Ethereum

Automated market maker (AMM) MonoX has announced the official launch of its mainnet platform, offering investors a full complement of swap and liquidity capabilities on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchain networks.

With the release of this new service, Mono X is aiming to establish a cost-effective and accessible infrastructure for liquidity providers seeking to propel their projects to the market, and traders interesting in engaging in token swap services.

In the case of traditional decentralized exchanges (DEXes) such as dYdX, it is necessary for projects to provide two tokens to build a liquidity pair, a requirement that increases the capital barrier for entry. With the single-sided liquidity feature, projects only need to stake their native token which means that they can offer more overall liquidity to the market.

According to the official announcement, the liquidity pools implemented upon launch are as follows: On Ethereum, assets include Ether (ETH), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT), while on Polyon, assets include Polgyong (MATIC), WBTC, USDC, USDT and Wrapped Ether (WETH).

Last month, the AMM raised $5 million in capital funding to support the decrease of mandatory capital and liquidity levels for decentralized finance (DeFi) projects offering swap, borrowing, lending derivative services on decentralized exchanges (DEXes).

At the time, the project was still in beta development, but this announcement marks a transition to full-scale implementation in the DeFi space.

MonoX CEO Ruyi Ren told Cointelegraph about how MonoX is utilizing single-sided liquidity pool innovation to reduce the barrier-to-entry for new DeFi participants:

“Protocols that use liquidity pairs result in capital requirements to participate in DeFi being high. With our model all you need to do is deposit your own token to the pool (0 collateral). Project owners can list their tokens without the burden of capital requirements and focus on using funds for building the project instead of providing liquidity.”

Related: DeFi liquidity pools, explained

In addition, Ren spoke of the potential impact Value Backed Tokens could have on the wider DeFi ecosystem:

Value Backed Tokens (VBT) are tokens that are already backed by other assets. Financial Derivatives, game tokens, NFT shards, DAO tokens, and even some stablecoins all fall into this category. With MonoX, we don’t require extra collateral so once a staked Ether is minted, it can be tradable on MonoX with zero capital requirement.