The Defi space is home to hundreds of projects, which can sometimes lead to naming issues. With two versions of SIL making waves, there is some confusion to take into account. Sushiswap’s sil and SIL Finance are two very different concepts.
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Picking the Right SIL/sil
It is unfortunate when two concepts come to market with the same name. Finding a unique brand is challenging in the cryptocurrency space. The recent growth of DeFi as an industry has made this process even more complicated than before. The industry needs many improvements, and some of these upgrades share acronyms with new projects coming to market.
In the past two weeks, there has been some confusion regarding the SIL brand. It refers to SIL Finance, a new DeFi platform in development since late 2020. However, there is also Sushiswap’s Single-Sided Exposure Impermanent Loss Mitigation or sil. It is crucial to distinguish between the two.
SIL Finance Came First
When issues like these arise, it is always crucial to determine which of the two came first. In this case. SIL Finance – the Sister in Law DeFi project – has a clear advantage, as its domain has been around since late November 2020, and the whitepaper has been unveiled on December 30 of last year.
Since its community-building began, the team has gathered over 10,000 members[Twitter, Telegram], indicating strong support for this project.
What SIL Finance brings to the table is a solution to composting LPs for liquidity mining, a compounding interest mechanism, and the Matryoshka Mechanism to issue SIL tokens to liquidity miners. Introducing a solution for DeFi enthusiasts who only have half of the liquidity mining pair’s assets can usher in a new era for decentralized finance.
Moreover, having the option to half the risk for users who provide liquidity is a big step forward. Currently, Defi enthusiasts have to gamble on two speculative assets to provide liquidity. Those who do not want to convert to or from Ethereum are often left in the dark. With SIL’s LP composition, users are “matched” automatically to create a liquidity pool through a peer-to-peer dual-mining model.
Digging a bit deeper, one can see the SIL Finance GitHub repository has been around for a while now. This makes it all the more unfortunate to see all of this “SIL” branding confusion, as Sushiswap’s Andre Cronje could have avoided it easily.
Despite all of the branding confusion, SIL Finance expects to launch its product in the next week. The project is well ahead of what Sushiswap’s upgrade will entail, as that upcoming change has no launch date yet. Whether Cronje copied ideas of SIL Finance, will be a matter of debate. Coincidence can exist, but far less often than most people assume.
Cronje’s “sil” Solution
Less than a day ago, Andre Cronje posted a new development to advance the SushiSwap ecosystem. As an AMM DEX, Sushiswap – and Uniswap – can benefit from single-sided exposure and impermanent loss mitigation. The single-sided exposure is very similar to what SIL Finance is building, as it too removes the need for supplying two different assets as a liquidity provider.
To make matters worse, “sil” and “SIL” are very similar to one another. Moreover, they are both released in the same period, leading people to believe some ideas are “borrowed” from SIL Finance to bolster Sushiswap. SIL Finance has yet to publish its contract code, yet there are white papers, audits, and contract code skeletons to look at.
That is also how Sushiswap came to be, as it is a forked version of Uniswap, the leading AMM DEX on the market today. Borrowing ideas and improving upon them further is not uncommon. The DeFi space is incredibly competitive, yet using the same “naming structure” will always be unusual. It is not a sign of malicious intent, though, but perhaps an unfortunate combination of circumstances.
The big problem is how there is a Sushiswap V2 IL Protection token, which is known as “sil”. Issuing such a token when a project using the SIL ticker already exists is rather problematic. As the “sil” tokens are put in the hands of hundreds of users, there will be confusion among those looking to trade SIL.
Solid Ideas Are Beneficial
Assuming there is some truth to Cronje taking the SIL Finance idea and modifying it to his own needs, one must wonder what the future will hold for this project. DeFi can benefit from single-sided exposure in many different ways, allowing new concepts to thrive in the months and years to come.
If this happens to be purely coincidental, there may be some name changing in order. SIL Finance has its native token, which is SIL. For Sushiswap, sil is an incomplete abbreviation to highlight the Single-Sided Exposure and Impermanent Loss Mitigation. This entire debacle can be resolved peacefully, yet the outcome remains unclear.