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December 19, 2023 7:46 AM
Last Updated:
December 8, 2022

Meet HeliSwap — the new home of DeFi on Hedera Hashgraph

by
Ainsley Yeung
Meet HeliSwap — the new home of DeFi on Hedera Hashgraph
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DeFi trading has been one of the hottest trends in the crypto space for the past couple of years and with a good reason. It is an exciting new trend in finance that has opened up a whole new world of investment opportunities for people that may not be able to rely on established TradFi systems. But as with all things new, DeFi still has some kinks that need to be ironed out.

The roots of most of these issues can be traced to low transaction efficiency and energy efficiency. As a highly performant Web3 network, Hedera Hashgraph is perfectly positioned to address those limitations. However, Hedera is currently lacking a killer dApp that can allow DeFi users to unlock the network’s full potential. Fortunately, this won’t be a problem for much longer, as Hedera is about to get its killer Decentralized Exchange (DEX) in the form of HeliSwap!

Meet HeliSwap

MANTRA and LIMECHAIN are thrilled to introduce you to HeliSwap, a new state-of-the-art DEX, with an impressive suite of sophisticated DeFi features, that we believe will be a real boon for the DeFi ecosystem on Hedera Hashgraph. HeliSwap v1 is currently in its final stages of development and will soon be available to users of the Hedera network.

For starters, HeliSwap is the first exchange on Hedera Hashgraph to support both HTS and ERC20 (Ethereum’s fungible token standard) tokens. This means that, in addition to HTS-HTS token swaps, HBAR-HTS, HBAR-ERC20, ERC20-ERC20 and HTS-ERC20 token swaps are also supported on the platform.

This is all possible thanks to Hedera Hashgraph’s support of EVM-compatible networks and the wrapped HBAR token (wHBAR), which is an ERC-20 representation of the HBAR token. You can learn more about the wHBAR token at whbar.io.

Users will also be able to create liquidity pools or add tokens to existing ones, contributing to the variety of trading pairs supported on the HeliSwap DEX, as well as earn protocol fees through their token supply.

On HeliSwap, users will have a variety of trading options that can rival many of the DEXes that run on other Web3 networks like Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. However, the fact that HeliSwap runs on Hedera gives traders even more reasons to consider choosing the DEX as their primary crypto trading platform.

Enjoy low-fee crypto trading

Thanks to Hedera Hashgraph’s sophisticated Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, which supports high transaction throughput and real-time transaction confirmation, HeliSwap is able to charge transaction fees that are well below the industry average. This makes HeliSwap one of the most affordable trading platforms in the DeFi space.

Be eco-friendly from the get go

Another big advantage of PoS is that it is much more energy efficient than Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithms like the ones that power Bitcoin and Ethereum. Just to put that in perspective, a single transaction on Ethereum uses enough energy to power an average US household for over four days (and the figures for Bitcoin are much worse!), as per data from digiconomist.net. It’s not surprising, then, that Ethereum is in the midst of a transition to Proof-of-Stake, a move that is expected to reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99.5%.

Since Hedera Hashgraph is a PoS network in the first place, it already boasts great energy efficiency. This means that, from the outset, you’ll be able to trade on HeliSwap with minimal impact to the environment!

Explore DeFi on a user-friendly platform

One of our priorities when designing HeliSwap was to create the ultimate user experience for DeFi veterans and newcomers alike. To that end, we’ve designed a clean and easy to use interface, with sufficient guidance and info-tips, to help our users navigate the platform and make the most of its robust features and capabilities. We want to help make the world of DeFi intuitive and fun and HeliSwap is our bid to do so!

The beginning of something great

With the launch of HeliSwap, we want to accomplish two main, largely complementary, goals: to establish a strong DeFi presence on Hedera and to demonstrate that the network is more than capable of competing with the current market leader, Ethereum.

Together with the HBAR Foundation, we’ve been working hard to achieve these goals and we are proud of the progress we’ve made so far. We believe that HeliSwap v1 will be a great showcase of the vast utility of the Hedera Hashgraph network. More importantly, we’re thrilled to be able to offer Web3 users a new HELI green, HELI affordable and HELI user-friendly way to engage with the exciting world of DeFi.

So much more to come

We are committed to keep HeliSwap at the forefront of DeFi innovation. With that in mind, we’ve devised a comprehensive roadmap outlining an ambitious post-launch expansion plan. As part of that plan, we’ll continue to expand HeliSwap’s capabilities through the addition of new features and functionalities, extending support for popular Web3 wallets, launching a native token and, eventually, launching a DAO to enable decentralized governance of the HeliSwap DEX.