Canto: A DEX With No Fees?
Here is my note from the interview between @chjango and Scott Lewis - contributor of Canto, a blockchain designed to support Free Public Infrastructure with zero fees DEX. The episode can be viewed here
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1. How Scott get into crypto?
2016: Felt down Ethereum rabbit hole.
2017: Created a public service to research ICO scams. Founded @SlingshotCrypto - a DEX aggregator and designed Canto mechanism.
2021: Started building Canto.
2. What is Canto?
L1 Cosmos SDK chain - a fork of Evmos.
Try to solve the monopolization & economic sustainability without having a token problem of the application layer on Ethereum by launching 3 DeFi primitives:
Lending Market: a fork of Compound V2.
Canto DEX: a zero fee DEX - Solidly fork.
$NOTE: a unit of account, soft-peg to $USDT and $USDC.
No team or organization is responsible for Canto. Instead, Canto DAO controls the free public infrastructure.
3. Why do you build Canto?
Blockchains are like cities, which consist of:
Private enterprises
Free public infrastructures
Canto DEX’s vision: no protocol fees and also no LP fees ⇒ Free public infrastructures where liquidity providers are incentivized by the city.
4. Is $NOTE a stable token?
Not a stablecoin since there is no mechanism to redeem for USD. Users can put in collaterals and borrow $NOTE against them. It is co-integrated with the dollar by:
Increase the interest rate if it is below USD.
Decrease the interest rate if it is above USD.
just as central banks around the world. The interest rate change for $NOTE is done automatically every 6h by 0.25 of the difference between the price of $NOTE and $1.00.
The mechanism hasn’t been battle-tested and is experimental.
5. How to incentivize people to build on Canto?
The spirit of Canto is kinda like Bitcoin with code release and thought posted on the message board. If people like it, they will use and build on top of it.
6. 3 most successful communities?
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cosmos. These are the least corporate. Scott thinks blockchains are not businesses. When cooperations (e.g. VCs) try to attract people to use a specific chain, that chain will lose collectivism and voluntary spirit. Users will migrate to another chain with better incentives shortly after that.
7. On current financial system
Global financial systems are running on opaque, private by default, and hidden balance sheets by institutions. Can we show a better, and more transparent system can work and eliminate the boom and bust cycles?
⇒ DeFi and blockchains allow all market participants to audit the project in real time. Ethereum may solve that & Scott hopes Canto could be a part of it too.
8. How to protect DeFi users?
In favor of regulation of DeFi, such as DeFi contracts need to be audited as a standard.
9. On integration with other projects
Canto doesn’t care about integration but focuses on building and making it cool enough for people to want to be a part of it.