Aftermath: 2023 Year-in-Review
2023 was a momentous year for Aftermath and our community, so we wanted to go back and highlight the achievements we are most proud of. We are grateful for those who have been with us from the start or have joined us along the way. Building great products is our mandate, but none of it matters if our community doesn’t find what we build to be useful to them.
Aftermath was founded in September 2022, and we spent the rest of the year assembling our developer team, researching, and defining our priorities for the coming year. FTX imploding made it a fantastic time to launch a new protocol on a new blockchain (/s), but it also reinforced our thesis that a fully on-chain exchange, which offers the convenience of a centralized exchange, was needed and worthwhile to attempt to build. So that’s what we set out to do.
We have come a long way since one year ago, both Aftermath and the greater Web3 community as a whole. We persevered through the FUD we all faced at the end of 2022, put our heads down and built, and we’re thrilled about the solid foundation we have created going into 2024. Below are just a few of our milestones, in chronological order, that we’ve accomplished over the past year:
- AMM v1 [Devnet Launch]
- Capy Staking [Testnet Wave 2]
- Router v1 [Testnet Launch]
- Validator Genesis Ceremony [Mainnet]
- First Contract Ever Published on Sui Mainnet
- AMM v1 & Router v1 [Mainnet Launch]
- afSUI v0.1 [Testnet Launch]
- SIP6 (First SIP)
- Found Bug in DeepBook
- LSD Hackathon
- afSUI v1 [Mainnet Launch]
- Dynamic Gas [Mainnet Launch]
- Perps [Testnet Launch]
- Received grant to build Elixir Integration
- Oracle Aggregator v1 [Mainnet Launch]
1. AMM v1 [Devnet Launch]
Our first major milestone of 2023 was launching our first product onto Sui Devnet. Up until this point we had a vision, and a strong team, but nothing concrete to show for it. Launching our AMM (prior to the launch of Sui Mainnet) was our way to show the world that we could build quality products and deliver on what we promised we would.
Our AMM was, and still is, different from every other DEX on Sui in that we offer pool compositions of up to 8 assets and provide both uncorrelated and stable swap pool types. We opted for this route after identifying the liquidity fragmentation issues that arise from having multiple representations of the same underlying caused by the various bridges integrated with Sui.
In order to allow users to perform the actions they wanted to, there needed to be a way to ensure it didn’t matter what chain you came from. Our AMM helps solve this problem, and after a year it’s clear our thesis was correct: our pools consistently act as a convenient avenue to enter the Sui ecosystem.
Related Twitter posts:
2. Capy Staking [Testnet Wave 2]
Although only lasting for a few weeks, Capy Staking is something we are proud of and think is worth highlighting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was not something that we had planned on building. Rather, it was a response to what we noticed from the Sui community, which was that we were all really enjoying the Sui Capys NFT collection.
We had an internal discussion and decided it would be interesting to build a product tailored around these NFTs. The purpose behind this product was twofold; it acted as a way to drive more users to our Testnet deployment, and also started laying the groundwork for future NFT integration into Aftermath.
A few days later it was complete and we deployed our Capy staking vault to Sui Testnet. These vaults allowed users to stake their Capys and earn fees from other users breeding their own Capys with those in the vault. This functionality greatly expanded upon that of the official Capy dApp, which only allowed breeding between two Capys owned by a single user.
We were able to showcase our ability to quickly respond to market demands by deploying products that users want. Overall it was a very fun experiment, and a bit of a tease of things to come in the NFT domain.
Related Twitter posts:
3. Router v1 [Testnet Launch]
After deploying our AMM, we wanted to make Aftermath the de facto place to go to ensure you get the best price for any swap you want to execute on Sui. It was clear that we would need to bootstrap multiple liquidity pools, and it just isn’t realistic to have the most liquid pool for every single asset, nor to expect a user to always calculate the most optimal path when trading between any two assets. In order to ensure the best swaps for our users, we needed to integrate every other sufficiently liquid DEX on Sui into our router… So that’s exactly what we did.
A user who comes to Aftermath to trade one token for another can be ensured that our router will search every Sui DEX with enough liquidity, and find the most optimal path between the two. Routes can even be split up so that 50% goes through one path, 25% through another, or any other combination which provides the best final swap price.
There is truly no reason to perform a swap anywhere other than Aftermath because if another DEX offers a better price we will route you through them anyway.
Related Twitter posts:
4. Validator Genesis Ceremony
Being one of the first teams building on Sui gives us great pride, in addition to the added expertise our developers have with Sui Move from being so early. We have always wanted to support the ecosystem and help it grow, so we were honored to be chosen as one of the 105 genesis validators of the Sui network and to participate in its Mainnet genesis event.
