easily switch between accounts. Furthermore, we have improved the flow for providing liquidity and joining the available farms, making it an intuitive experience for new users.

In other news, the 2nd wave of liquidity incentives for the Polkadot Hydration Campaign is live, ensuring continued incentives for the upcoming ~3 months.

Read more on these updates below, and don't forget to check out the Dev Updates and the Governance Square.

New Wallet So Smoooove

Getting the wallet experience right in web3 is not an easy feat. Users often use different accounts spread across different wallets, and switching between them is a well-known pain point.

Our new and improved wallet flow fixes this. You can now connect all your wallets and view all your accounts, allowing you to switch with between them with just a couple of clicks.

This makes it easy to carry out cross-chain transactions, swaps, liquidity provisioning, and more without having to disconnect and reconnect wallets.

Give it a try:
https://app.hydration.net/wallet/assets

Unified Flow for Liquidity Mining

Another area of improvement that was identified from user feedback is the liquidity mining flow. For technical reasons, providing liquidity and joining the available farms for an asset were conducted as separate steps. In practice, we saw that some users unfamiliar with our platform would provide liquidity but forget to join the farms, thereby missing out on liquidity rewards.

For a smoother user experience, our latest push of app improvements has unified this flow. When providing liquidity, LPs now have the Join available farms option on the UI selected by default. This will trigger a flow which asks the users to sign a series of transactions that do it all: Provide the liquidity, and join every available farm.

We also tidied up the liquidity page, replacing the Add Liquidity buttons with Join Farms to avoid confusing users - since one cannot join a farm without first providing liquidity, and one typically doesn't want to provide liquidity without farming rewards.

2nd Wave of Polkadot Hydration Campaign Live

After passing the Hydration Governance, Ref #178 launched the second wave of liquidity incentives from the Polkadot Hydration Campaign which are expected to last for the upcoming ~3 months. The Protocol reconfigured the farms to draw more liquidity to the more successful ones from the first wave, as well as adding a few new ones. As a result, the APRs for LPs have been adjusted.

Here’s a snapshot of the current APRs:

• ASTR - 35%

• BNC - 28%

• CFG - 31%

• DOT - 23%

• vDOT - 7%

• GLMR - 32%

• iBTC or WBTC - 24%

• INTR - 24%

• KILT - 42%

• PHA - 39%

• USDC or USDT - 19%

In the upcoming days we will see the launch of two new farms: vASTR (pending Ref #180) and MYTH-DOT (after the upcoming runtime upgrade to Polkadot v1.11.0).

There is no better time than now to hydrate your bags. Provide liquidity for a single asset only, and earn rewards in 2-3 tokens:
https://app.hydration.net/liquidity/all-pools

Product Features / Cross-chain / Infrastructure

• Money Market

  • Description: Allowing users to lend their assets as collateral to earn fees and borrow assets against those positions - alternatively those collateral positions can be used to mint the stablecoin HOLLAR.

  

  • Notes:

    • Runtime implementation complete pending imminent testnet

    • Additional audits ongoing for Substrate runtime components (EVM bindings)

    • Collaboration booked with Spearbit for audit of AAVE configs and deployment

• HOLLAR Stablecoin

  • Description: Intrinsically linked to the Money Market - HOLLAR stablecoin can be minted by providing collateral.

  

  • Notes:

    • Final specification agreed for Peg Stability Module (PSM)

    • Pending launch of Money Market for further implementation

• Intent Composing Engine [ICE]

  • Description: Order matching of trades, liquidations & OTC orders by off-chain workers in order to maximise efficiency for all users.

  • Github: https://github.com/galacticcouncil/hydration-node/pull/907

  

  • Notes:

    • Runtime implementation ongoing

• Async backing

  • Description: Introduction of async backing allowing for reduction of 12s blocktimes to 6s

  • Github: https://github.com/galacticcouncil/Basilisk-node/pull/672

  

  • Notes:

    • Runtime implementation complete pending final tests

    • Will be deployed to Basilisk prior to Hydration

• Other developments

  • Migration to OpenGov - https://github.com/galacticcouncil/hydration-node/pull/848 - to follow v1.11.0 release

  • Support insufficient assets for fee payments - https://github.com/galacticcouncil/hydration-node/pull/852 - MERGED to master pending release

  • Upgrade to Polkadot v1.11.0 - https://github.com/galacticcouncil/hydration-node/pull/889 - MERGED to master pending release

  • Add insufficient fee support for EVM - https://github.com/galacticcouncil/hydration-node/pull/920

Governance Square

A selection of recent governance proposals

Live

• Ref #180 - Launch vASTR farming

Passed

• Ref #179 - Return funds stuck on Hydration sibling account on Moonbeam

• Ref #178 - Polkadot Hydration - 2nd wave

• Ref #177 - Delegate POL DOT to ChaosDAO

• Ref #176 - Authorize runtime upgrade release v30.0.0

• Ref #175 - Update Omnipool weight caps

• Ref #174 - Prolong existing Polkadot Hydration farms

• Ref #173 - Remove DOT LP & send to staking account

Failed

• Ref #172 - (withdrawn) Please NAY