Introducing WhatSwap: A Lightweight Decentralized Trading Protocol

4 min readFeb 17, 2022

Save 50–90% Gas Fees Everytime You Use Whatswap on Ethereum

As Decentralized Finance continues to grow, the products built are beginning to reach widespread adoption. Currently, there are over $86 billion locked in DeFi liquidity protocols. In addition, the volume on decentralized exchanges has grown substantially, reaching more than $2 billion daily volume across all Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges.

The ease of use combined with users having complete control over their digital assets has played a significant role in the mass adoption of DEXs. As a result, trading pairs on decentralized exchanges have surpassed the volume on many prominent centralized exchanges.

This phenomenal growth of decentralized trading volume has played a prominent role in increasing the network congestion on Ethereum, where users often end up paying over $100 for a simple swap. Unfortunately, the issue for solving the gas fees has been solely assumed to be the responsibility of blockchain foundations. In contrast, the potential gas fees reductions by building gas-optimized applications can play a crucial role in reducing the gas fees.

Need for Gas-Optimized DApps

Most AMM (Automated Market Maker) liquidity protocols are forks of Uniswap and hence, suffer from the same underlying issues of inefficient gas utilization. These inefficiencies are limiting the growth of users on existing decentralized exchanges due to high gas fees and astronomical costs for creating a liquidity pool.

While all the innovation happening in this space has been around adding new features in the exchanges, creating more gas-efficient protocols has been widely overlooked. Gas fees are one of the deciding factors for users while choosing where they trade, and innovation in this area has been long overdue. Gas inefficiencies in dApps have limited the user base who can access the decentralized money markets on Ethereum.

Introducing WhatSwap

WhatSwap is an on-chain decentralized trading protocol using an automated liquidity pool based on a “constant product formula.” Every WhatSwap trading pair stores a reserve of the dual asset pools, which provides liquidity for the assets in the pool. WhatSwap is designed to be a highly gas-efficient protocol that substantially reduces gas fees when compared to other AMM pools without adding any trade-offs with the user experience.

WhatSwap incorporates all essential trading features in the protocol smart contracts while achieving the low gas fees trades for the users.

Some of the key features of WhatSwap:

Gas Efficiency: WhatSwap is designed with gas efficiency as one of the key features of the protocol. The architecture saves gas during liquidity pool creation and token swaps. WhatSwap also lowers the on-chain data storage while creating a new liquidity pair which not only saves gas fees but also puts a lower on-chain storage burden on Ethereum saving blockchain bloat.

Permissionless Listing: WhatSwap is a permissionless protocol where anyone can create a liquidity pool for token pairs and provide liquidity.

User Experience: WhatSwap is designed to offer the same user experience as other decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and other automated liquidity pools.

Token Pairs: WhatSwap is designed to support ETH/ERC20 and ERC20/ERC20 (in V2) token pairs.

Gas Fees Savings With WhatSwap

The chart below illustrates the top gas-consuming smart contracts in 2021 on the Ethereum blockchain.

The above chart states that decentralized exchanges are among the top gas guzzlers on Ethereum in 2021.

An estimated $3.2 billion is consumed in gas fees on decentralized exchanges in a year. According to our analysis, WhatSwap saves ~60% gas fees for a swap and ~90% gas fees for pool creation compared to existing decentralized trading protocols.

WhatSwap can help save more than $2.1 billion annually (as per the above-derived data).

These are very significant savings, and the low gas fees will trigger wider adoption for the entire DeFi ecosystem.

Sneak Peak!

Following are two trades performed simultaneously on Uniswap and WhatSwap.

As evident, WhatSwap is highly economical in terms of saving gas fees when it comes to decentralized exchange trading.

Journey Ahead

We will keep releasing new updates, including our roadmap, timelines, audits, and much more. We welcome feedback from the community and are open to collaborations.