QuickSwap lets users avoid Ethereum transaction fees with Polygon

As Ethereum gas prices rise, the chain that inspired Web3 is gentrifying, with high transaction costs pushing less wealthy users to competing blockchains or scalable solutions.

This means that many use cases are becoming infeasible in the proverbial layer one inner city, and suburban neighborhoods are being developed to enable a profitable layer two blockchain experience.

Ever since he became familiar with Polygon at the time of its release in late 2019, Sameep Singhania has been an avid supporter of protocol-based projects. In 2021, he created QuickSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) serving the needs of the nascent Polygon ecosystem.

Singhania left a promising career as a software developer in 2017 to work as a freelance developer, only to find himself writing code for a variety of layer-two and DeFi blockchain projects. Among the many projects he worked on, he spent 18 months with the blockchain e-commerce site OpenBazaar and served as lead developer for the DeFi exchange ParaSwap.

Polygon is a layer two solution based on Ethereum, offering users lower fees when transacting on-chain. QuickSwap is Polygon's main DEX and functions as the heart of the network.

A DEX for polygon

After working on perhaps dozens of projects at Polygon from 2019 onwards, Singhania "realized that in order to grow the Polygon ecosystem, we need a DEX."

This was because while "99% of blockchain projects have a token", listings on popular exchanges are not easy to organize, and many users are unwilling to create an account on an unknown exchange alone. to exchange a particular token that is not listed anywhere else. . A DEX can function as the central marketplace of a blockchain network, giving its users access to everything they need without having to venture to another chain.

Singhania recalls being encouraged to create a DEX by Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, who put him in touch with Roc Zacharias, a Lunar Digital Assets trader. "That's how we built a team: We had developers, we had a marketing team, a perfect match, and we launched the app," he explains.

Polygon, formerly called Red Matic, with MATIC being its symbol, is a layer two blockchain. That means it is a blockchain built on top of an existing chain. While Lighting is an example of a layer two, or L2, based on Bitcoin, Polygon is based on Ethereum. As a result, Polygon-based tokens can be sent to Ethereum addresses, whose users can retrieve them simply by switching to the Polygon network in a DApp like MetaMask.

The oft-mentioned advantage of L2 solutions is that they are more agile than their giant parents, allowing for faster and cheaper transactions. with Bitcoin proceedings costing more than $10 and taking approximately 10 minutes for the first of six confirmations, it is clear that transacting on the main chain is not practical for day-to-day transactions in El Salvador, for example, where workers can earn as little as $100 per month. Instead, Salvadorans use Bitcoin Lighting, whose transactions cost as little as 1 satoshi.

Transaction costs on the Ethereum network are much higher, making it "unusable for small users" who are effectively starting price of using DeFi solutions or decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. In January 2021, a “normal Ethereum transaction on Uniswap was around $100,” Singhania recalls.

"If I'm a normal user and I want to do a small transaction, I can't do it on Ethereum - the average transaction size on Uniswap is around $50,000."

“Polygon is there to scale Ethereum,” Singhania says, which has its pros and cons. He further explains that while "Ethereum is the most secure solution out there", it comes at the cost of high gas fees and relatively slow transaction times.

That's not exactly desirable for an economy: smaller denominations of currency exist because not everything can be done with $100 bills. L2s are the answer to enabling smaller transactions on existing networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. On Polygon, users can trade Ethereum-based tokens, NFTs, and interact with smart contracts cheaply.

📣 LIVE NOW: @mcuban, @hackapreneur, @CryptoRocky, @AaveAave, & @0xPolygonspeak at Polygon Power Hour!

- @mcuban "People are probably much more active on Aave and QuickSwap on Polygon than they are on the Ethereum L1 versions" – Mark Cubanhttps://t.co/99rGSoa04U pic.twitter.com/ySjxu049td

— QuickSwap (@QuickswapDEX) June 15, 2021

The pressing need for L2 is relatively new, because transaction costs have risen significantly in the last couple of years along with the blockchain user base. At QuickSwap, transactions between the more than 23,000 available pairs cost just pennies. “Basically, you can use QuickSwap to swap any ERC-20 token that has liquidity and exists on the Polygon network,” says Singhania. The fees are naturally paid in MATIC.

Considering the savings, switching digital assets from Ethereum to Polygon seems like an obvious solution for many users. However, some activities, such as six-figure NFT trading, remain decidedly outside the Polygonian suburb. Similarly, Singhania acknowledges that those who transact in the millions have less to gain from Polygon.

