Astroport – 84% |

Review Date: January 4, 2022

Astroport is a decentralized exchange built on Terra. With innovations in the AMM (Automated Market Maker) model compared to Terraswap, the first AMM of Terra Blockchain, Astroport aims to become the liquidity hub for all the assets on Terra. The design philosophy behind Astroport is simple: to enable decentralized, noncustodial liquidity and price discovery for any asset. To achieve this, Astroport prioritizes flexibility above all else; combining various specialized pool types and routing seamlessly across them. Astroport allows for the following pool types, which enable Astroport to accommodate a wide variety of token markets: Constant Product pools, pioneered by Bancor and Uniswap, and Stableswap Invariant pools, first introduced by Curve Finance. In addition, Astroport has a flexible architecture that allows builders to create new pool types that fit seamlessly within Astroport, with minimal changes to core protocol code. Besides the upgrade in the AMM model, Astroport also offers an attractive feature: dual liquidity mining and an innovative way to leverage the use case of the ASTRO token, through Astro Generators, architected to enable a liquidity provider to claim the governance awards of both ASTRO and the tokens of the extrinsic DeFi communities associated with the pool.

The Terra DeFi ecosystem is in its infancy but already has a wide variety of assets: cluster tokens, synths, governance tokens, native stablecoins, and of course LUNA itself. With the emergence of asset bridges such as IBC, Axelar, and Wormhole the diversity will increase as assets from the broader Cosmos, Ethereum and Solana ecosystems become available to Terra dApps. To cater to this on Ethereum, different pool types have been developed, each with unique trade-offs that lend themselves to certain market types. However, this causes fragmentation, decreasing capital efficiency, and necessitating higher-level AMM aggregators. Astroport empowers users to choose different pool types within a single AMM system, bringing built-in flexibility to support various asset types of Terra. Astroport has been developed through a joint venture of builders made up of Delphi Labs, We3, Attic Lab, and Terraform Labs (the “Astroport Joint Venture”). Astroport will be governed by the Astral Assembly, Astroport’s own DAO. The protocol was designed with the ambition of making it the most flexible and durable AMM system in DeFi, featuring support for multiple pool types, permissionless asset listing, a powerful incentive structure, and wide distribution of Astroport’s value and governance to Astroport’s most active and responsible users and builders. With these design principles in mind, the hope is for Astroport to become the go-to launchpad for the Terra DeFi universe.