Clipper’s Gas-Efficient Upgrade Means Lower Prices and Better Yields

This week, Clipper’s Mainnet underwent its latest redeployment, which is expected to further lower trading prices and increase yields for liquidity providers!

This was achieved by moving many of the computations involved in pricing swaps off-chain. As a result, Clipper is arguably the most gas-efficient DEX for crypto swaps <$50K on Ethereum.

Clipper redeployment benefits

Fewer price computations occurring on-chain means significant gas savings and the new version of Clipper uses about 49,000 less gwei to perform a swap than the previous deployment. This means that Clipper should handily beat DEXs like Uniswap and Sushi in terms of swap-specific gas costs, which results in multiple benefits for Clipper users.

• Traders can now enjoy even lower overall transaction costs, and this recent upgrade further solidifies Clipper’s position as the go-to DEX for retail traders.
• Liquidity providers can now make multi-asset deposits directly into Clipper’s Core Pool (this is recommended for deposits >$100K to balance your assets more efficiently), and it is now much cheaper to add or remove liquidity from the pool. On top of that, more traffic from DEX aggregators is expected to come into the pool, which means better yields for Clipper LPs!

Why did Clipper need a Mainnet redeployment?

Initially, Clipper was designed to perform its pricing computations off-chain, which meant that the price could potentially change between the time the protocol pulled pricing data from an off-chain oracle and applied it to an on-chain swap. In order to protect traders during such price movements, Clipper would run an on-chain calculation once the price was pulled to determine if the price had changed significantly during this time. If the price difference was too great, Clipper would reject the transaction. However, this on-chain calculation used a lot of gas.

With this recent upgrade, Clipper now performs this comparative price computation off-chain, then checks the results of that calculation on-chain. This off-chain embed reduces Clipper’s gas usage significantly – both relative to its previous iteration as well as other leading DEXs like Uniswap.

What’s next for Clipper users?

Traders are free to enjoy even better trading prices on Clipper--see for yourself!

Liquidity providers can now transfer their deposits to Clipper’s new pool and start earning yield through Clipper’s upgraded, gas-efficient protocol. Keep in mind that LPs now have the option to deposit more than one asset into the pool and deposits of $100k or more will typically be more profitable if they are balanced between multiple assets.