Grant Request by Rubicon

Submission Date

January 11, 2022

Project Links

Website: https://www.rubicon.finance/
Discord: Rubicon
Newsletter: https://rubicondefi.substack.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rubicondefi
Medium: Rubicon – Medium

Project Description

Rubicon is an order book protocol for Ethereum. Our mission is to bring decentralized exchange to the masses. You can use Rubicon today on our app (https://app.rubicon.finance)

Rubicon is currently live on Optimism, and we are searching for the next network for our permissionless order book protocol! To bring the power of DEXs to the 200 million+ crypto users worldwide, Rubicon can utilize the scale and speed of Polygon’s solutions to bring order books to Ethereum.

Traditional markets prove that as computational constraints are lifted, the order book is the optimal method of exchange. Order book exchanges on Ethereum L2s will become critical DeFi infrastructure; they enable real-time price discovery and give liquidity providers flexibility to protect themselves in ever-changing market conditions.

Ethereum needs a core order book protocol, and Rubicon is building it.

At its core, the Rubicon protocol is a fully on-chain order book exchange that has native liquidity pools. Instead of choosing between active liquidity management or passive liquidity providing, we designed Rubicon so that both play an important role in the protocol!

LPs can deposit tokens into liquidity pools, where active managers (called strategists) make markets on the order books using the liquidity in the pools. The yield from the market-making is passed back to the pool LPs, while the strategists are rewarded for their fills (similar to a rebate on a centralized exchange).

Taking the best of both active and passive liquidity management, anyone can provide liquidity on Rubicon, and LPs can still react to changing market conditions and protect themselves from toxic order flow. The end result is that Rubicon is the most democratic order book exchange ever: anyone can trade on the order books, and anyone can provide liquidity.

You can learn more about how Rubicon works by visiting our docs (https://docs.rubicon.finance)

Amount Requested

1,000,000 USD

Milestones

Budgeting:
The MATIC grant would be used for two purposes:

  1. The majority of the grant ($900,000 worth of MATIC) would be used to incentivize providing liquidity in Rubicon Pools. This MATIC would be distributed to LPs in the following liquidity pools: WETH, MATIC (effectively WMATIC), USDC, DAI, and USDT. Ideally, the program would last a minimum of 6 months but it would effectively last until all of the MATIC is rewarded to Pools LPs.

  2. The rest of the grant ($100,000 worth of MATIC) would be allocated to Rubicon’s market-making operations. This MATIC will be used by our strategists to cover network costs as they frequently place and cancel orders to provide traders deep order books with low spreads and bring Rubicon Pools LPs competitive returns. Rubicon Pools socializes gas costs by making strategists cover the gas costs for liquidity management. This portion of the grant would help kickstart liquidity management and allow Rubicon to offer competitive spreads and order book depth from its first day on Polygon, rather than starting with wider spreads and thinner books.

Milestones:
As a DEX, Rubicon is best measured across two main metrics: TVL and trading volume.

For a TVL measure, we propose a grant unlock at $5 million in TVL

For a trading volume measure, we propose a grant unlock if $1 million in daily trading volume is sustained for a period of two weeks.

We welcome discussion on these measures and any others and would love feedback from Ecosystem DAO members to ensure that incentives are aligned with these proposed milestones.

Hello everyone, I’m Forrest, one of the founders of Rubicon. We are excited at the prospect of bringing order books to Polygon!

We welcome and appreciate any feedback on this grant request, please feel free to tag me if you want to discuss this further!

Hi!

We have started to review your application, due to the early stages of our DAO (Season 0) we are only able to provide grants up to $10,000.

Therefore, your grant has been denied at this stage. However, in Season 1 we can award grants up to $100,000 if you wish to reapply. But again, we don’t have the resources at this stage to provide funding for liquidity pools.

In any case, we can help you reach out to Polygon DeFi if this is something that you would like to do. Then just contact any Genesis member on our Discord to get some advice.

Thank you,

Kouros