Education is key in the crypto world. Things move so quickly on all fronts that it is impossible to keep up.

Today I'm going to do a deep dive  into Unibar's key fundamental pool mechanism; single-asset liquidity pools (SALP’s), and their future plans.

In simple terms, SALP’s are created by depositing a single token into a pool, that can then be traded upon with a liquidity provider token or "receipt" to claim back swapped assets and the initial deposit.

The core purpose of these pools  is to act as the foundational primitive for all other functionality within the system.

Uniswap and balancer pools

We have been inspired by Uniswap's Liquidity Pools and the creator concept of pools within the #DeFi community. One notable project, Balancer, provides the ability to customize pools to fit many use cases; including, fundraising through the use of weighted pools. In this scenario, different token ratios can be used to generate capital.

A number of companies such as, Tapmydata and Perpetual Protocol have used this model as their Initial Dex Offering (IDO), having it act as a fair launch, allowing the market to decide the initial price value of a given token.

Our approach at Unibar was to strip everything back and focus on first principles; the foundational lego’s in the system:

• I have minted a token
• I want to sell the token and receive value
• I don't want to sign every transaction

But before we continue any further, keep in mind that there are five primary entities to be aware of:

• A seller of tokens, an actor that deposits tokens into a pool.
• A buyer of tokens, an actor that can atomically swap value.
• The token pool, the parent account where a remaining token balance is stored.
• Pool receipts, tokens that can be used to claim swapped value from a pool.
• The reward pool, a unique account for every pool participant which enables the fair distribution of value for all participants over time. The reward pool mints receipts.

Why is this approach worth pursuing?

Unibar enables users to create new pools, make deposits into them, and in return they can receive any kind of token. This infinitely increases the vector for network exposure for any participant to swap tokens with them.

We are removing the need for token pairs entirely - at the foundational level. The requirement for token routing within a transaction for unpaired tokens is removed.

This means that different actors can deposit into the same pool and request different tokens to be swapped for. This exposes a new opportunity for value to be extracted with token swaps, enabling tokens that are up and coming, unknown to the masses.

What are reward pools and why are they needed?

The short answer.

An onchain ledger for the equal and fair distribution of swapped assets to all pool participants over time.

Let's break this down.

Imagine there is a token, we'll call it UNIBAR.

There are 2 holders of UNIBAR, Alice and Bob.

On day 1 Alice creates and deposits 2 UNIBAR into a pool. A new "reward pool" account is generated just for Alice, she receives 2 UNIBAR:LP pool tokens which allow her to extract her value.

In Unibar's conceptual protocol form, pre-price oracle, all buyers may purchase UNIBAR with any token. Upon purchase, a buyer will receive a 1:1 unit of a token through an atomic swap.

So on day 1, let’s assume that a buyer "Bob"  purchases 1 UNIBAR worth of value but this value is split as 2 tokens:

• 0.5 UNIBAR for TOKEN_A
• 0.5 UNIBAR for TOKEN_B

Bob has 1 UNIBAR in his account, the liquidity pool has been depleted down to 1 UNIBAR and inside of Alice's reward pool she has access to TOKEN_A and TOKEN_B if she submitted a portion or all of her pool tokens.

Now on day 2, Bob deposits 1 UNIBAR into the pool. (bringing the total value back to 2 UNIBAR) All value which is swapped within the pool is equally distributed between Bob and Alice's reward pool thereafter.

If a third actor, "Carol" swaps 1 TOKEN_C for 1 UNIBAR, both Bob and Alice will have access to 0.5 TOKEN_C respectively.

By creating new "reward pool" accounts for every liquidity provider you have a new simple mechanism for the decentralised time locked distribution of value - completely fair.

Starburst Transfers

Current liquidity pool providers can be considered centralised in nature - even smart contracts themselves. As a result, smart contracts can actually be a single source of failure:

• What if a developer or audit failed to pick up an issue with the contract?
• What if a contract is drained through a front-running issue?

We assume that smart contracts are decentralised but even if we think about the base ERC20 token contract, all token balances are ultimately ledgered with an account.

A contract links an address to a balance.

A contract can do whatever actions they want to an owner's value; think elastic-supply rebase tokens.

You need to trust that a contract will conduct the behaviour that it has promised you it will carry out in a deterministic fashion.

There are no smart contracts with Unibar. This provides a number of challenges and steps against the status-quo of how dapp development should be. For better or worse, there will be individuals that will reject this approach.

