Zircon Product and Strategy Update, November 2022: Going Cross-Chain, More Upgrades, Details on Zircon Pro

Pivotal change of plans for the upcoming year 2023

The crypto market situation and FTX’s dramatic collapse is making everyone uneasy. There’s fears of massive contagion, that every exchange will fail, that crypto is never going to recover…

This is really typical of a late stage bear market. The old mainstream narrative breaks and people learn harsh lessons they’ve forgotten during the bull market excesses. Who’s left to pick up the pieces sets the stage for the next cycle.

We hope the next cycle will be quietly thundering, just like the internet was in the mid-2000s, after the Dot-com crash. That “cycle” wasn’t marked by speculation: assets went up because more and more people found the internet to be useful. This time we expect it will be the same for crypto.

No one knows what crypto will look like in the future, but one thing we can expect for sure: people will like decentralized exchanges much more. With them, you always know what to expect, because it’s written in its code. 

Once the technical quirks that make it really difficult to use DEXs are fixed, there will be essentially no reason to use centralized exchanges, ever. The only exception might be for fiat-to-crypto gateways, but that’s really it.

And that is the Zircon vision: creating fully decentralized, user-friendly and complete crypto investment solutions that are better than anything offered by centralized products.

We understand that doing this isn’t about finding the right concentrated liquidity bonding curve, or the most efficient veTokenomics. It’s about creating the best possible product for crypto enthusiasts like us.

---

Zircon Values Put into Action

Now let’s get down to business. Earlier this year we’ve launched Zircon Gamma on Moonriver. This was initially designed as an experimentation ground to launch our new system. In that sense, Moonriver was amazing for us.

But we know that too many projects on Kusama and Moonriver suffer from abandonment issues. Teams create two apps/networks that often have the same product, the same roadmap, but two different tokens. As a result, the smaller “canary” community just gets left behind.

Zircon is committed to changing this unhealthy trend.
Here’s how we can define the two versions from now on:

• Zircon Gamma is a simple-to-use “Lite” version of our product with a stronger focus on P2P, composability with other projects and immutability. Good news is you still access most of the cool innovations developed by Zircon Labs.

• Zircon Pro is the ultimate DEX. The place where active traders feel at home, and don’t need to look for anything else. This also means it will be a more complex exchange, which isn’t for everyone.

We see Gamma and Pro having different niches and different blockchain deployments. For some chains, Pro makes more sense, while for others it’s Gamma. Hence the changes that are coming.

---

Going Cross-Chain with Gamma

As planned, we are preparing to introduce our own DEX to a wider range of blockchains. But unlike the initial idea of starting this with Zircon Pro, we’ve decided to advance the timing a bit. The first cross-chain deployment of Gamma is coming in a few weeks. Expect it most likely to be in the beginning of 2023.

A little heads-up: this new Gamma deployment won’t be on Moonbeam.

We are in the process of releasing an upgrade to our systems, which incorporates lessons learned in our Moonriver deployment. After this update, our system will be ready to go cross-chain and offer single-sided liquidity pools to projects on Moonriver and beyond.

---

Product Roadmap & Zircon Pro Features

Our Pylon system has proven itself as an effective platform to perform no-slippage swaps. This feature is a natural outcome of how we’ve designed the systems to provide liquidity.

Right now, the flow is a bit awkward: you need to supply liquidity and then burn it, requiring two separate operations. With a few tweaks, in the future users will be able to do this with one click. The amount of liquidity you can swap will of course depend on the size of the pool’s token reserves at that time.

The no-slippage swap will work like a decentralized OTC trade. You will be paying a higher base fee, plus a dynamic fee based on the price deviation from the last few blocks. This is to ensure that MEV bots don’t extract too much value from these trades and result in large impermanent loss, which helps Pylon liquidity providers.

The more stable the price is, the cheaper you can swap with no slippage. For small amounts, the traditional swap remains the cheapest.

Zircon Pro & the Account NFT

The Pro version of our exchange will feature a deeper account integration for users. While the basic features will be available without any setup, the Account NFT will give users extra tools such as:

• Easy one-click access to leveraged positions for 4x leverage or more

• Ability to sell your account, or just your network of referred users

• More benefits, such as fee discounts and airdrops

The Account NFT will be fully decentralized and won’t be required to use the platform. It will unlock a new experience with DEXs, and form the basis of many future improvements and social integrations.

Additionally, in our previous update we’ve promised to implement token governance on Zircon Gamma and expand the token list with more tokens of the Moonriver and Kusama ecosystems. Once we release the next Pylon update, these will be the major priorities for Gamma. We’re rapidly expanding our team in order to keep up with our ambitious plans.

In this regard, if you have previous experience in the crypto industry, and you want to join the Zircon Team you might want to send your CV to: hello@zircon.finance

We are especially looking for talented financial engineers/quantitative analysts and frontend/Solidity developers, but all roles will be reviewed.

Stay tuned to our social media and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog.