For the April Spotlight Article, we interviewed Long Nguyen, the co-founder of Minswap.
Hey Long! Happy to connect today and learn more about the Minswap project! Can you tell us more about the project and the problem you were addressing?
Minswap is a community-centric decentralized exchange on Cardano. With no venture capital funding or private investment, we aim to become the best DEX for anyone to buy and sell their Cardano native tokens, and earn passive income via yield farming and staking.
Why did you choose to build Minswap on Cardano?
Cardano is simply the most decentralised Proof-of-Stake chain as of now. We are also aligned with Cardano’s philosophy of measure twice cut once, moving slowly and research-driven. Cardano also has an awesome community and that makes it the best place to launch a community-driven, no-VC projects like Minswap.
What are the most important things about Minswap?
We are a 100% community-funded project without VC investment. We have a fairly-distributed tokenomics with more than 70% going to the public. We are also one of the most innovative, builder-centric projects.
Going forward, how will Minswap make an impact in the crypto space or on the world?
Advocating for Open and Fair ecosystem initiatives like open sourcing that help growing and strengthening Cardano’s technical community, the scalability of solutions, and accessibility for future builders to deploy innovative applications.
We believe that while Cardano has emerged as the most decentralised PoS blockchain network, every effort ought to be made to maintain and advance this level of decentralisation by empowering small and medium SPOs to benefit from the emergence of DeFi in Cardano, while also enabling them to build trust and reputation.
Now, what are your accomplishments so far, and what are you most proud of?
Since Q1 2022, we have successfully launched the testnet. We launched a successful Liquidity Bootstrapping Event with Fair Price Discovery and Transparency, Equitable and Wide Distribution and No front-running by whales.
We launched our mainnet and yield farming as well. We are the biggest DEX in terms of TVL at the moment, having been funded entirely by Catalyst and our community. However, the thing that I’m most proud of is our team that has and will continue to work hard to make Minswap better, and our community that has always continued to support us over good and challenging times.
Why should people choose to use Minswap? What are the advantages over other decentralized exchanges?
We are fast! We also have one of the best UI/UX out there with many user-friendly features like mobile support, price chart, zap-in and real-time yield farming. We have more than 30 languages with community contributors in all parts of the world. We are always looking to innovate by borrowing ideas from successful DeFi concepts on other chains and applying them to Cardano, as well as using some of the features of the Cardano architecture to make DeFi special such as built-in liquid staking of ADA.
What is the future of Minswap? For example, what new things to come, and what will it mean for the overall project?
We are working hard to add more features and improve the performance, the experience and security of Minswap. The next big thing that the community can expect is MIN staking and Minswap v2.
Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind Minswap?
We are a DeFi passionate global team with members from all over the world. Most of our developers are based in Vietnam, while other members of the Team are in Europe, India and the UAE.
Which partnerships have you engaged so far, and which ones are the most impactful?
We are engaged in a lot of partnerships ranging from bridges to trading NFTs in marketplaces with MIN tokens. There are also some strategic partnerships that will benefit mostly the trading experience like integrating Djed Stablecoin that will help provide a convenient unit for transacting. In addition, Minswap will be tapping into the endless possibilities that synthetics offer by partnering with Indigo. Stay tuned for more partnerships!
Thank you for your time! Do you have anything else to add?
We are always happy if the Cardano community submits ideas, improvement proposals and feedback on our #ideas channel on Discord or on our Forum. We would also like to thank our community and the greater Cardano community for the support they have shown towards us, in the good and the hard times. It is a blessing to build in such a welcoming and active community!