Lack of built-in XTZ → ctez → * routing harms casual user experience

Recently I had a acquaintance who became interested in the Tezos environment, specifically in GIF DAO (GIF). They were looking around to see where they could acquire GIF, and naturally I recommended swapping using Plenty DeFi. However, they were immediately turned off by having to go to a separate site, ctez.app, to make a preconditioned swap for their held XTZ to ctez. They had no interest in a personal oven, minting, etc, so to them it was merely an additional offsite step, and some people truly do dislike extra steps.

As someone who moved their LP from the PLENTY / XTZ Quipuswap LP farm to the PLENTY / ctez Plenty LP farm day-of, I don’t have any issues with it, and moreover I understand the purpose of ctez quite well. However, your causal user don’t care about those sorts of things. A casual user just wants to take their XTZ and —as trivially as possible —swap it to something else. Given that, there should exist within Plenty DeFi the ability swap directly from XTZ under the automatic routing to ctez. My friend, for example, could have made their XTZ → GIF swap, but with a ctez step in the middle, and this should generically apply to all XTZ swaps (XTZ → ctez → *).

I think that would greatly improve casual usability, as my friend ultimately just used Quipuswap, because it “made things easy”.

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Valid. Thanks for sharing the feedback here. We just don’t want to use the current ctez.app’s liquidity pool for swapping on PlentyDefi as well. Coming up with a more optimized one. Wait for updates!

I think that kind of advanced routing could be there on roadmap, but before that the work might be around minimising the slippage for a xtz to ctez swap through a flat curve.

Like in uniswap or sushiwap, we need WETH to trade. I think it’s reasonable to just keep as ctez. we can do some other activity with it, and when we want tezos, just tranfer it to tezos.

Making things is easy is definitely important! Thanks for the feedback.

Onboarding new users can be improved with writing guides, youtube videos etc. Ctez can be a daunting project at first, but I think when users can learn how to use DeFi like an AMM, they can also learn to ctez.

Why would any user want to read a bunch of guides and view a bunch of youtube videos to make a trade?
It’s not their job to learn how to use a product it’s up to the team to build a product that is easy to use and if that’s not the case people will just move on to the next dex that makes it easier for them I don’t understand how Plenty cannot see this.

Onboarding new users is arguably the hardest thing to do and a good product would optimize that funnel to the n-th degree at least from my experience that is how you start to win over users and increase usability and engagement.

Plenty needs to decide if it wants to build a product that is accessible to the masses or not, are you willing to compromise your ideal solution for a more practical one?

Your honest answer is appreciated I think it will help people make a more informed decision if they want to keep supporting this project with their money or not.

I have voiced this point of view before. Not being able to swap XTZ is a huge barrier for having people use PlentySwap. A Tezos AMM needs to offer XTZ swapping. It’s basic optics.

To solve the “who’s baking”-issue, I suggest the following, which plays right in to Plenty’s buy-back-and-burn approach:

  1. Create XTZ-Plenty and/or XTZ-cTez pair (+ farms), and integrate XTZ into the router.
  2. Setup a Plenty-run baker that XTZ-holding contracts are permanently delegated to.
  3. DGH provides baker bond (10% of XTZ TVL) to avoid overdelegation while LP XTZ remains fully liquid.
  4. Compensate for lack of staking rewards w. slightly higher farm yield (Optional. I actually don’t think people care that much)
  5. Use staking rewards to buy back and burn Plenty.

A side effect is that Plenty gains a presence as a (potentially large) baker, which I see as a plus for both Plenty and Tezos!

Happy to discuss weaknesses I may have missed.

Thank you for your input!

The goal for the team was to attract more liquidity to the Tezos ecosystem. This why the Plenty project was started. Building a DeFi protocol is different from building a product though, but I understand the sentiment.

DeFi has challenges, and the Tezos blockchain has specific challenges. Choices have been made to assure scalability, for example with the introduction of ctez.

Making the UI/UX more usable is important, so if you have any issues please create them on the open source frontend repo! :point_right:https://github.com/Plenty-DeFi/plenty-interface

Thanks for the input!

Tez doesn’t scale really well for DeFi on Tezos unfortunately. The Plenty Protocol will eventually be completely decentralized, running a bakery is not part of that in my opinion. Open to other options though, like flatcurve ctez-tez.

Whatever works. If flatcurve ctez-tez will do the trick and fits better with the setup, I say it’s worth at least trying out for a while.

The flat curve will enable to trade large amounts of xtz-ctez with minimal slippage, so plenty can integrate the seamless under the hood xtez-ctez swapping :wink:

Just selecting tez and swapping through the router should work. Liquidity adding is of course in ctez- tokenabc.

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That’s perfect! keep the LP in ctez - xxx, it’s all good

A very strong xtz-cTez or xtz-Plenty pool should be included as soon as possible.

As mentioned in another thread, some Telegram users have been very vocal about wanting to use XTZ for trading,
…BUT XTZ is an inferior option for Liquidity providers, since they can’t control delegation AND farm at the same time.
The alternative is having the choice of loosing out on staking rewards : Vortex
OR fighting bad bakers that don’t pay staking rewards: Quipuswap.

As long as there is one strong, liquid xtz-cTez or xtz-Plenty pool you can create the illusion of xtz-trading pairs while in reality routing all trades through two pools at basically no extra slippage.

Edit: the xtz-Plenty/ctez pool should be delegated to a Plenty baker or Plenty Partner and should be used to fund xPlenty or burn Plenty.

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