Three Minutes to Understand Bonfida: The Serum Frontend for On-Chain Programmatic Trading

Written by: Groot

At the beginning of 2021, the lingering heat from the DeFi boom had not yet dissipated, and the emergence of NFTs and new public chains smoothly took over, driving the cryptocurrency market into a new peak of this historic bull market. In the competition among new public chains, the high-performance public chain Solana stood out, maintaining a presence in the eyes of market participants since its founding in late 2017 by former engineers from Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox, thanks to its extremely high TPS.

Among them, the DeFi protocol Serum, advised by the "top influencer" in the crypto space, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), founder of the FTX exchange, has gradually formed a nascent sub-ecosystem as the flagship application of the Solana ecosystem. However, today we are not discussing Serum DEX itself, but rather the killer application known as Bonfida, referred to as Serum's "flagship front end."

Most domestic users' first impression of Bonfida comes from IDO issuances like Oxygen, but Bonfida is more than just an IDO platform or a simple Serum front end; it is a collection of applications that empower the Serum and Solana ecosystems.

What is Bonfida?

As mentioned earlier, Bonfida is Serum's "flagship front end," providing a better trading experience for the DEX. Currently, in addition to the basic trading functions based on Serum, Bonfida offers programmatic trading bots, Serum APIs, and the upcoming launch of the first perpetual contract protocol on the Solana chain.

The Bonfida front end significantly optimizes the trading experience of Serum DEX. Bonfida is one of the first platforms to use on-chain data for TradingView chart embedding. For most more professional investors, the line-drawing features provided by TradingView offer a far superior experience compared to the drawing tools provided by most trading platforms.

The Serum API built by Bonfida can provide all trading data from Serum for querying. Currently, mainstream data platforms like CoinGecko and major market makers within some centralized exchanges directly obtain trading data from the Serum ecosystem via the Serum API.

Among the services provided by Bonfida, the programmatic trading bot is the real "killer feature." BonfidaBot can help DeFi users in the Solana ecosystem establish trading strategies on Serum using the natively integrated TradingView. DeFi users can use TradingView's strategy indicators or send on-chain trading signals to BonfidaBot via JavaScript commands, achieving fully automated on-chain trading.

At the same time, users can choose to open their created programmatic strategies to others and set their own subscription prices for those strategies. After other users subscribe to the strategy, the strategy provider can receive subscription fee incentives. Based on the high transparency of the Solana decentralized ecosystem and the absence of centralized custody, users can fully trace and view the historical returns of all publicly available strategies. Whether users establish their own trading strategies or subscribe to others' strategies, they can maintain 100% management rights over their assets.

BonfidaBot has already launched BTC/USDC strategies from well-known Taiwanese KOL Benson, as well as trading strategies for BTC/USDT and SOL/USDT from the overseas quantitative team CompendiumFi. In the future, BonfidaBot will integrate contract protocols, and even options and structured product protocols.

According to the team, Bonfida is about to launch the first perpetual contract protocol on the Solana chain, which will also provide more diverse options for BonfidaBot.

Native Token FIDA

Bonfida has launched its native token FIDA, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens. 95% of the net fees on Bonfida will be used to buy back and burn FIDA tokens. The application scenarios for FIDA within the ecosystem include access to VIP API privileges, among others. In addition, in the future, holding FIDA will also grant reductions in perpetual contract fees. Furthermore, FIDA can be staked on the Serum platform, and 10% of the monthly buyback and burn will be used to reward FIDA stakers.

The distribution plan for FIDA is as follows:

• Seed round lock-up: 9% (linear unlocking starts after one year of purchase, fully released within four years)
• Liquidity provision: 2% (no lock-up)
• Pre-sale: 0.6% (no lock-up)
• 10%: allocated to EcoSerum nodes as SRM earnings (of which 8% is locked, linear unlocking starts after one year of purchase, fully released within four years)
• 10%: to be held as bonuses and allowances by Bonfida contributors and staff (locked, linear unlocking starts after one year of purchase, fully released within four years)
• The remaining shares will be jointly managed by Bonfida and the FIDA Foundation, as well as the future Bonfida ecosystem.

The total circulation in the first year accounts for 4.6% of the total token supply, which includes 2% for providing initial liquidity, 0.6% from the pre-sale portion with no lock-up, and 2% from the unallocated portion given to EcoSerum nodes as SRM earnings.

Team and Investment Background

The core members of the Bonfida team graduated from internationally renowned institutions such as CentraleSupélec, the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the University of Notre Dame. The team has rich experience from top tech companies and well-known investment banks, with a profound understanding of traditional finance, digital assets, data analysis, and computer engineering.

In mid-December 2020, Bonfida completed a $4.5 million seed round of financing led by CMS Holdings, with participation from well-known institutions such as Alameda Research, Three Arrows Capital, Spartan Group, Genesis Block Ventures, Sino Global Capital, Fisher8 Capital, FBG Capital, and Prophet Capital.

Summary

The high throughput and scalability of the underlying architecture Solana have facilitated the rapid maturation of the Serum ecosystem, while the Bonfida front end, as a highly user-friendly portal to the Serum ecosystem, has quickly accumulated a considerable user base. As of the time of writing, the trading volume of Serum DEX in the past 7 days has exceeded $260 million, with a daily trading volume nearing $50 million. Leveraging the vigorous development of the Serum and Solana ecosystems, Bonfida has focused on providing a good front-end user experience while actively building programmatic trading bots and perpetual contract protocols, achieving continuous empowerment for the Serum and Solana ecosystems.