There are elements which need to be worked out here and there, but in this model, the only trust you need to place on the system is when a "pool" account receives funds, it will swap value and distribute fairly in a decentralised manner. Unibar does not want to hold different tokens, it wants to get rid of them in as little transactions as possible.

As a participant of Unibar, all you need to do is simply trust in a token swap occuring. No forked contracts with potentially problematic behaviour.

The Hedera Token Service (HTS) provides the ability for distributed atomic swaps.

In the case of Unibar, when a pool account receives value it can swap for value in as few as 2 transactions:

1. Send the pooled tokens to a buyer.
2. Fairly distribute the gifted tokens to the liquidity provider owned "Pool rewards" in 1 atomic transaction based on prorated ownership.

Yes, ALL "reward pool" accounts will receive their token value in the same transaction – we call this process Starburst Transfers.

This is conceptually decentralised, in terms of distributing swapped value to the accounts of network participants. No smart contract holding custody of value.

For the medium-term, all reward pools will be configured with approved whitelisted tokens that a user would want to explicitly expect.

Put together, multiple liquidity providers can contribute to the same pool but configure to receive different tokens through atomic swaps creating a one-to-many relationship.

Dripping value to network participants over time

There is one aspect that we have glossed over - the pool tokens. Inside of Unibar, these pool tokens are similar to those found in Uniswap. By providing liquidity to the system, a user receives these tokens

Think of them as a "receipt" which can be exchanged to return the original token value.

They do not have tangible value by themselves, but they have access to value.

Pool tokens are used to extract value but they can also be used as the core token to create new liquidity pools. So buyers can trade value to get access to a pool token where they may use to claim value.

Think of this in the following way:

Within Unibar, I don't need to send you a token. I can send you the receipt to claim value when you are ready.

Perhaps you are an airline with a pool of airmiles to give away for loyalty. Instead of directly sending value, you can offer a "pool/receipt" for your customer to claim the value.

Alternatively, perhaps you are a farmer and you want to tokenize the carbon in your land and sell in a marketplace, to gain income over time. As the storage of carbon is an ongoing process that needs attention and care, there is a need to ensure that a "rug pull" situation cannot happen.

In this case, pool tokens can be dripped on a schedule over time. This ensures that a farmer gets access to income, whilst proving they are correctly tending to their land with ongoing evidence. ❤️

Presenting our first use-case, the focus of our efforts: 👇

DOVU, market driven and reputation based carbon offsetting

DOVU is the first platform that will combine tokenization, DeFi, and accountability for carbon offsetting. It will provide safety to investors of carbon assets and will track that farmers and land managers work over a period of time.

The focus here is around delivering a marketplace platform to facilitate connecting anyone who wants to offset their carbon footprint with farmers from all over the world. Land owners will get paid long term, but along the way, they need to prove they are being a good citizen.

If an agent is not delivering on their committed promise, and is not providing evidence, they will not receive further income. If this is prolonged, the original asset value is returned to the investors.

Unibar will be the DeFi backbone of DOVU's carbon NFT issuance platform. Combined with our dynamic NFT specification, these will form the core basis for accountability using IWA ecological token specifications.

DOVU with Unibar combines tokenization on top of real life assets and incentivises positive action to gain income over time for rural communities; Unlocking the carbon in the soil under our feet, as income by being a good citizen.

Final thoughts

Unibar is a protocol for the fair and accountable distribution of value. We accomplish this through a combination of our unique Dynamic NFTs and novel approach to DeFi.

We can issue a token that relates to any asset and link an infinite amount of evidence to track its changes over time.

Unibar's vision is a frictionless cross chain world, it can be used to add DeFi magic to any SaaS solution. It is an API by default. Accessible for any development team to implement.

In order for any action to occur, you authenticate through locally signing with your Metamask. Sign once and your browser stores your signature for subsequent actions for a given session.

As with any new technology, there will be rigorous testing, improvements and more along the way, but the direction we are heading in now is refreshingly new. For an industry where there seems to be an endless line of forks, with only minor changes being made, this new paradigm feels different and very exciting!

For those who may not know, full disclosure, I am also the CTO of DOVU.

DOVU's carbon token issuance platform is the first key use case for Unibar. It is currently only using a subset of Unibars full potential - together, we will grow.

The future is green!

Matt 🚀

Good monday morning. 😁

This is the Unibar Prototype, we built this in 3 weeks and probably spent 200+ hours on the project. It is frankly ridiculous what was delivered both conceptually and in product.

