Increment 2021: Year Review and Update
Community Newsletter #5: December 2021
Season's greetings and happy new year from all of us at Increment! 🎉
As we transition into 2022, we would like to review some milestones that we have accomplished together since this project began in July 2021. At the end, we will also provide an update on some development updates from December.
Birth of Increment
It all started at ETHGlobal’s HackMoney event in July 2021, one of the world’s largest DeFi hackathons of the year. The idea behind Increment is about helping non-USD participants reduce their exposure to USD in DeFi. Thus, we built an MVP of a perpetual swaps instrument for the JPY/USD trading pair at HackMoney.
This was the birthplace of Increment and we were humbled to be one of the 16 finalists out of over 200 projects.
Joining KERNEL
![KERNEL [Panvala League] | Grants | Gitcoin](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F37d0401b-b993-4e82-82ce-4b21f6f7c89a_1400x714.bin "KERNEL [Panvala League] | Grants | Gitcoin")
After the hackathon, we applied and got accepted to join a Web3 incubator program and community named Kernel. For a span of 8 weeks, we connected with other fellows in the cohort and learned a lot from the different modules we attended.
It was also during this period where we implemented the first Discovery stage of our governance model by using Sourcecred and also conducted a tremendous amount of research on AMMs to find the framework that would be most suitable for Increment V1. Ultimately, we decided to implement a virtual assets + Curve V2 pools trading engine, which is currently under development and will be open sourced when ready.
Product Designs with Deep Work Studio
On the frontend side, we were fortunate enough to have met Deep Work Studio during a workshop at Kernel and was introduced to their work in web3 product designs and prototyping. Hence, we worked with them on our V1 app (web and mobile) designs and also create a new landing page that will be released once our testnet launch approaches.
The most important factor that really made this experience different and more fruitful than usual processes of UI/UX designing or prototyping was the user research and testing opportunities. This means that we were able to receive feedback from the target user base during the product designing process and implement their suggestions into the product design. We were also able to get our community involved in this process and implement their suggestions as well.
Thank you to all those that participated - your suggestions helped us improve!
December Updates
In December, we finished the app designs with Deep Work and also made great progress on the contract development side with the help of engineers from the Curve team.
📟 Operations
Hiring Quantitative Researcher, apply here
Research: Tokenomics, Governance
Business Development: Auditors, Keepers, etc
📑 Smart Contracts
Focus on completing the core of the protocol
Polished deployment scripts
Working on trader positions: opening and closing, working on liquidity pools modules, etc
Successfully deployed Curve pools as internal trading engine
Pushed out early version of funding rate and vault factory
💻 Front-end
Optimized web app design according to user feedback, you can find a sneak peak of that design in the previous newsletter here
Completed both mobile designs and a new landing page
Now focused on developing the app interface according to the designs
Sneak Peak of Mobile Design
That’s a wrap for 2021 folks! To da moon, 2022 🚀
Special thanks to our community Cred Stars: FalconsEye, Sovandar, Smileyyface
Full cred ranks can be found here.
Increment is a decentralized, algorithmic perpetual swaps protocol building on zkSync 2.0, featuring automatically concentrated liquidity, dynamic fees and parametrizable pools.
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