Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are one of the most widely used decentralized crypto products. Even in the current bear market, these market makers facilitate over $3B dollars of daily volume, rivaling the volumes of centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, and FTX. AMMs connect liquidity from liquidity providers (LPs) who are looking for yields on their assets to traders who want to swap those assets.
The Constant Product Market Maker $x*y = k$, a type of AMM which supports simple, gas-efficient swaps on-chain, popularized AMMs in DeFi. While swaps on Constant Product Market Makers are gas efficient, they are subject to high price impact. To mitigate this, a new wave of AMMs like Uniswap V3 and Curve’s Stable Swap introduced innovations to increase capital efficiency, thereby limiting the price impact of trading.
Recent research has shown the capabilities that AMMs unlock for liquidity providers. Two notable examples are:
Replicating Market Makers: We now know that a very large class of payoff functions (concave, non-decreasing, 1-homogenous functions) can be replicated with an AMM.
Replicating Monotonic Payoffs: Specifically, one can replicate any monotonically increasing (non-decreasing) payoff function by separating the exposures to different tokens in a liquidity position. This insight opens up an even larger range of financial products which can be built with AMMs at their core.
While our understanding of how to best engineer these derivatives is still nascent, building tools to make them more accessible and flexible has massive potential. These innovations enable liquid derivatives markets that don’t require adversarial market-makers — just a well-designed AMM position. Cutting-edge research is continuing to explore how AMMs can be used to enable futures markets, expand the space of payoffs by selling the right to arbitrage pools, invert payoffs through lending markets, use liquidity positions as staking derivatives, and more.
To foster experimentation and unlock the full capabilities of AMMs, liquidity providers and builders need an AMM that gives them intuitive, fine grain control over the parameters and distribution of their liquidity. Currently, teams have chosen to build new AMMs from scratch, leading to fragmented liquidity and huge amounts of development overhead.
Duality is a decentralized exchange optimized for capital efficiency and composability while protecting users from harmful price manipulation. With Duality, liquidity providers and protocols have intuitive, fine grain control over parameters and distribution of liquidity. It has the following properties:
1️⃣ Simple and Flexible Duality is built using liquidity pools with constant prices, a radically simpler way to build a concentrated liquidity AMM. This simplicity lends itself to flexibility: since any curve can be approximated with a few tangent lines, any AMM curve imaginable (static or moving) can be approximated to any desired accuracy using Duality. To assist, we have been building out tools to make it even easier for developers and LPs to experiment.
2️⃣ The Best of AMMs and Order Books Duality traders and LPs get the best of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) and Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs). Traders can set limit orders as if Duality were a CLOB, and LPs can generate fees, stabilize liquidity in volatile markets, and create arbitrage-based portfolio strategies enabled by the liveness of an AMM.
3️⃣ Shared Liquidity Any AMM curve built on top of Duality will re-use the same underlying liquidity pools, creating a best-in-class shared liquidity infrastructure. Duality’s approach to concentrated liquidity reduces fragmented liquidity, making it more difficult to manipulate the price of a AMM, creating safer derivatives and less price impact on trades.
4️⃣ Cutting-Edge MEV Protections As an app-chain, Duality can implement protections to prevent bad kinds of MEV such as sandwiching and TWAP manipulation by leveraging staking mechanics, block ordering / visibility, and MEV-aware app design.
There is much room to improve user’s experiences around MEV, liquidity provisioning, swap pricing and more. Building an app-chain allows for fine grain control over every layer of Duality - which is extremely important for building the optimal environment for decentralized exchange.
We believe that a concentrated liquidity exchange built right, can not only elevate the trading experience but also unlock an entirely new class of financial products.
Duality will be launching as a Cosmos SDK app-chain in 2023. We are excited by the feedback we’ve received thus far and are excited to see what brilliant teams will do with our platform. We’ve kicked us off by brainstorming a few exciting use cases for Duality below.