It is an API-first decentralised finance (DeFi) product on Hedera Hashgraph. It allows you to mint and transfer tokens as well as creating permissioned pools with liquidity provider receipts.

The pool mechanism that has been built cannot be understated. It enables anyone with a token to mint a pool and receive any token in return, you have a single platform to mint a token and eventually fundraise. This is a game changer even when compared to Uniswap where the requirement is to have a "pair" of tokens to contribute to a liquidity pool.

This will enable separate parties in the future to create locked liquidity pools as new markets through a collaboration of tokens without having to previously interact.

Put it this way.

• I have ETH
• You have BTC
• We both create a pool.
• We can create a decentralised financial market by depositing our receipts in to a new market pool.
• From their Unibar will automatically calculate the price of assets through a AMM process, similiar to Uniswap.

After the creation of a pool, a user gains receipts, these can be used to return the initial stake and any deposit swaps have been made from external parties.

In Unibar liquidity receipts control the distribution of value over time

This system allows for logic to distribute value over time with a link to accountable and proven actions – (hint hint) Hedera scheduled transactions 😉

Some extra icing on top, it also has:

• 1-click access to DeFi through Metamask.
• A gasless experience to mint, exchange and create pools with no friction.
• Baked in key management for securely encrypting secrets.
• It is completely serverless, anyone can spin up their node for free.
• All swaps for assets are atomic swaps.
• All rewards are sent to liquidity providers in one transaction.
• Reward pools will be configured to be multi-sig, giving more control for the distribution of value.

No solidity, just a REST API with a frontend. Stop, I said that correctly – this is the level we are at. Any product or business that wants "blockchain" included in offered can plugin to our tools.

An update on Trust Enterprises

Alot is moving quickly on all fronts for Trust Enterprises, as some of you know we started last August and released our Hedera Serverless API and Laravel client.

Those tools in themselves are highly disruptive. We are so ahead of the curve we have the time to build quality products.

The ability to interact with the decentralised world with no friction for learning new tech, infrastructure requirements, over a simple interface, and the Laravel client does all that in 3 lines of code. 🔥🔥🔥

Literally someone could take our API, run a free node and connect it to a no-code tool like zapier. Let me say that clearly. No-code blockchain logic. 🤯

It doesn't stop there.

Yesterday we launched our new blog, we've had a number of updates to the Unibar prototype over the last week, and the feedback on Twitter has been absolutely incredible.

The Unibar Design Non-Fungible Token (NFT)

If you've made it this far and for those that have been following along we will be offering an NFT of our Unibar designs and sketches. Strictly speaking we've created a new type of NFT called dynamic NFTs (dNFTs) but we will go into that another day!

Think of it as a digital collectible, imagine if you had the first sketches for Bitcoin or Ethereum, how much would it be worth in 10-20 years?

NFTs are a huge business at the moment, look at NBA Top Shot as an insane example.

People have offered to buy them from me, no all of you beautiful people will get them for free – don't want anyone to have a tax liability at this stage. 🤗

There will only be a finite amount of these NFTs tokens minted, my mailing list size at 02/03/21 plus 10 for my own collection.

I have yet to confirm how these tokens will be distributed but it is likely we will use the IV wallet, another hackathon project to distribute them but we may look at minting some on ethereum or binance markets. Talk to me.

Either join my list on this blog or sign up to Unibar Exchange landing page before the deadline.

Until next time.

Matt

This is repost, slightly updated, of an article I wrote in September 2020 on my personal blog.

If you'd want the link to the docs, here you go! And for a little minor flex, the project made it on the official community documentation on Hedera. The docs are open source so it was just a fork then a Pull Request 🤣.

For the Postman API documentation devil toads out there... 🔥

It is currently in softish-beta, you may run a client but you need to make sure that you use the testnet credentials from hedera but you'll likely be able to set your environment in the coming days.

Actually, the project made it into their boost program, so hopefully, it will garner some more attention.

If you want to find out more about me, my history in crypto, and why I'm building this project find out more below. 👇

My (brief) journey in crypto-land.

I've worked with blockchain technology in various forms since mid-2017. My first engagement, which was shortlived was with Blockmason. I helped them build their initial Lndr app using their Credit Protocol and a bespoke Telegram bot framework.

Unfortunately without tarnishing their reputation the way they handled my employment exit left a bad taste in my mouth and with all things considered my attitude was far more naive. I admit that I was out of my depth and communication was a challenge.

