Traders on AirSwap continue to use the original Swap contract deployed years ago. It does one job well: to swap tokens and ether. Immutable like any smart contract, it will continue to support applications that fit.

Setting a course

Since then, we’ve seen both needs and opportunities to expand its capabilities and deploy new protocol elements as smart contracts. Already, the components of trade — custody, execution, and settlement — are decentralized through a peer-to-peer design, our founding principle.

Our goal is to take flight — to become open, transparent, and immutable. Combined with an overall aim to bolster liquidity through both online and onchain peers, our goal to take flight also includes more open source development and decentralized indexing capabilities.

New features for Swap

We’ve maintained the same simplicity that makes the Swap Protocol elegant. We’ve added support for more token and signature types, improved efficiency, and added two powerful new features: affiliates and authorizations.

Token types include ERC-20 and ERC-721 (NFT) with a path to supporting more standards over time. Signature types include both standard and ERC-712 (typed) for improved wallet usability and transparency. All signatures are now more secure by implementing EIP-191.

Affiliates are third-parties compensated for their part in bringing together two parties making a trade. These come into play if a transaction is facilitated by a third-party or a software application helps to connect its users to other traders on the network.

Authorizations are for peers that trade on behalf of others. These peers are authorized for either side of a trade, and can be wallets (people or programs) or smart contracts, opening a new world of integration possibilities.

See the Swap source code on GitHub.

We take quality and security seriously. We maintain unit and integration tests for full coverage, and have performed an internal audit by our team at Fluidity with the support of researcher and advisor Phil Daian.

See the Swap Security Report on GitHub.

New decentralized indexers

We envision a future of many indexers, supporting makers of many kinds. An indexer employs a token for staking, a necessary utility to give makers an opportunity to be among the first returned when the indexer is queried.

For example, an application like AirSwap Instant may be interested in querying a maximum of 20 prospective makers at a time. By staking variable amounts of AirSwap Token, makers can ensure that they are included among those results and able to provide that liquidity.

In the future, an indexer could be deployed for IPFS hashes that resolve to arbitrary URLs for makers that live around the web at various endpoints speaking various protocols. We think the new indexer design both fits this wide open future and matches our original vision well.

See the Indexer source code on GitHub.

New onchain liquidity

The authorization feature enables traders to deploy smart contracts that implement the Peer Protocol and trade on their behalf. The simplest form of this is rules that effectively provide limit orders and partial fills. Others can include arbitrary logic and integrations with other liquidity sources.

See the Delegate source on GitHub. For demonstration only.

The AirSwap network today, comprised of automated makers and trading desks, does a great job covering higher liquidity assets and large over-the-counter trades. Onchain liquidity now lets everyday people and token teams participate without having to run online maker software.

In combination with existing automated makers and trading desks, we think this solution fills the long tail of liquidity completes the picture.

Active open source development

Today we’ve published our complete protocols repository for review and contribution. You’ll find our team there — Deepa Sathaye, Ethan Wessel, Alice Henshaw, and Don Mosites— actively developing new features and performing ongoing security and performance analysis. We welcome your thoughts and contributions and look forward to continued growth as we pursue an immutable and transparent future.

Coming up next

This week, we released AirSwap Trader using the new Swap contract in production. Our upcoming goals are to complete and deploy a new indexer for AirSwap Instant, and then to complete the onchain peer system.

We’ll soon publish a bug bounty for the Swap contract so stay tuned. To discuss the new AirSwap Protocols repository and roadmap, please join our team on the new AirSwap server on Discord. We’re looking forward to it.