All Aboard the Pool Party Bus 🎉🚌🚀
March 8, 2021: Our maiden voyage drives directly off a cliff...
Curve Market Cap is back after battling some big time errors. Thanks for your patience degens!
Check out this pool party. Nearly $1 billion in Curve Volume!
Well, it only rounds to a billion due to some double counting issues, if you want to be technically correct (the best kind).
Yet however you count it, it’s phenomenal!
But what about the peasants who can’t afford to join these incredible pool parties because of high gas prices? Not to worry. We’re building a solution and it’s filling up fast!
We first dropped the idea for pool party buses here, and your response was overwhelmingly positive. We’re pleased to announce our first proof of concept is live. In fact, the first bus is deployed and already taking tickets!
So, first off a major disclaimer. Where does the first bus go? It’s a one-way journey directly off a cliff. This is the only guarantee you may ever find in crypto: if the bus leaves, you lose all funds you deposited.
Why? It’s a bit like funding a DAO. We need infrastructure to operate our buses at scale. If we can crowdsource the required amount and the first bus actually drives, we’ll turn around and launch a second bus, a round trip journey to a Curve pool.
This first bus ride is a one way trip. But at least you’ll have fun! Anybody who takes the plunge will have their address and ticket value stored forever in a genesis file. We’ll also invite you to a secret telegram group.
We’re even releasing an NFT to commemorate the brave souls whose relentless party spirit will enable future bus rides:
With that disclaimer out of the way, how does it all work? It’s conceptually quite simple. At the moment, it costs about $50 - $100 in gas every time you want to make a transaction into a DeFi pool like Curve. No problem for whales, but a major problem for small fish.
We’re breaking it up, such that a bus ride is an apt analogy. Here’s how it looks structurally at scale:
BusStation Contract: A highly gas-efficient “dumb contract” that does pretty much nothing except take tickets for a destination.
BusDriver Contract: A smarter contract that periodically ingests all funds from the BusStation and delivers them en masse to and from the intended Pool Party
Operator Nodes: A decentralized mechanism to periodically call the bus driver contract when certain conditions are triggered.
The BusDriver contract is the biggie — it can theoretically handle as many people as it likes at a time, meaning that thousands of people can collectively ape into a Curve pool with the BusDriver batching everybody into just a single transaction. It may cost $50-$100 each time BusDriver interfaces with a Curve Pool, but that doesn’t matter if it’s done once and split among a bunch of people. We therefore gain the benefits of scale, such that we can engineer a ton of efficiency into how we route buses for optimal gas savings.
The trick then is designing the BusStation contract to be as gas-efficient as possible. The BusStation is kept efficient by only providing very basic functionality: collect tickets for deposit and withdrawal requests. You can therefore make your request, and then sit back and wait for the BusDriver to deliver.
Our inaugural maiden voyage bus serves as the proof of concept for the BusStation portion of this ecosystem. After all, we don’t need an expensive union waged BusDriver to navigate us off a cliff. This maiden voyage has been a bit of a test to see just how efficient we could make the BusStation contract. Thankfully, it’s working quite efficiently. Take a visit and see how cheap it can be!
Four people (bless you!) have already sent 2.05 ETH to the contract, paying an average of .005 ETH in gas (~$9.17) with gas prices averaging 95 gwei over the period. This version of the BusStation and the next round trip version are functionally similar, so you could expect future round trips to the Curve Pool Parties to match this level of efficiency, contingent on gas prices.
Future iterations could even see bus stations located off chain, so we could get gas prices as low as pennies. We also can eventually expand beyond Curve to other hot but expensive destinations around DeFi like Yearn or Badger, though we’re keeping our focus on Curve for the beginning.
You can review the proof of concept contract we pushed live at our github repository. The schedule is also posted and updated within the repo. The major functionality we intend to add in the next version, in addition to the full round trip experience, is to provide both slow and expedited withdrawal request. Expedited means if you can’t wait for the return trip bus to fill up, you can always have the option to pay full gas to get your funds immediately.
Of course, this all hinges on us filling up the gas tank for our first bus trip. For those of you who can’t read code easily, here’s how our maiden voyage bus contract works:
The bus has a reserve price of 60 ETH. Until we hit this target, the bus stays parked and only the depositor can withdraw their funds.
The bus also has a 1 week timelock. The soonest it could drive is Sunday March 14, giving you time to change your mind if you chicken out.
The most any address can deposit is 2 ETH, because we want to keep this democratic and balanced for anybody who wants to join.
Nobody owns or has access to this contract. In other words, there’s no driver or person who has custodianship of funds. The keys are sitting in the ignition, so if the bus is eligible to depart then any random person who wants can have the privilege of driving the bus off the cliff.
Again, this bus does not go anywhere except directly towards funding the infrastructure necessary to operate future buses. Nobody profits, nobody makes money.
We’ve barely launched and we’re currently just over 3% of the way to this goal. This bus is gonna fill up fast! And naturally, there’s always a risk this gets hacked — but if we’re talking about funds you’re throwing away you may not be too concerned.
If you’re interested in participating, check out the landing page at https://curvemarketcap.com/bus with all the details and a progress tracker. We recommend using this landing page, as Etherscan is doing some weird things with gas estimation due to some irregularities in the verification process. You can also chat with us in our public telegram.
See you at the pool party!
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Newsletter is an independent roundup of interesting trends in cryptocurrency, never financial advice. Author stakes $CRV