Welcome to the 0x spotlight series, where we highlight some of the exciting and novel projects built on 0x. Our second spotlight is DeFi Saver! DeFi Saver is a one-stop dashboard for creating, managing, and tracking DeFi positions. We talked to community lead Nikola to dive deeper into what sets DeFi Saver apart from other management apps, why they chose to integrate Swap API, and what’s next for the project.

Enjoy the interview!

What is DeFi Saver?

You were probably at least once in a gloomy situation where the market started crashing and you weren’t sitting at your computer, or maybe you were missing your hardware wallet while on a vacation, or maybe you just happened to wake up one morning to find out that your position almost got liquidated. Big yikes. These are all stressful situations in DeFi that we regularly hear about. Now, wouldn’t it be great if you were able to unwind your position on time and avoid liquidation? Heck, wouldn’t it also be quite nice if you could rest easy knowing that if the market starts moving in a positive direction you’re not just sitting idly by?

That’s where DeFi Saver comes in with Automation, our unique, trustless system for automatic liquidation protection and leverage management of collateralized debt positions. When using Automation, you input your desired collateral and debt ratio and rest easy knowing you are safe from liquidation. Automation removes the burden of having to always keep track of the market and price movements in regards to supplied assets or incurred debt and performing manual corrections. By relying on Automation, you can step away from your computer, log off, enjoy your day or sleep easily at night knowing you are safe from the scourge of liquidation.

Automation actively monitors debt positions and increases or decreases leverage automatically when the price of the underlying collateral changes. This is all done using our signature “Boost” and “Repay” features which allow for instant leveraging or deleveraging of positions created using lending protocols. To function as intended, assets currently deposited as collateral are used to clear the debt (by Repaying and decreasing leverage) or borrow more (by Boosting and increasing leverage) in a single transaction.

Automation is our flagship feature, but DeFi Saver is an overall management application for DeFi protocols, focused on creating and managing various debt, leverage, or yield farming positions. Built on Ethereum, it provides users with a broad set of features, such as portfolio management, lending, borrowing, leveraging assets, token swapping, and saving, as well as some quite interesting features like 1-click loan refinancing and building custom single transactions by combining various actions.

Specifically, automation is available for MakerDAO, Aave, and Compound for now, while we also support numerous other protocols like Liquity, Reflexer, 0x, Uniswap, and Kyber, just to name a few.

What sets DeFi Saver apart from other DeFi management apps?

While nearly all the other features mentioned can be found in various asset management apps, Automation, together with 1-transaction leverage management, is our unique feature combo that has made DeFi Saver famous in the DeFi space. Having the peace of mind and being able to sleep at night while having positions in this highly volatile market is what inspired us to develop our app.

During the last big market crash in mid-May of this year, DeFi was hit with a tsunami of liquidations with over $370M worth of collateral liquidated across the landscape. During those few days, while many were having trouble staying afloat due to extremely high gas prices, users relying on our Automation service remained safe from liquidation throughout the chaos. At the time, Automation was managing and protecting nearly 700 unique positions with around $1.4B in collateralized assets in Maker, Compound, and Aave.

In those 10 days, as the market crashed from $4,300 ETH all the way to almost $1,900 ETH, there were over 2,900 automated Repay transactions, unwinding users’ positions to protect them from liquidation. Automation repaid more than $331m of debt during that period, all through swaps made via 0x API. We’re extremely proud to share that no automated positions were liquidated during the crash. And, what’s more, the total volume of all transactions made at DeFi Saver over the same period, mostly from users re-adjusting their positions, surpassed $870m, which was an absolutely incredible achievement for us.

DeFi Saver recently launched the Recipe Builder, with swaps powered by Swap API. What is the Recipe Builder and what has the response been so far?

Simply put, Recipe Creator is an advanced DeFi transaction builder that allows users to combine a number of actions, such as flash loans, asset swaps, and other interactions with various protocols, into a single transaction. What we wanted to achieve is to make the true interoperability of DeFi accessible to less technically skilled users than was previously the case. Our goal was to provide this functionality through an informative, approachable, and highly functional interface.

Things can become really interesting with the fully exposed composability and interoperability of DeFi protocols and applications. For example, by mixing various actions and using flash loans users can maximize liquidity mining rewards, move positions between different protocols, convert debt or collateral, and create instantly leveraged positions within a single transaction.

The response has been awesome so far, especially given the fact that we introduced lots of user-friendly stuff with it, like premade recipes and a natural language processing tool that turns written instructions into recipes. Although the most useful feature that we released alongside Recipe Creator is probably the Simulation mode, which creates a separate and secure fork for users to test everything and play around. This especially comes in handy for composing new recipes and making sure everything goes as intended before committing actual funds.

As far as usage goes, we’ve been quite surprised, especially with users’ willingness to experiment and create unique recipes themselves instead of relying solely on premade templates. We’ve already seen hundreds of different recipes executed, containing anywhere from three to nearly twenty actions. On top of that, broader community and especially dev recognition for the system and its capabilities was clearly positive from the start.

Why did you choose to integrate Swap API?

From our earliest days, we had users reaching out to ask about potential liquidity improvements for the swaps being done in our Boosts and Repays, and so we gradually moved from our initial Kyber integration to Kyber and Oasis, then expanded to Kyber, Oasis and Uniswap. But ultimately it became clear that proper DEX aggregation would be needed to satisfy the needs of a constantly growing user base.

Today we use Swap API for all trades at DeFi Saver, including all leverage management options, refinancing tools, swaps in our Recipe Creator, and trades done by our Automation services.

For any builders out there who are looking for the ultimate liquidity for their future users, we would definitely recommend looking into 0x Swap API as a simple, ready-made, plug and play solution.

What’s next for DeFi Saver?

We’re currently working on adding several additional protocols to DeFi Saver, such as Uniswap v3 and Yearn. All of our new integrations keep providing additional options and more freedom for combining different protocol actions within the Recipe Creator. The Creator was actually a showcase feature of an entire architectural overhaul of our smart contracts. And, besides modularity, the new architecture was, in fact, prepared with L2 networks in mind, allowing us to quickly launch on any of them once they’re released publicly.

Another thing we’d like to mention is that one of our main goals right now is providing users with additional Automation options. The idea is to enable users to create custom strategies based on interactions available in the Recipe Creator, all combined with customizable event triggers. Creating custom, automated strategies in DeFi is something that we hope will interest quite a few people and we are super excited to deliver this functionality later this year.

Where can people go to learn more about DeFi Saver?

• Website: defisaver.com
• Blog: medium.com/defi-saver
• Discord: discord.gg/KJgbDH7T
• Twitter: twitter.com/DeFiSaver
• Forum: forum.defisaver.com

Thanks for chatting, Nikola. Congratulations to the DeFi Saver team on all of their recent achievements! It’s been fun to watch the platform flourish and we’re excited to see what comes next.

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