Swell has set sights on its next big upgrade: Barracuda.
This upcoming release is now scheduled for early next year, and will create a primary market for swETH; enabling the redemption of swETH for ETH through the Swell app at the underlying rate.
From Seawolf to Barracuda
Swell launched in late April under the Seawolf release, and has quickly broken into the top 10 liquid staking protocols — with more than 10,000 unique stakers and more than 44,000 ETH staked.
Along the way, the protocol has established an extensive range of ecosystem integrations. Chainlink Proof of Reserve is used to automatically verify the ETH backing each swETH, and the token is traded on a range of top-tier DEXes including Maverick and Balancer. More recently, swETH has also been incorporated into several LST indexes, and accepted as collateral in decentralized borrowing protocol Gravita.
These integrations support a robust and diversified secondary market for swETH, with more than $40M in liquidity now sitting across decentralized exchanges, including dedicated swETH pools, multi-LST pools, and various forms of concentrated liquidity pools.
Enabling withdrawals
Building on this progress, Barracuda will represent the first major upgrade to our protocol architecture since launch.
The release is expected for early next year, and will introduce redemption capabilities that enable swETH to be redeemed at the underlying rate through the primary market. This will both streamline the process of swapping out of swETH to ETH, and add another layer of reassurance to stakers on Swell.
Research has now commenced into seamless and secure withdrawal mechanisms, including buffers for facilitating seamless at-peg swaps between swETH and ETH.
What's next?
Prior to Barracuda, Swell will be introducing other new features that support our mission to provide the best possible liquid staking experience, remain aligned with Ethereum, and promote decentralization and responsible protocol development
In the immediate pipeline, Swell will be expanding the reach of swETH to Layer 2 protocols, and further boosting swETH utility by integrating with more protocols across the DeFi ecosystem.
If you haven't staked with Swell yet, now is the best time to get involved: early adopters are now being rewarded through the Voyage airdrop campaign, and can collect pearls that can be used to claim $SWELL tokens at the token generation event!
Stay up-to-date by joining our thriving community in Discord and following Swell on Twitter.
