cBridge 2.0: Launch Celer-bration & Agenda

Celer Improvement Proposals
#1

cBridge 2.0: Launch Celer-bration & Agenda

Overview

The team is no doubt all hands on deck for cBridge 2.0. Its launch will be a momentous achievement. However, we’re now deep into the DeFi season and there’s a ton of catching up to do versus competitors. Below, I list out my view of what a strong post-launch could look like for cBridge 2.0.

The purpose of this post is to start a conversation about what’s important and how the community can contribute, so please reply with your views!

1. Launch Celer-bration

cBridge 2.0’s launch event needs to be big. To maximise the flywheel between CELR rewards, liquidity, and public attention, it’s important to get the PR going continuously. As a community, we can help by signal boosting tweets, articles and news. Even better, we can help by browsing Reddit, Twitter, Discord servers and Telegram groups and search for instances of “bridge” or “bridging”, and point out cBridge as needed if it can serve users in need (helping in this case, not shilling).

On Celer’s end, ideally there’d be new tokens and/or chains (or simply announcements about them) being broadcasted frequently, in order to continue this flywheel of growth.

2. DeFi visibility

With an expected rise in TVL, cBridge should be listed on directories including Defillama and Apeboard bridges (cBridge is currently on Apeboard, but not all routes are listed). cBridge should also list on Cryptofees as it explicitly becomes a protocol that earns fees (Hop is already on there).

3. New Tokens

With the new bridge design, hopefully adding new tokens is simple, as there are many to add!

Importantly, new stablecoins have reached billions in market size and continue to grow. In particular: $UST ($3.5BN) and $MIM ($2.6BN). Both currently have multi-chain strategies. Even if they don’t drive as much volume as the classic stables, they’re a key point of focus for this DeFi season. See Appendix below for easy reference to their contracts.

Native ETH support is also badly needed for ETH-gas rollups such as Optimism and Arbitrum. Good-to-have tokens include $SUSHI (operating on 13 chains), $CRV (7 chains & expanding), $AAVE (3 chains & expanding) and $LINK. Further community suggestions could be helpful!

4. New Chains

In addition to adding Harmony and Celo, and Solana as voted for by the community, I think it’s important to ensure cBridge is among the first movers for supporting zkRollups too: zkSync & Starknet. Celer’s first mover support for Arbitrum was what gave it an advantage when a flood of liquidity entered Arbitrum in early September.

If possible, it could be fruitful to connect cBridge with customised rollups, such as dYdX (dYdX now has $1BN+ TVL and more trading volume than most CEXes). ImmutableX is another key part of the ecosystem. Upon enquiring with StarkWare, they pointed out that bridge connections to StarkEx rollups could be possible per this article.

Other chains of note include Terra, Cosmos, Moonriver, Ronin, Secret Network, Boba Network, Polkadot, etc.

Lastly, it’d be great if we could enhance the liquidity flywheel by asking for incentives from sidechains that benefit from being connected to cBridge. See how Synapse requested $250k of ONE from Harmony here.

5. Middleware partnerships

I’m assuming Celer aims to become a key player in solving the liquidity fragmentation problem, and that the SDK will be a vital component for this goal. No doubt the team is already aware of Aave’s v3 Portal proposal too.

Please let the community know if we can serve a role in connecting with members of other communities, sharing information on the ground to this end, etc.

6. Layer2.Finance?

In my estimation, the above is already plenty for the Celer team to chew on. If there’s also capacity to work on L2F, that’s great!

However – and love to discuss this with the community – I believe the “DeFi is expensive” narrative has already broken down with the multi-chain reality as many non-ETH sidechains and rollups are already providing cheap access to DeFi now. And so, L2F would really only solve the “DeFi is inconvenient” problem, which is already being worked on by many other teams/protocols/apps.

Instead, I wonder if Celer could excel by focusing on the critical infrastructure aspect via cBridge, which solves the “liquidity is disconnected” problem and can be synergistic with other teams that are focusing on the convenience problem. From there, I definitely see that L2F could serve as further infrastructure / middleware to help connect cBridge liquidity into specific DeFi functionality. I trust the team to adapt as appropriate, towards widespread adoption.

Appendix: Contacts and contracts

Here’s a list of token contracts and people to be aware of, to help with the launch/expansion.

$MIM – Magic Internet Money stablecoin

Key contact: Dani (@danielesesta)

Contracts:

$UST / $wUST – TerraUSD

Key contact: Do (@stablekwon)

Contracts:

$SOL / $wSOL – Solana

Key contact: ??

Contracts:

Solana stablecoin contracts:



Most importantly, thoughts from the community and/or team are welcome! 😊
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#2

Well put. One thing I would add to this is organic discovery for the general crowd. A separate blog that walks through bridging with SEO to direct people who are searching in google, say for example “cheapest way to transfer tokens from bsc to fantom”.

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#3

Your last sentence is the key to succes. make sure to create blog post directed for people who know a bit but have no clue about bridging. Why do they want to bridge and how. Make it a very detailed step by step. Verify it by asking some older family members if they can follow the steps and look behind them how they interpret.

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