There are two main ways to move assets to Polygon, according to Singhania: exchange withdrawals and bridging. "Many big exchanges like Binance support deposits and withdrawals on the Polygon network," meaning the Ethereum network can be avoided entirely. As for assets that are already on Ethereum instead of on a centralized exchange, they can be bridged, which is effectively a transfer between blockchains.

"Both L1 and L2 applications have their own advantages and disadvantages and both have their use cases, now it's up to the user to choose which platform best suits their needs."

learning the ropes

Singhania, 31, grew up in India's capital, New Delhi. He had an early passion for coding since high school, describing the coding process "as if it happened by magic", whereby "wonderful things" could be created with just a few lines of code. He followed his passion in 2008 to the JSS Academy of Technical Education, just outside the capital, where he completed a bachelor's degree in computer science and served as an IBM ambassador on campus.

A 2013 graduate, he began his career in software testing and automation at Dell, but soon realized he wanted to "focus more on development" rather than remain a software tester, a role with fewer opportunities for creative input. for the rest of his professional career. He made the switch to software developer in 2015 at Drishti-soft Solutions, where he worked on customer service software and organized web development training sessions.

Still not quite settled in the role and looking for "something I'm not bored with," Singhania turned to freelancing software in 2017. "When you freelance, you meet a lot of people and learn about a lot of new industries and domains. he recalls, noting that he eventually took an interest in his work. One of these new industries was blockchain, which he had previously heard about while working as a developer.

“Again I came across this blockchain and Bitcoin stuff while looking for a project so I decided to give it some more time and do some more research to find out 'what is this Bitcoin? What is this blockchain?'”

As of mid-2018, Singhania was a full-time blockchain engineer for a number of projects, including Akila Labs, Bitgrit, and Toptal, where he developed ERC-20 tokens and smart contracts for things like airdrops, token vesting, and crowdsales. Notable among this was 18 months spent working with the decentralized marketplace startup open bazaar, "which was trying to build something very similar to Amazon, but on the blockchain" using the peer-to-peer interplanetary file system (IPFS), recalls Singhania with emotion.

compound knowledge

“When DeFi was just getting started” in 2018, Singhania worked as a lead developer and first employee of For Swap, a DApp aggregator that brings together multiple DEXs so that users can seamlessly trade cryptocurrency pairs that do not exist together on any exchange. All of this trading is done through Singhania's smart contracts, which "handle millions of dollars every day," he says proudly, adding that the platform recorded $3.3 billion in volume last month.

“That project allowed me to get into DeFi; He basically introduced me to everything out there, like Uniswap, Bancor, Kyber Network, because to build ParaSwap we needed to learn everything about DeFi.”

With DeFi under his belt, Singhania found layer two blockchain solutions while working on a dice game for one of his clients, a blockchain casino.

He soon realized that "it was too expensive to do it on Ethereum," even though 2019 gas rates were a fraction of what they are today. Something new was needed, and Singhania "began exploring layer two solutions," he recalls. He first built his dice game on the now defunct layer one Loom Network which closed shortly after, Singhania explored the Matic Network, which as of late 2019 was "very new and its mainnet was not launched". Working with the team at Matic Network, now called Polygon, Singhania got the dice game up and running and became familiar with the Polygon network in the process.

Ethereum dice games are not the first to suffer from scaling issues. Erik Voorhees' Satoshi SAYS, for example, it launched in 2012 and soon accounted for more than half of Bitcoin transactions. With transaction prices rising, placing small on-chain bets on the main layer of Bitcoin has since become impractical.

.@QuickswapDEX has shown tremendous growth in Polygon PoS and has become the largest native Polygon decentralized application in terms of users, TVL and volume.

We are offering them 1 million dollars in liquidity extraction incentives to strengthen the liquidity of the platform.

🌐:https://t.co/Z3fb8BOCmw pic.twitter.com/gHN9ZL89U6

— Polygon | $MATIC 💜 (@0xPolygon) September 30, 2021

Incorporating the next generation

Now that Polygon is a low-cost option for L1 and has a reliable DEX, Singhania believes that the next step in scaling the layer is to improve the user experience so that it is easy to use for millions of people who are new to cryptocurrencies. . Since QuickSwap is a central point of the Polygon ecosystem, much of the responsibility falls on their shoulders.

"The way things are designed right now, it's not for a novice, it's for a well-trained crypto user."

In Singhania's opinion, the price of MATIC can be expected to follow the adoption of the Polygon layer. If the team continues to execute, "it's only a matter of time" before prices start steadily rising. One thing is clear: Singhania is no longer bored with his work and "isn't doing any kind of freelance work because I don't have time."