As some of you know during that time crypto-mania hit the masses, the end of 2017. Bitcoin was worth over $20,000, Ethereum spiked to over $1,300, and crypto was front and center in the public eye.

This mania had its roots from the bitcoin halving event from July 2016.

In early 2018 I joined Simpleweb Block, a spin-off agency of Simpleweb with a focus on decentralised technologies. One of my favorite years of my development career was working with Block, it opened my eyes to actually working with an onsite team and travel to meet with the team, being part of the energy and dynamic.

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sidenote.

Finding Simpleweb Block and working with them was a challenge, I didn't have a network at the time I could contact as I dropped all my side projects and my previous role to jump to Blockmason. It was a tough 2 months to find a job.

Since then after working with Simpleweb all my current opportunities have been rooted in the relationships I developed there.

We focused on a number of different projects some of which used the Stellar Network including TapMyData and Dovetail.

Our main client and part-owner were DOVU, we researched and built a sidechain with oracles to allow for seamless bi-directional transfer of assets from mainnet. We actually developed a lot of novel technology, we assumed was normal in the industry, when later on similar technology was considered groundbreaking. 😭

I originally first came across Swirlds the technological parent of Hedera in 2018, and tested their Java SDK to explore a proof of concept timestamp mechanism.

After Block, I transferred over to DOVU as a senior developer, and to say that the journey has not had its ups and downs, being a complete rollercoaster is not painting a clear enough picture.

I'm still at DOVU to this day and have grown to recently become their CTO. We've pivoted our focus into tracking real-life events and rewarding carbon positive behavior with tokens.

Overall my decentralised journey so far has been enjoyable, it has been really beneficial to be at the intersection of the dreamers, marketing, developers, and seeing the mania.

I feel somewhat privileged to have an awareness of this industry, the technical constraints, and seeing the speculative madness of "investors" trying to make the right personal decisions they can to make their life better.

Many of which are so deep in the weeds it becomes nearly difficult to see the wood from the trees. Technological tribalism, even to this day is rife.

One personal gripe I have in particular is that the claim that Blockchain or decentralised solutions solve the problem of commercial trust. As in order to have a business relationship, let alone any relationship we need to trust the other party to deliver on their promises.

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Why do we trust a brand?

Think about it why do you trust Paypal when you send money to a friend, it is a question that we don't think about, it just works.

We know that as historical a transfer has worked, we believe that every future transaction will work. You have friends that have used Paypal, the social proof and it naturally evolves to become part of your social groups vernacular.

Trusting a company, a brand in the traditional sense is paramount and vital to building up a base of real paying customers.

To get to this point takes time, to become a household name takes a lot of money, in many cases tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

From the perspective of a small startup with big dreams to change the world in a meaningful way this can be out of reach from purely a lack of runway and financial support.

Trust and decentralized technologies

Decentralised technology can provide a mechanism for publically displaying the intent of a decision. This is the primary reason that I find DLT and Blockchain fascinating.

With that said there isn't anything stopping anyone from submitting a transaction to a blockchain that contains falsified information but it can provide a mechanism for verifiable accountability. If a company makes a claim to be accountable for a particular action then backs out, this has the potential to cause brand harm.

So the question I ask myself, does a technology or solution have the potential to reduce the cost and the friction for a company to build something that is truly trustworthy?

I like the offering from Hedera, from the outside they are building "the trust layer of the internet" that anyone could plug into. The ball is in their court to develop a system, to gain the trust of the greater community, to grow their brand, and by enabling anyone to used that system any third party project will automatically inherit the benefits of social proof.

One such psychological challenge in the market will for the trust that Hedera develops in consumer markets needs to be decoupled from a given third party which utilises the technology, companies using hedera will be accountable.

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Thankfully the governance model they employ is unique within the crypto space with a focus on building a council of top tier enterprise clients to steward the direction of the project.

The acid test, which I believe is the gateway into public adoption is what is the clearest way that such technology can be explained to a normal person and will it save significant money for businesses.

How about will it provide new experiences to a low-tech consumer, is it capable to make their lives easier?

Imagine where phones were 10 years ago, even where voice interfaces were, remember when the first iPhone was released, and how groundbreaking it felt to a consumer market.

The world and technology have been laser-focused on reducing the friction for consumers, ease of use and attention have been the pillars of modern-day business.

So what am I building?

I've teased you enough if you haven't read the docs yet.

I am making interacting with Hedera Hashgraph as simple as possible for developers that have projects in any language and want to get started integrating their code.