Sui was officially born on May 3rd, 2023, and Aftermath has been processing transactions since day one. It’s just another way for our team to be intimately involved with the Sui network and a responsibility we are proud to take on.
5. First Contract Ever Published on Sui Mainnet
This one is a bit of an Easter egg but something we think our community will appreciate. Before Sui Mainnet officially went live, the very first contract published to the network was published by Aftermath and contains an inside joke for our community. It was a fun way for Aftermath to celebrate the launch of Sui Mainnet, and write our names in the history books as the first to deploy a contract on our home chain.
6. AMM v1 & Router v1 [Mainnet Launch]
Sui Mainnet launch was a huge milestone as it meant we could release our AMM and Router to a monetary, production environment.
We were thrilled to see that both retail and our partners on the builder side found our products useful and wanted to collaborate. We steadily added new pools and new features, integrated more DEXs into our router, and saw our volume and TVL grow throughout the year.
Seeing real users utilizing our first products reinvigorated our efforts to continue pushing forward and roll out several more products in 2023.
Related Twitter posts:
7. afSUI v0.1 [Testnet Launch]
Ah, afSUI v0.1, or what we might more accurately refer to as “the saga of afSUI.”
To keep it brief, we always believed in the usefulness of liquid staking, but initially it was impossible to build a fully decentralized LSD on Sui. It required centralized, off-chain elements — the polar opposite of our ethos at Aftermath — due to the architecture of native Sui staking and some of its constraints.
We voiced our concerns and pushed ahead building what was a non-ideal LSD solution but ultimately one that was the best (in terms of decentralization) we could do with the existing technology.
When we completed building afSUI v0.1, there was a growing interest in Sui liquid staking derivatives and the possibility arose of rebuilding our implementation the way we originally intended through the enactment of a Sui Improvement Proposal (SIP).
8. SIP6 (First SIP)
The Sui Network can be modified and updated through a community upgrade process known as a Sui Improvement Proposal (SIP). After already implementing afSUI v0.1, we intimately knew the limitations of Sui’s original staking mechanism and what changes would be required to enable a more decentralized, non-custodial liquid staking protocol.
The key motivation was to to remove the requirement of a centralized account to custody the protocol’s supply of StakedSui by enabling StakedSui to be held by another shared object.
Our CTO Kevin wrote the SIP, which you can find here if you are in it for the tech and this sort of thing interests you. It was the first SIP that went from proposal to release on Sui Mainnet and marked another milestone for Aftermath and our pioneering spirit on Sui.
The end result of SIP6 is that afSUI is fully decentralized, and requires minimal trust nor custody from Aftermath. Users stake and receive afSUI all completely on-chain, thanks to SIP6.
9. Found Bug in DeepBook
Unit testing and benchmarking are a significant part of our development process. Before we begin feeling comfortable sending a product to audit, we are obsessive about testing the products, including benchmarking them against other protocols.
We decided early on to build our own orderbook for our perpetual exchange, since no one had ever built a bespoke orderbook that took full advantage of Sui Move.
Through direct comparison of our own orderbook against DeepBook, a vulnerability in DeepBook was discovered. We immediately alerted the relevant parties, proposed a fix, and were rewarded a bounty for our efforts.
10. LSD Hackathon
From August to October, the Sui Foundation hosted an ecosystem-wide Liquid Staking Hackathon. As the forefathers of liquid staking on Sui, we were natural contenders to place in this hackathon. The hackathon consisted of two tracks: one for liquid staking protocols, and one for liquid staking DeFi and tooling.
We entered afSUI in the first category, and a modified version of our latest innovation, Dynamic Gas, in the second.
Dynamic Gas allows users to pay for transactions in a coin other than SUI, through the use of two Sui-native features: programmable transactions and sponsored transactions. This alleviates the requirement for anyone to hold SUI to transact on Sui; instead they can hold 100% afSUI, while earning staking yield on their entire portfolio, while using afSUI to pay for their transactions.
Aftermath placed 1st in both categories.
Related Twitter posts:
11. afSUI v1 [Mainnet Launch]
Our next major milestone was launching afSUI on Mainnet pending completion of our audit. This was a major step and the culmination of all of the development time we committed to LSD v0.1, SIP6, and the final, current version of afSUI.
The community response to afSUI has been phenomenal, with afSUI becoming the dominant LSD on Sui, and the afSUI/SUI pool on Aftermath becoming the second most liquid pool on Sui.
We have a new feature that is soon to be released that will provide even more utility to afSUI, so be sure to stay tuned in the coming weeks. We are sure you are going to like it.
Related Twitter posts:
12. Dynamic Gas [Mainnet Launch]
In a nascent blockchain ecosystem like Sui, onboarding new users is paramount. One of the largest barriers to entry is ensuring that new users can easily onboard and start using dApps on the platform. Sui is quite intuitive to use, but not all users will necessarily have a SUI balance in order to pay for the gas cost of performing a transaction.
