NEST Roundtable3: Ethereum merge is coming, opportunities & challenges to infrastructures

Participants:

Ricky: CTO of NEST

Michael: Core developer at Celer Network

Zord4n: LI.FI marketing lead

Arvinc: .bit Technical Operation

Coinhub: Coinhub Community Speaker

Conference recording：https://twitter.com/NEST_Protocol/status/1569309652562907138

Would you please provide our audiences an introduction of your projects?

NEST: NEST used to be a DeFi lending protocol, then transferred into an Oracle. Now it is a stochastic computer based on PVM, enables the generation and programming of stochastic assets.

LI.FI: LI.FI network is a Bridge & DEX Aggregator, so we give you the best routes for sending any token across fifteen incompatible change currently, and soon we’re going to start expanding to other ecosystems like Solana and Cosmos.

.bit: .bit is a unified cross chain identity for users and communities. It is a is a self-sovereign data container and decentralized user homepage linked to all web2 and web3 social graph.

Celer: Celer Network is a blockchain interoperability protocol, which is a solution to fungible assets across 13 chains. We also expanded into inter-chain messaging, which is the ability to relay arbitrary message across different chains. With this, we are able to support non-fungible assets and build cross-chain dApps.

Coinhub: Coinhub is a user-friendly multi-chain wallet, which has already integrated with a lot of DeFi and Dexes.

How was your situation in the last one year, and would you please share some developing story of your projects?

LI.FI: In June last year, we kept adopted the protocol with two integrations. We added new protocols to the liquidity match, so we now support ten bridges and 17 Dexes, offer on-chain swaps, cross-chain swaps, and a combination of both.

Coinhub: We found protocols to integrate into our SDK and Widget, so we can not only help users to manage their asset much easier, but also one-stop center for developers.

.bit: We have been developing our products in the most of the time in the past one year. We were researching the did track in detail, and we established our solid product ground, and we were trying to expand imagination for DAO, bringing some community government into it. We developed .bit alias which will effectively enhance the security in Web3. And we are also creating the function sub-accounts for DAO management etc.

Celer: We were just building and iteration. We launched the three iterations of the cBridge. This year we also support NFT in our messaging system. We can also support more complex cross-chain dApps, like cross-chain gaming and yield farming etc.

NEST: We upgraded into version 4.4 in Aprils. We improved the techniques and prices offering for multiple assets. In one smart contract, one can start a pricing information flow for more than ten different assets. In this way, the efficiency of uploading information is better. The economic model has also been improved. Quotations commission fees have been cancelled, means that the quoted price is free now.

What will be the major changes after the merge from the perspective of your project?

LI.FI: There is not basically going to change the protocol. We talked to all the bridges that we integrated and asked about their plan on if they will shut down. Some of them will not have a downtime, so we will not stop our services as well, and the only difference is that there will be a limited number of bridges during that time until they come back online. Technically there’s not a lot of changes. I personally suggest waiting one day for bridging.

.bit: We do not foresee to receive much impact from the merge.

Celer: In the short term, the final merge right end in the year the switching of their execution layer is coming up in problem about two three days. So we will pause our service in Ethereum chain for caution, probably less than one day, not a long time, but other chains will not be affected. After the merge, there might be no difference to us.

Coinhub: From user’s side, it should be the same and they should feel nothing different, but in the operational side, like the bridge and swap, they may pay more attention to these features to make sure that once this merge happen, there’s no gap and all things are safe.

What are the opportunities or challenges presented by the merging to the infrastructure, DAO, and especially DeFi projects?

LI.FI: I think that the first opportunity is to move all your ETH mainnet because the only way to get filled with token as all. For me personally, the biggest question is what happens with the consensus, what happens to the stakers, what route are they going to choose. There’s no legal clarity for a lot of companies and that will basically the side a lot of development on Ethereum in the future.

Coinhub: I mostly agree on the opportunities you said. The consensus of the community is to move from POW to POS, because POW is not scalable enough, and I see many community members say OK, now 99.5% energy consumption from POW is now eliminated. That’s why I don’t think there’s a lot of change internally, but rather opportunities within DeFi. Like STETH and CBETH are trading now in extremely discount to ETH but I don’t see a lot of risk in coinbase. So, there’s a lot of opportunities.

Celer: Not only for Dex, but also Cex, the people expect funding a little different from what they had before. For DeFi, when staking the derivatives, some protocols should manage the risk.

.bit: From DAO side, we have been investigating the possibility of creating a DAO based on our product, and we have launched a project called NameDAO with many functions and great logic.

Coinhub: We seek difference after the merge. What we try to do is a kind of targeting institutional DeFi, which is might one of the emerging assets in the next four five days.

Do you have any preparation for the up-coming merge? Would your share some of your future plan after the merge?

LI.FI: My personal wish is there’s going to be some small hiccup from trading perspective. We expect to influence more people and more new fresh enter the market.

Celer: Besides the short pause for security, we do not have any specific preparation.

Coinhub: I hope things all go smoothly. I personally prefer moving to POS.

.bit: Also from the DAO side, so the most challenging we see it will currently facing right now is how to transfer the OG of the product into the DAO OG. We have a healthy treasury set for the DAO to compensate.

NEST: We do not see any impact from the merging. Actually, the merge makes us easier to calculate the compound interest rate and discount rate. We are also very excited to build our research academy for investigating the financial mathematics related to blockchain and cryptos.