Decentralized exchange (DEX) Slingshot has chosen to launch to the public on Polygon, a blockchain that runs tangential to the main Ethereum network, and one that’s a lot faster and cheaper to use.
A victim of its own success, Ethereum, the home of decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and a bunch of other stuff, has become rather congested of late with very high transaction fees. As a result, projects are exploring faster, cheaper so-called layer 2 solutions such as Polygon (formerly known as Matic).
“We’ve been in closed beta on Ethereum and Polygon for a few months now. But today’s launch is Polygon only,” Slingshot CEO Clinton Bembry said in an interview. “So there won’t be any Ethereum trading, it will only be on Polygon’s network.”
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Bembry said Ethereum trading would be added further down the line but that for now, “insane transaction fees” were effectively pricing people out of DeFi. (For example, a trade that might cost some $300 in transaction fees on Ethereum would cost about five-thousandths of a penny on Polygon, Bembry said.)
Slingshot, which raised $3.1 million late last year when it rebranded from DEX.AG, boasts all the features of decentralized trading and on-chain liquidity, but with the kind of user interface you might expect at a centralized trading platform, said Bembry.
The aim is to help users find the best price for any given token trade on Ethereum, a service also provided by the likes of 1inch, ParaSwap, 0x’s Matcha and even the prominent Ethereum wallet MetaMask.
To get started trading on Slingshot, users will need to bridge assets from Ethereum to Polygon, Bembry said.
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“We are not wanting to take a shot at Ethereum, which is very much in Slingshot’s DNA,” he said. “This is just the first step in our public launch and we plan to support other layer 2s in the future to like Arbitrum and Optimism, and I’m sure there’ll be other good ones as well.”