
Liquidity Providers
Liquidity providers, or LPs, are not a homogenous group:- Passive LPs are token holders who wish to passively invest their assets to accumulate trading fees.
- Professional LPs are focused on market making as their primary strategy. They usually develop custom tools and ways of tracking their liquidity positions across different DeFi projects.
- Token projects sometimes choose to become LPs to create a liquid marketplace for their token. This allows tokens to be bought and sold more easily, and unlocks interoperability with other DeFi projects through Soroswap.
- Finally, some DeFi pioneers are exploring complex liquidity provision interactions like incentivized liquidity, liquidity as collateral, and other experimental strategies. Soroswap is the perfect protocol for projects to experiment with these kinds of ideas.
Traders
There are a several categories of traders in the protocol ecosystem:- Speculators use a variety of community built tools and products to swap tokens using liquidity pulled from the Soroswap protocol.
- Arbitrage bots seek profits by comparing prices across different platforms to find an edge. (Though it might seem extractive, these bots actually help equalize prices across broader Soroban/Stellar markets and keep things fair.)
- DAPP users buy tokens on Soroswap for use in other applications on Soroban/Stellar.
- Smart contracts that execute trades on the protocol by implementing swap functionality (from products like DEX aggregators to custom Soroban scripts).
Developers/Projects
There are far too many ways Soroswap is used in the wider Soroban/Stellar ecosystem to count, but some examples include:- The open-source, accessible nature of Soroswap means there are countless UX experiments and front-ends built to offer access to Soroswap functionality.
- Wallets often integrate swapping and liquidity provision functionality as a core offering of their product.
- DEX (decentralized exchange) aggregators pull liquidity from many liquidity protocols to offer traders the best prices by splitting their trades. Soroswap is the biggest single decentralized liquidity source for these projects.
- Smart contract developers use the suite of functions available to invent new DeFi tools and other various experimental ideas.