Aloha,
Today, we are launching Shell on Arbitrum mainnet. This is the culmination of years of hard work. Starting now, you can wrap tokens into Shell and start earning Shell Points. If you'd like to learn more about this, take a look at our Shell Points and quota blog posts.
In the coming weeks, we will roll out a network of liquidity pools based on our Proteus AMM engine. At that point, you will also be able to swap tokens and LP into pools. Not only will Shell have its own native source of liquidity for major currencies such as USDC, ETH or DAI, we are also building an AMM for Government Toucan NFTs.
For those that missed the snapshot and don't have any LP quota (or just want more), we will have a new community event with quota-earning opportunities very soon...
It's hard for me to overstate how much innovation has gone into this release - at the smart contract level (the Ocean), at the UI/UX level in the app, and in terms of incentive design (Shell Points).
I must give a big mahalo to the core team that has been extremely focused, creative and dedicated to make this dream a reality.
I must also thank our Discord Quartermasters for moderating our community, onboarding new members, protecting us from scammers, and explaining Shell to people better than I ever could.
And of course, mahalo to the rest of our community. The Primordials: you have been with Shell since the very early days when we were a humble stablecoin AMM trying to change the world. You have been an invaluable source of guidance.
The Toucan Wranglers: your presence has injected our community with a new level of energy and enthusiasm. Before you flocked to Shell World, we were one of many projects floating in the web3 sea. Now, we are one of the largest communities in the space, even larger than many blue chip DeFi protocols.
To the new community members: welcome aboard! It is an honor to have you. The Shell saga has only just begun and I look forward to taking this journey together.
Speaking of our journey, where exactly are we going? What is the purpose of all this?
I don't want to sound harsh, but the user experience in web3 in general and DeFi in particular is at best frustrating, at worst unusable for the average person. Something as simple as migrating tokens from one protocol to another is expensive, tedious and time-consuming.
This has to change.
But why are things so bad in the first place? Although we are building a new, decentralized financial system, mentally, we are still shackled to the old way of thinking. In TradFi, financial markets are separated from each other, monolithic silos available only to the gatekeepers. For example, the London Stock Exchange isn't connected to the New York Stock Exchange which isn't connected to your bank, which is barely even connected to your credit card.
We've designed DeFi and web3 with the same outdated mindset. Uniswap is siloed from Aave which is siloed from MakerDAO - all the way down the list! This disunited system is responsible for our frustration. It's holding back web3 from mass adoption.
It doesn't need to be this way.
Why is Shell important? With Shell, protocols are modular - not monolithic. They are natively, intrinsically, interconnected - not siloed. Whereas TradFi and legacy DeFi are tangled balls of string, Shell is an elegant network, like coral growing beneath crystal blue water.
With the technology we have shipped today, we finally have the tools to give people a seamless experience. Imagine a world where using finance is self-actualizing rather than frustrating. We can automate all the tedious, expensive steps and do exactly what we want with only a couple of clicks.
We are just beginning to realize the full potential of Shell. However, even now you can experience the promise yourself. On our testnet (and soon on Arbitrum One), you can seamlessly migrate your tokens from one liquidity pool to another in a single transaction! Much, much more capability beyond even that is soon to come.
Which brings me back to our earlier question: what is Shell's vision?
We are building the financial system of the future, the Internet Monetary System.
That means anyone in the world, no matter what country they are born in, who their parents were, or how much money they have to their name, is only ever a few clicks away from tapping into financial markets and technology that up until now were only available to the powerful and well-connected.
And who knows? Perhaps Shell will even build financial technologies that not even Wall Street has accessed before?
That is our vision. That is our destination.
Enjoy the launch, and thank you all for embarking on this journey with us.
Mahalo,
Kenny
Join the Shell community!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ShellProtocol
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/shell-protocol
Telegram: https://t.me/shellprotocol
GitHub: https://github.com/cowri/
Website: https://shellprotocol.io/