2024 In Review | Clipper Product Update

Clipper Crew

• 3 min read
2024 In Review | Clipper Product Update

Here are recent product improvements to Clipper. These updates were meant to help all of DeFi get the best yields around!

The "north star" of all recent development work has been to improve the experience for LPs so Clipper can scale up liquidity. Many of these ideas came out of the LP research report from earlier this year HERE.

Project 1

The biggest push has been to make Clipper’s pools simpler for users. Upgrades include:

  • Moved existing Clipper pools to have fewer tokens, in particular, so they just have the 2-asset exposure LPs are used to. Already, BTC was removed from mainnet so it is 50% ETH and 50% USD assets.
  • Upgraded Clipper so it can support multiple pools per chain. This enabled (as an example) a separate WBTC<>USD pool on mainnet. The upgrade required changes to every piece of Clipper. The backend/architectural changes are all done. Now, the front end just needs to be updated. Then, all existing multi-asset pools can be split into two-asset pools, and new assets can be listed!

Project 2

Measured how much incentives would be required to scale liquidity in Clipper. Arbitrum's LTIPP campaign helped to measure how expensive it would be to acquire new liquidity and how much would be retained after incentives expire.

Here are some highlights:

  • TVL grew by $780K, retaining 60% of incentivized TVL post-rewards.
  • Acquisition cost: $0.11 per $1 TVL; retention cost: $0.20 per $1 TVL.
  • From the first day of incentives to December 1st, Clipper has grown over +800% in TVL and +140% in LPs.

Project 3

Provide better reporting for LPs. This includes two components:

  1. Created a logging system and dashboards to provide mark-out analysis on a trade-by-trade basis so that LPs and professional LPs can see proof of how healthy Clipper's yields are. This infrastructure has been built; public dashboards should be coming soon.
  2. Provided a detailed, personalized accounting for each LP on their position, how it changed over time, and how it compared to having LPd in Uniswap or HODLed. This should give existing LPs concrete, quantitative proof of their outperformance. This should provide LPs confidence they can scale up their liquidity.

Project 4

Upgraded Clipper's solver infrastructure. One of Clipper's advantages is that it can compose multihop trades, whereas offchain marketmaking/trading firms can't. Solvers help compose Clipper into multihop trades routed from DEX Aggregators like 1inch and UniswapX.

Project 5

The recent exploit of Clipper's smallest pools showed the need for certain security enhancements. While Clipper's pools have been reactivated with some limitations on their functionality, removing those limitations would require redeployment of all L2 pools, which could happen in the future.

These infrastructure upgrades lay the groundwork for the next generation of Clipper, which is expected to provide a significantly improved user experience.

Legal Disclaimer - please note that you should not rely on any future efforts from any core contributors, community operators/leaders, or anyone else. Clipper contributions are not formal commitments. All improvements are voluntary, and anyone in the community can propose and implement them.

Refund Update: ⤵️

  • A creative financing solution has been secured with a third party, enabling refunds of 80%+ (potentially more) for impacted users.
  • Refunds are expected to be processed within several weeks (less than 8 weeks), with more detailed timelines and amounts shared soon.
  • These estimates are subject to change, but we’re confident enough to provide this update to avoid further uncertainty for affected users.

Please note that you should not rely on any future efforts from core contributors, community operators/leaders, or anyone else. Clipper contributions are not formal commitments. All improvements are voluntary, and anyone in the community can propose and implement new ideas.