2022 Year in Review - A Brief History of Aqualis

over 1 year ago

Greetings Aqualiens, hope you have all had a great holiday period and happy new year! We have had a short break here at Aqualis as well, but now it's back to work building the most efficient DeFi platform in existence!

Before we announce our new updated 2023 roadmap, we wanted to take some time to look back at what we have accomplished in 2022, arguably the most turbulent year for crypto so far.

How Aqualis all started
Building our first smart contracts
Hosting our first sale
Community growth
Tokenomics updates
Closing remarks

How Aqualis all Started

From as far back as 2021, I had been toying with the idea of a DeFi protocol that focused on efficiency with sustainable tokenomics built for the future. Personally, I had been bothered by AMMs charging hefty fees for trades, suffering from frontrun bots and huge price impacts for large stablecoin trades and lastly, the under utilization of funds in large liquidity pools and lending protocols. These were all issues I wanted to solve but with no team, no plan and no idea how to code, I simply let it remain a pipe dream.

It wasn't until December 2021 that I had learnt how to code in Solidity. I built and presented the Aqualis prototype, known as StableSwap back then, to an audience at an online FinTech Program's final presentation taught by Dr Alan Downes, the current head of R&D at Aqualis. This is also where I had met Harold Lucero as a guest listener, who is now the co-founder of Aqualis.

Captivated by the idea, Harold and I began conversations after the presentation and ultimately; Aqualis was born!

Building our First Smart Contracts

The prototype I initially built was unfortunately just that, a mere prototype with no gas optimization nor security considerations. This had to be rebuilt by our developer Takeshi, who is now also in charge of our frontend (to be released for public testing soon!).

Since then, we have made advances in optimizing the MALP, our staking smart contract and establishing connectivity with Snapshot for governance. Lately, we have been focusing on creating our own lending smart contract forked from Aave. Despite the open source nature of Aave, understanding, testing and integrating 210 smart contracts with the MALP has taken considerable time. However, this is now finally nearing completion!

Beyond smart contracts, the team have set up the infrastructure for our web hosting, frontend design and frontend development, all of which necessary for the smart contracts to be usable.

Hosting our First Sale

Earlier this year, we hosted our whitelist sale. Despite initial enthusiasm, the interest had unfortunately subsided considerably by the time the sale actually started and we ended up raising a total of $18.2k USDC. In hindsight, our delay in launching the sale and the FTX crash happening merely days prior definitely did not help with the sale's results.

Ultimately, the team took this process as a lesson, learning a lot from this experience which will be utilized over future sales.

Community Growth

In preparation for our whitelist sale, the Aqualis team initiated our first marketing push. As a result, we have more than doubled our Discord members and Twitter followers. Furthermore, this allowed the team to connect with a wide range of people, some of whom are still actively helping us today!

As part of the marketing push, Aqualis has created our very own Splinterlands guild. Thanks to the management of @angelwithashotty, we are now a top 60 guild in Splinterlands and consistently growing.

Tokenomics Updates

Due to the market conditions, Aqualis has undergone 2 major tokenomics updates, both of which included the reduction of token price to match the current market conditions. More information can be found here (first update) and here (latest update).

In summary, the price of Aqualis tokens have been heavily reduced, matching the price action of major cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH. Furthermore, due to efficient development of the protocol, the team has spent farm less tokens than anticipated thus the AQL token allocations have been shifted dramatically towards the community. Overall, these are extremely beneficial updates to any contributor and community member.

Closing Remarks

Looking back, 2022 has been a massive year for Aqualis with development across our core fundamentals. However, 2023 is the year to accelerate this development and deliver our product to market. We will be releasing our 2023 roadmap shortly which will feature our planned launch dates, public sale, new features and more!