I'm building a Serverless REST API client for Hedera Hashgraph. To the vast majority of web developers consuming an HTTP API is dead simple and it connects to their regular workflow, it also makes testing a breeze.

A developer using the project will:

• Own the deployment of their client completely.
• There will be zero additional microservice cost, both in terms of money and time.
• All environment variables are encrypted, secrets are secure.
• There is a deep test suite, to check the state of the application and configuration.
• There is an optional inbuilt CI flow using Github Actions that when properly configured will validate the deployed client every day.
• The API structure is clear, flexible, and easily extendable.

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Most blockchain or crypto projects I have been a part of the biggest problems have always been cost, scale, and most importantly technical accessibility. In 2017/2018 in order to interact with many of these technologies their was always a barrier to entry, writing in solidity (the OG smart contract language), and installation of other tools.

With Javascript this included the truffle framework and Web3 libraries, documentation has always been an issue and different versions can change the API. It can be a challenge to work with.

At the end of the day, not every developer knows how to deploy a docker container, let alone deal with any security implications for a serious DevOps deployment. Combined with cryptocurrency and the risk of losing real money a lot of care and thought needs to be taken before making any serious technical decisions for production.

To make it as easy and simple for any developer of any level to safely get started.

I'm looking forward to the serverless REST API being used in the wild and would love to see what projects will be created. I have my own personal wish list that I will be making prototypes, in due time.

Why does this matter now?

It almost feels like everyone has been talking about COVID-19, remote work, and redundancies so I rather not beat a dead horse anymore but...

Behind closed doors costs have been aggressively cut, the damage of the recession is trying to be minimised, that we are currently experiencing. Capital and free cash preservation are key. Angels and investors are being tighter fisted with investment, many companies being recommended to enter cockroach mode to simply survive.

For developers, especially remote-focused developers it has become significantly harder to find a new role due to the increase of supply. In my opinion, it is likely that many individuals may need to reduce their salary expectations in order to secure a role for the next 12-18 months.

When a workforce in a fast-paced startup is being cut by 30-50% priorities pivot, the mode switches to maintenance inside of a core team. Innovation is less of a focus.

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During these next 18 months in order for cash-strapped companies to become involved with decentralised technology the barrier to entry needs to be reduced, risk needs to be as low as possible and costs need to be stable.

Enter, my contribution, Trust Enterprises as an attempt to solve this problem.

On a positive and purely speculative note, there could be an incoming Bullrun mid-late next year, I hope that this developer tool will help introduce some developers get started in this arena.

Until next time.

Matt 🚀

Trust Enterprises aims to eliminate the cost for basic "blockchain" integration, our definition encompasses the entire decentralised technological space focusing on trust and open transparency.

Follow along on twitter for Trust Enterprises.

For the majority of use cases in this space we simply care that an event was tracked accordingly or that there has been a change of state in a system has occured.

Proof of Anything. Any event where a change of state of an internal system requires open public transparency as proof.

This is the business value proposition

• 🤓 No additional cost for specialised blockchain developers.
• 🏢 No cost requirement to maintain additional infrastructure.
• 😇 Unlock rapid integration for adding transparency for your software.
• 💵 The tools are completely open source with Apache 2 licensing.

These are the partnership opportunities

• 🔥 All projects deployed to production can apply to the Hedera Hashgraph Boost Program ($3k in HBAR tokens)
• 🌍 If you are working on a carbon offsetting solution, you can apply to the DOVU token grant program (up to £6k in DOV tokens)

This is the development value proposition

• 🥞 An end-to-end mini Blockchain stack, no requirement to upskill.
• 🖱One-click serverless Hedera Hashgraph REST client deployment.
• 📝 Fully documentated REST API with Postman documentation.
• 🧪 Deep testing suite and coverage.
• 🤙 In built CI Github actions with a daily scheduled task for service validation.
• 📦 Laravel package, with all complexity mitigated, extend events if required.

How to get started

1. Register on the hedera portal, get those testnet credentials ready.
2. Check out the documentation of Trust Enterprises, we also have a mini video course that is thorough and goes into the details as a walkthrough.
3. Use the Postman documentation to get started interacting with Trust Enterprises.
4. And for you Laravel artisan's out there, just dive right in.

All in all, I'm very excited to release this project in its entirety, from the one-click serverless hedera hashgraph node, the REST API and the Laravel package.

Make something amazing and reach out to me if you need extra help. 🤗

Thank you.

Matt.