How to Migrate from Shell v1 to v2

A guide to moving funds from Shell v1 to Shell v2

This is an article in Shell Guides. Shell Guides is a series of tutorials and explanatory articles shedding light on Shell Protocol, web3, and finance at large.

Access Shell v2

Access Shell v1, Access Deactivated Shell v1


In October of 2020, Shell Protocol launched its first-ever AMM pools on Ethereum mainnet. They were a novel approach to a particular set of problems, offering deep liquidity and broken peg protection for like-value tokens (such as stablecoin-stablecoin or wrapped BTC-wrapped BTC).

Shell v1 also contained the seeds of a vision for a composable liquidity network — a vision now borne out by Shell v2. As such, after nearly two years of active life, Shell v1 will transition into a graceful retirement.

The Shell team has no immediate plans to disable access to Shell v1 or its app interface. After all, nothing ever really disappears on the blockchain. However, the time has definitely come for LPs in Shell v1 to withdraw their funds and transition to Shell v2. A simple guide below explains how to get this done.

Use the retired Shell v1 interface here: (RegularDeactivated)

First, visit the Shell v1 app and connect either your MetaMask or WalletConnect wallet. Note that Shell v2 only supports Metamask at the present time. If you have funds stored in the deactivated version of the Shell v1 pools, you may need to visit the deactivated Shell v1 app to retrieve them. On either app, the withdrawal process is the same.

Once you connect your wallet, you will be able to see your balances for each active pool in the ‘Your Balance’ column marked orange in the screenshot above. If both of these pools show zero balance, you do not have any funds deposited in Shell v1 via your currently-connected wallet.

To withdraw funds from a pool, click that pool to go to the pool details screen. Here, you will see a gray ‘Withdraw’ button at the bottom. Click that.

On the next screen, you will have the option to either ‘Withdraw Everything’ proportionally or specify which tokens you would like to withdraw to. For the stablecoin pool, if you withdraw everything proportionally, you will receive roughly 30% DAI, 30% USDC, 30% USDT and 10% SUSD. Please note that the Shell team has no present plans to support SUSD within Shell v2 at any time, so funds withdrawn as SUSD will not be able to wrap into Shell v2.

If you do not want to receive part of your withdrawal in SUSD (or any other particular token), you can instead type values for each withdrawal token in the fields above. The app will warn you when the sum of the tokens you have typed exceeds your current balance.

Depending on which tokens you are withdrawing to, you may see a slight additional gain or loss of value in your pending withdrawal. This mechanic gives you additional funds if your withdrawal brings the pool closer to its balanced state, and subtracts some funds if your withdrawal brings the pool further from its balanced state. A ‘Withdraw Everything’ withdrawal will do neither.

Once you have found a balance of tokens that you are satisfied with, click ‘Withdraw.’ You will be charged a small amount of gas on mainnet for the transaction, and the stablecoins will be transferred to your wallet.

For the wrapped BTC pool, withdrawal works identically, save for the fact that you can withdraw to any combination of WBTC, renBTC, and sBTC (instead of stablecoins). The Shell team has plans to support wrapping of WBTC into Shell v2 at or shortly after launch.

Now that you have withdrawn your funds from Shell v1, we can move them over to Arbitrum just like any other tokens. We do this by visiting the Arbitrum bridge.

Use the Arbitrum Bridge interface here.

In the Arbitrum bridge, select Mainnet as your source and Arbitrum One as your destination. Then select whichever token type you’d like to bridge first. You will need to pay a small gas fee (and potential authorization fee) for each token type you bridge. The actual bridging process will take roughly ten minutes from the time it is initiated.

You do not have to wait for one token type to finish bridging before you start the next one.

Once bridging is completed, success banners will appear for your bridged tokens on the Arbitrum bridge site. Now we can head over to Shell v2 and deposit our funds.

Access Shell v2

In the Shell v2 interface, you can either wrap or LP to move your funds into Shell v2. Either way, you will begin earning Shell Points (up to your quota limit). If you transition your funds to Shell v2 right at the start of launch, you may find that we have not deployed any AMM pools for users to LP into. If that’s the case, wrapping tokens will be your only option.

AMM pools are expected to roll out in the weeks following the initial guarded launch!

If you are able to LP, the option will appear in the trade screen just like any other token. In Shell v2, you LP into pools by ‘swapping’ from any supported token to the LP token of your choice.

First, select ‘shLP’ as the ‘Swap To’ token in the trade screen. Then click ‘Select LP token’ and choose your desired token from the list. Each LP token corresponds with a different pool. The names of the tokens indicate what component tokens they have exposure to.

Lastly, complete the swap for your desired LP token just like any other swap to transfer your liquidity into that Shell v2 pool.


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