Aggregators have become an integral part of DeFi Lego.
Unlike basic businesses with clear scenarios such as lending and decentralized exchanges (DEX), the concept of "aggregator" sounds a little hard-core at first glance, and the market has not given enough clear and vertical divisions for such projects. Yearn.finance, which provides income aggregation, 1inch, which provides DEX transaction aggregation, Armor, which provides insurance aggregation, and even DeBank, which provides information aggregation, are often called “aggregators”. If you want to find something in common from these projects to give a clearer definition of the aggregator track, perhaps it can be summed up like this - "aggregate the resources of all projects of the same type, and provide services that best suit the interests of users."
Taking the DEX transaction aggregation project as an example, the significance of this type of service (DEX transaction aggregation) is to aggregate liquidity resources scattered in major DEXs, to find the best trading path for users, and to provide the most reasonable quotations. Since the turn of summer and autumn last year, the DeFi ecology of Ethereum suddenly exploded, and countless DEX projects emerged one after another, and the liquidity was also scattered among different DEXs. Since most mainstream DEXs adopted the AMM mechanism, prices within different DEXs inevitably existed. In addition, the price will fluctuate in real time, and it is difficult for users to find the most suitable transaction price. 1inch took advantage of this pain point and rose at that time.
However, with the evolution of the market, the needs of transaction aggregation have actually changed.
There are two reasons for this. First, with the rise of new public chains such as BSC and Solana, liquidity is no longer just scattered in the Ethereum ecosystem, and the demand for multi-ecological aggregation has begun to appear; as for the second reason, the idea comes from OpenOcean, a rising star in the aggregation track. The project jumped out of the DeFi thinking cage, believing that compared with DEX, greater liquidity is actually scattered within the centralized exchange (CEX), so it is necessary to break down the barriers between the two and aggregate more liquidity resource.
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Rising star OpenOcean
On March 9, OpenOcean announced the completion ofstrategic financing, this round of financing was led by Binance, with participation from Multicoin Capital, LD Capital, CMS Holdings, Kenetic, and Altonomy. It is worth mentioning that this is the first investment case jointly disclosed by both parties since Binance’s strategic investment in Multicoin Capital on March 2.
OpenOcean is positioned as a "full aggregation protocol". The initial stage aims to aggregate liquidity scattered within DEX and CEX, and become a one-stop trading portal that provides the best price and lowest slippage. Although it is a latecomer, OpenOcean has performed quite well on the data side. The picture below shows the real-time statistical data of DappRadar at 17:00 on March 10. OpenOcean has not yet issued tokens and relatively lacks incentives. It has already ranked among the top trading DeFi projects. Over the past 30 days, DappRadar has 57,902 active users who have executed 180,000 transactions worth $430 million.
It can be seen from the figure that DappRadar classified OpenOcean under the BSC ecological name, but in fact this classification is not accurate. As mentioned above, the demand for multi-ecological aggregation has emerged. After realizing this trend, 1inch, the leader in the track, announced its plan to deploy it on the BSC chain on February 26. What is little known is that OpenOcean’s action is actually much faster than 1inch. As early as last year’s Q4, OpenOcean has completed the deployment on the three public chains of Ethereum, BSC, and Ontology. This year’s Q1 expanded its footprint to the TRON chain superior. With the cross-chain technology of Poly Network and Binance Bridge, OpenOcean can support the direct exchange of assets between different public chains.
At present, OpenOcean has integrated mainstream DEX applications such as Uniswap, SushiSwap, Curve, Balancer, Kyber, Mooniswap, Oasis on Ethereum; it has integrated mainstream DEX applications such as BakerySwap, BurgerSwap, PancakeSwap, StreetSwap, Unifi, and Acryptos in BSC; Innoswap and Unifi are integrated on TRON; Justswap and USwap are integrated on TRON.
On March 11, OpenOcean announced that it has reached a strategic cooperation with Zenlink, a cross-chain decentralized trading network based on Polkadot, and has taken the first step towards Polkadot ecological aggregation. In the future, OpenOcean will continue to expand to new ecosystems such as Solana and Ethereum Layer 2, and continue to integrate DEX applications in these ecosystems.
As for the second change in demand for transaction aggregation, OpenOcean has now integrated Binance’s spot trading service. Currently, on the left side of the interface of the OpenOcean pro version, users can see the price comparison between Binance and major DEXs. In the future, OpenOcean will continue to aggregate Coinbase, Deribit, Huobi and other leading centralized exchanges, and integrate spot and even derivatives trading services.
