Excalibur report #1 — Post-launch

After months of development, an extensive audit process, excessive testing and a number of contests, we are finally live!

Now seems to be good timing for a quick overview of all the events that happened since our official AMM launch 10 days ago.

Some numbers

At the time of writing, Excalibur quickly climbed the ladder and is comfortably sitting with a 35M TVL (#10 DEX on Fantom), and generates 3M to 4M of daily trading volume (#5 DEX on Fantom!) after only a week:

Our pools also provide some of the highest APR’s across the whole chain, being for native pairs or stable ones:

This goes along more than 1.4k daily users:

But more importantly, those values must take into account the fact that we’ve yet to be integrated on yield optimizers and swap aggregators!

Fairlaunch

Let’s quickly go back in time and have a talk about our initial liquidity event. It’s safe to say that we received mostly positive feedback, and fairlaunch participants were pleased with how the launch was handled, despite some (understandable) initial skepticism from a part of the community.

One of the specificities of our fairlaunch model was that it went through a public sale, with no fixed selling price for EXC nor any hardcap. No private sale took place and there was no private distribution for the team either. In other words a true fairlaunch where everyone was given the same start. All funds raised were exclusively for Excalibur ecosystem.

We raised over $1,200,000 in FTM during the public sale phase. 50% of raised FTM was used to create liquidity where the other 50% (minus referral program %) was redirected to the dividends treasury to be shared amongst grail holders.

This success has been a real source of pride for the team, as every early participant has effectively been able to be rewarded for their commitment, while still getting some solid shares of the project.

Partnerships

As we always stated, Excalibur will be an ecosystem-oriented DEX, and has been thought and made so that projects can easily plug into it.

It started right before our launch, with strategic partnerships with high-quality launchpads and ventures DAO like Thorstarter, FantomMaker and DEXTForce. While they offered us a larger audience for our public sale, they will also give us opportunities to get in touch with fresh projects launching on Fantom, and plug them into our ecosystem.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, as our team has been actively working on cooperating with all types of platforms, in particular yield optimizers, swap aggregators, lending protocols and others.

$UST Adoption on Fantom

After our proposal successfully won enough votes (https://station.terra.money/proposal/247) from the Terra community, we officially announced our partnership. It’s no secret anymore that we are bringing UST adoption to the Fantom chain and word is certainly spreading around.

7 days after our farming launch, our efforts brought over $10M UST pairs liquidity and over $6M trading volume. Currently our UST liquidity makes up for more than 70% of total UST liquidity on Fantom.

So far UST was integrated natively throughout the platform, with UST pairs (UST/USDC and UST/FTM for now) getting high incentives level in order to attract the deepest liquidity. Those pools are also targeted to maintain the lowest swap fees in comparison to other stablecoins present on the exchange, making UST on Excalibur the lowest friction trading option.

$255k of UST incentives coming from the Terra community will also be distributed over 3 months. Those incentives will then be directed to time-locked stakers in the UST pools, encouraging deep predictable liquidity. Incentives will be introduced in the coming weeks, along with the exact allocation terms.

More generally, Excalibur will keep on working with its partners to promote UST as much as possible, making it the #1 stable option on Fantom!

GRAILwars

One of the main features and backbone of Excalibur yield farming, the dual-token rewards system, has definitely proved its worth.

GRAILwars got off to a flying start and already led to a fierce battle for grail shares!

Even with limited swap fees due to our pending integration on aggregators, we already managed to balance the dividends distribution with the entering fees, while still keeping a huge added profitability to GRAIL.

We’ll continue on this path, and will aim to progressively increase the distribution as the swap volume on Excalibur goes up, counterbalancing the progressive supply growth.

To find out more on how to join GRAILwars and how dividends works

Time vaults

One of our core features that got widely praised by our community is time vault staking, giving the opportunity to our users to establish way more profitable yield farming strategies.

Contrary to traditional staking, users can choose a lock duration during which they will be unable to withdraw their deposit. In exchange, they will receive additional farming rewards. The longer the lock, the more bonus rewards will be earned, up to 50% for 30 days.

The existence of two lock slots (along a third one for classic deposits) offers the possibility to refine one’s staking strategy, by making two simultaneous deposits with different lock durations and amounts (counting three with the regular slot).

To find out more about our time vaults

AMM — Swap fees & trans-fee mining

While our implementation of custom swap fees for each pair will truly shine once we’ll be up on aggregators, the first week was a perfect opportunity to display its worth: the ability of setting our native pair to 1% (and to burn the collected EXC), while keeping the friction on stable pairs to its minimum, has been key to reach our current level of traffic volume.

To find out more about customizable swap fees

We also ran our first Trading Festival, which we used to make a trial run of our trans-fee mining feature. This was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how powerful this feature can be in the future, with the possibility to create some special incentivized trading campaigns on specific pairs.

To find out more about transaction fee mining

Marketing overview

In a market having so many fresh projects launching everyday, we perfectly know how much marketing and social communication is an absolute key to success that should never be neglected.

One of the key moves was our partnerships with some well-established and popular platforms like Thorstarter, FantomMaker or DextForce, and of course our collaboration with the Terra community which brought us great exposure.

Since our launch we ran various adverts on targeted defi apps, including for instance Dextools and ape o’clock, and cooperated with various social advertising companies to earn visibility on social media.
We’ve organized a number of twitter giveaways and special events in a constant effort to maximize our exposure.

Marketing also includes minor advertising/data platforms we have been listed on:
Dappradar, Dapp ,Ape O’clock, Rugdoc, CoinHunt, CoinAlpha, GemHunters, Coinseek, Feedback, CoinVote, CoinMooner, CoinHunters, Cntoken, GemFinder, Cointoplist…

As it was asked multiple times, CoinGecko and CMC listings are still being reviewed but have already been submitted since our launch, so hopefully should be finalized very soon!

Tools integration

To provide extra utility and convenience to Excalibur we’ve been integrated on DeBank, FarmScan, DexScreener, DeXTools and DefiLlama.

We are actively working to collaborate with more tools that will benefit Excalibur users, many more utility platforms will be announced in the coming weeks.

What’s next?

While not being exhaustive, the following list is about our priorities for the coming week:

1. Ecosystem
Our team has been working behind the scenes on many collaborations, with an absolute focus on yield optimizers and swap aggregators. Integrating with these platforms will be one of the key elements to bring more liquidity to Excalibur and exposure to our pools.

2. Governance
Soon community members will be able to use their GRAIL as a governance token, voting for official proposals.
The launch of the governance will arrive in the next few days, along with the very first proposal! It seems some rumors have been pointing to an important UST pair…

3. Bonding
We’ll soon run a live test of this feature through our first bonding campaign. The authorized amount will be very limited, but will give an opportunity for everyone to get a grasp on its functioning.

4. Double incentives mechanism
We’ve been working on a fresh implementation that will allow us to distribute double incentives to users filling some specific conditions, for instance having locked liquidity for a certain amount of time.
It will need to be submitted to Paladin for a fresh audit, and will be released just after, to be immediately put to use with the Terra incentives distribution.

Many other good news will be announced as we go along, so stay tuned!

Our journey is just beginning… only for the Worthy!

App: https://app.excalibur.exchange
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ExcaliburDefi
Discord: https://discord.gg/2rWjcZr3Kf
Main Telegram: https://t.me/excaliburexchange
Announcement Telegram: https://t.me/excaliburexchangeann
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/excaliburexchange