For example, if you have USDC on Arbitrum or on Solana, and you want to bridge to Sui, you can do so. But then you will need a balance of SUI in order to do anything on any Sui native protocol… Or do you?
Dynamic gas removes this need entirely. Bridge over USDC, ETH, or SOL? You can use that as gas.
Through programmable and sponsored transactions, you can use afSUI, USDC, or USDT to pay for your transaction’s gas thus removing one of the largest barriers of entry for new users.
Dynamic Gas combined with zkLogin present the ability to completely abstract away the fact that a user is interacting with a blockchain.
Our thesis is that it shouldn’t matter to users what chain they are on any more than it matters what cell tower their phone is connected to. As long as it is simple to use and offers the best experience, that’s where the users should be.
Dynamic Gas is a big step in that direction, which is why we prioritized it and launched it as soon as we did.
Related Twitter posts:
13. Perps [Testnet Launch]
Building a fully on-chain perpetual protocol was always our goal and what ultimately led us to building on Sui.
It simply hasn’t been possible to build something like this, even a couple of years ago. As avid traders, we are intimately aware of the drawbacks of existing hybrid CEX/DEX perp protocols with off-chain matching. We wanted to build the next generation of perps DEX which offers greater transparency, censorship-resistance, and user experience.
This was no small undertaking, and required us to build a bespoke matching engine written in Sui Move and designed to execute fully on chain.
We have launched our v1 on Sui Testnet for our community to try out and provide their feedback, while we undergo audits, continue to test and deploy some final improvements.
Beyond the back-end architecture, we have spent a lot of time iterating on the user experience to ensure every trader has all of the information they need prior to executing a trade.
Perps UI’s suffer from two downsides: (1) marketplaces need to display a lot of information to their users and (2) experienced traders like to see different information than new traders do.
We have tried to build a UI that appeals to both, by allowing them to see exactly how placing a new order or modifying an existing one will affect their positions. On top of this, our UI is largely customizable to your preferences, so be sure to try that out.
We have put a lot of thought into this, but we are always keen to hear what our users think. Please test it and let us know what you think of the experience.
We want Aftermath to be the most intuitive place to trade, with the most markets and the best prices. Knowing what our community wants is a key step to us achieving our goal.
Related Twitter posts:
14. Received grant to build Elixir Integration
As an orderbook-based perpetual exchange, obtaining liquidity on our books — to ensure proper depth and tight spreads for traders — is paramount. For this reason, we have been developing simple-to-enter strategies to onboard both institutional and retail users as market makers.
The typical retail user is not savvy enough, nor has sufficient capital to run their own market maker strategy on a highly competitive orderbook. To this end, we’ve created vaults which will run the strategy on their behalf. All a user has to do is deposit into the vault and sit back to earn profits from market making activity and liquidations.
This is something that we have been working on since early 2023, so it made perfect sense to extend the work we had been doing already to an existing community of retail market makers: Elixir.
We’ve since been awarded a Development grant to build out the Elixir Sui Move integration for DeepBook’s spot markets. This integration is extensible to allow Elixir to market make on many Sui-native venues, ranging from our own perpetuals orderbook, to DeepBook, to any other Sui protocol which uses a similar, orderbook-based architecture.
This integration is good for Aftermath and the greater Sui ecosystem alike. It’s another example of Aftermath building tooling which is sorely needed and will help all of Sui, which is our ultimate goal.
15. Oracle Aggregator v1 [Mainnet Launch]
Reliable index prices are paramount for any perpetual exchange. As such, we prioritized building architecture that can integrate and aggregate price feeds from multiple data sources.
Currently, Aftermath obtains price feeds from Pyth and Switchboard, and we are in talks with other oracle services to add them once they are live on Sui Mainnet.
In addition to aggregating price feeds to ensure reliability, our oracle architecture allows Aftermath to be oracle-agnostic by not being reliant on only one oracle. This further enables us to create markets for exotic assets which may not have a standard type of price feed or are unique to a specific oracle.
This flexibility gives us the opportunity to create markets for pretty much anything our traders would like to speculate on. We will be deploying our first such exotic market onto Testnet soon, so be sure to stay tuned.
In addition, Aftermath is a Pyth publisher, allowing us to push our own price feeds on-chain to ensure we can quickly launch new markets based upon what our traders demand.
Conclusion
We are proud of all we have accomplished in 2023, and extremely grateful for our community who have supported us by using the products we have built.
We have exciting news to announce soon about what we will do to thank our earliest and current users, but that alpha will have to wait until our next article…
Thank you to everyone who has been with us so far, it has been very rewarding to show the world what we can do. We are still just getting started, so here’s to 2024!