The reason for the above product design all stems from the pain point of encrypted asset trading that OpenOcean has seen and felt - information fragmentation and asymmetry. The founding team of OpenOcean stated to:"Our vision is to provide traders with a bridge connecting the isolated islands of DeFi and CeFi transactions through full aggregation. In the current fragmented trading market, by providing a one-stop trading portal with symmetrical price information and all mainstream asset types can be traded, individual and institutional investors can trade at the best price and use their own investment strategy, and ultimately form an ecosystem that is beneficial to all types of users."
In this regard, OpenOcean's strategic investors have also added. Mable Jiang, partner of Multicoin Capital, said that until OpenOcean, there was no ready-made trading platform on the market that could compare the quotations on major DEXs and CEXs at the same time, and the emergence of OpenOcean has filled this gap in the market. Bobby Cho, a partner of CMS Holdings, another participating institution, also pointed out that through its improved search engine and path algorithm, OpenOcean can well solve the liquidity fragmentation problem faced by traders and become a new platform to improve the transparency of cryptocurrency transactions. infrastructure.
If you want to understand the OpenOcean experience more intuitively, you might as well try to interact with it yourself, maybe there are surprises waiting for you (see the third part of the article for details).
Open the official website link of OpenOcean「https://openocean.finance/", you can see the access channels of two different versions of "Pro" and "Classic". The difference between the two versions is that the trading interface of the Classic version is relatively simple, which is suitable for users who are accustomed to directly performing flash swap operations on major DEXs; the Pro version provides a clearer trading interface and K-line, and also Provides price comparisons between different platforms (DEXs, CEXs), which can help more professional traders capture market changes in real time and find potential arbitrage opportunities.
As shown in the figure above, the UI design of the OpenOcean Pro version is very clear. Users can directly switch the underlying public chain at the far left of the interface, and move to the right in turn. The main sections are each DEX and CEX (currently only Binance) Real-time quotation comparison, the price trend of the specified trading pair, and the trading operation window.
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Transaction Aggregation, Just the Beginning
Although it has achieved good results in the transaction aggregation business, OpenOcean is not complacent. The official roadmap shows that in the next few quarters, OpenOcean will continue to expand aggregation services in other business areas.
The complete roadmap of OpenOcean is planned as follows:
2020 Q3 & Q4 (Southern Ocean version): Aggregate DEX applications on Ethereum, BSC, and Ontology; become the first DEX aggregator on BSC; launch cross-swap function.
2021 Q1 (Indian Ocean version): Access more mainstream public chains (Tron, Solana, etc.), support more mainstream wallets; aggregate centralized exchange spot transactions (Binance); issue governance token OOE and start liquidity mining mine.
2021 Q2 & Q3 (Atlantic version): Continue to aggregate decentralized exchanges on mainstream public chains; aggregate USDT-based contract trading services of centralized exchanges.
2021 Q3 & Q4 (Atlantic version): aggregate more derivatives services from centralized exchanges, such as currency-based contracts; aggregate decentralized derivatives exchanges.
2022 Q1 & Q2 (Atlantic version): Aggregate more derivatives services from centralized exchanges, such as options trading services; introduce cross-exchange portfolio margin trading services.
2022 Q3 & Q4: (Pacific version): Provide revenue aggregation, lending aggregation, and insurance aggregation services to create an OpenOcean ecosystem.
2023 Q2 & Q3 (public sea version): launch a smart investment advisory service that can cover CeFi and DeFi.
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OOE, the next big red envelope?
Careful friends may find that there is actually a "wealth code" hidden in the roadmap in the previous part-OpenOcean said that it will issue the governance token OOE and start liquidity mining in the first quarter of 2021.
As of this writing, OpenOcean has not yet officially released its governance token OOE. As the first quarter is coming to an end, OpenOcean has also launched a round of small-scale pre-airdrop activities for launching Chinese communities on March 9. The official release of OOE seems to be It is not far away, and a larger airdrop may also be brewing.
Since OOE has not yet been officially issued, it is difficult for us to know its specific economic model, but according to the official disclosure, the value of OOE will be reflected in two aspects: governance tokens and functional tokens. Specifically, holding OOE will have the opportunity to participate in the future development and governance of the protocol itself. In addition, OOE can also be used for slippage compensation, Gas tokens (similar to 1inch CHI) and some advanced transaction functions. Can participate in corresponding liquidity mining activities.
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Aggregator's Imagination Boundaries
On the whole, OpenOcean is quite good in terms of product design, data performance, and capital background, but the most impressive thing is that under the background that the leader in the transaction aggregation track has emerged and the market structure is suspected to be solidified, Whether it is the vertical cultivation of integrating more ecological or centralized resources, or the horizontal expansion of extending to other types of aggregation services, OpenOcean has been broadening the imaginative boundaries of "aggregator" services.
We believe that with the deepening of the bull market, the in-depth development and horizontal expansion of high-quality projects will become a powerful weapon for them to seize the market.
