Hi everyone - I would like to introduce Horizon Finance to this community!
We want to make XCM transfers more user friendly. We have a small prototype ready @ horizonfinance.xyz. It allows the user to make a raw XCM transfer. Here’s a short demo - Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software | Loom
We are sharing our idea in detail below, and we would love to get feedback & suggestions from all the community members present here!
Brief Overview
Horizon Finance aims to make XCM transfers more user friendly for DotSama users. We want to make the experience of doing XCM transfers as smooth as swapping tokens on Uniswap.
The aim is to give users a refined user experience for making cross chain transfers that is on par with what is available in other ecosystems in the form of products like Bungee Exchange, Wormhole Portal, Leap Wallet (Bridge interface), Squid Router etc.
We will do this by building a good user experience for all things surrounding an XCM transfer like wallet selection, network/parachain selection, amount inputs etc.
To make the entire user journey more seamless, we’ll also focus specifically on some UX centric features as well. Some of these include:
- intimating the user of things that will lead to a failed transaction before they initiate it (like low amount of asset being transferred, XCM channel not available for the transaction to go through or low balance for gas fee to be paid etc).
- showing a user friendly summary of entire transaction before they initiate it
- checking the status of an XCM transfer within the app
The problem we want to solve
Dotsama ecosystem has low level tools for XCM transfers, but there isn’t a single interface with good UI/UX for users to perform XCM transfers. XCM transfers are the backbone of the dotsama ecosystem. A lot of development has been done recently to facilitate these transfers easily at infra level. Hence many low level tools like the xcm pallet & the asset transfer API have been deployed. However, these tools aren’t being utilised to give a good user experience to the dotsama users when it comes to making XCM transfers.
There is a huge volume of value transfer taking place via the 194 active XCM channels at the moment. The total number of XCM transfers done till date is nearing 500k. And these transactions increase exponentially when an adoption driving event happens like the recent Manta token launch.
These are the numbers for a nascent technology in an emerging blockchain ecosystem. With more improvements in the XCM pallet, more parachains supporting XCM transfers and an increase in overall adoption of Polkadot network, these numbers would go up exponentially.
And so will the inconvenience. A good user experience would make the process less cumbersome for these users. And it will also help less experienced users, who aren’t able to make use of XCM transfers yet.
Comparison with other products in the ecosystem
There are some similar projects in the ecosystem, but their primary focus isn’t on XCM transfers. Since these products aren’t specifically designed keeping in the mind the challenges that a user faces while making an XCM transfer, they give a very poor experience besides giving limited options.
Talisman, Subwallet & Nova have a UI to make XCM transfers but:
- The availability of existing channels & assets is fragmented.
- Each of these support different kinds of XCM channels & assets.
- Each of these has their own UI, and hence has it’s own learning curve.
This adds a lot of overhead as the user would need to maintain multiple wallets as per the availability of the XCM channels & asset support associated with a particular wallet.
Horizon finance would be a one stop platform for all active XCM channels and all possible assets.
Future plans
Once we have the basic product ready, we plan on rolling out a few other important features around it.
In terms of core product features, we plan on including some additional convenience features like a Horizon Finance UI plugin for other dapps, so that they can include this functionality within their dapps. We also plan on aggregating bridges to other ecosystem directly within our UI.
Beyond the above, we also plan on rolling out an Android & iOS version of the product as well for the mobile users.
About us
Our core team members include:
- Saumay Agrawal
- 7+ years of experience in software R&D across various startups & research labs.
- 4+ years of experience in building products/services/tooling for various web3 orgs like Solana, Livepeer, Filecoin, Celo, ICP & Mina.
- Previously led tokenomics design for a gamefi venture on Solana
- Prayag Desale
- 3+ years experience in web3 space as a Product Manager
- 6+ years experience in general software development and SaaS space
- DeFi degen by nature, active across Polkadot, Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana and other L2s
Do let us know what you think about it! 