Relay Chain: The Bridge of DeFi is the Next IDO on Starter

The next Certified QuickStart IDO is the highly-anticipated cross-chain bridging protocol, Relay Chain

6 min readJul 28, 2021

After a hugely successful first Polygon IDO in Yamp Finance in what is a challenging market, less than a week later, QuickSwap and Starter are delighted to be able to bring to you the next — Relay Chain.

As always make sure you have a minimum of 3.5 QUICK/START LP staked on Starter.xyz or QuickSwap Rewards to be eligible. And a minimum of 35 QUICK/START LP staked to receive a guaranteed allocation in the first round. As always, the more LP you stake, the more IDO token you will be able to buy.

As many of you might know, Relay Chain is from the team behind the hugely successful Zero Exchange, one of the first multi-chain AMMs, and a Mcap of over $100M Mcap at the peak of the market in April.

Relay Chain is the next chapter in the story of ZERO and as always, $STARTers will have exclusive access to purchase $RELAY, first.

So, without further adieu, let’s find out all about Relay…

What is Relay Chain

Relay Chain is the Bridge of DeFi — its aim is to become the ecosystem of ecosystems, the heart of cross-chain traffic — with a focus on utility, security, speed, and trust.

The Relay Chain Ecosystem enables four primary opportunities:

Incentivize existing chains — making gas tokens easier to procure and have exposure to.
Protection against CEX risks and oversight.
Arbitrage opportunities.
Liquidity incentives (provided by the parent chain and partners) across popular ecosystem tokens.

Bridging isn’t anything new…

Bridging may not be a new concept, however, Relay Chain was actually one of the first to bring it to the retail space, with Zero Exchange.

They learned a lot from their time with ZERO, and have used this experience to create a multichain bridge, or relay, with a number of key unique selling points:

Farewell stuck transactions — As many of you will know from using cross-chain bridges before, sometimes your transactions can get stuck. Resolving this can take hours or days, and by then the opportunity you were attempting to grasp may have passed. Relay boasts one of the most complex and resilient bridges around. They rebuilt their relayers from the ground up with resilience in mind, ensuring that 99.9% of transactions go through without needing any manual intervention.
Free gas tokens for initial bridging — Perhaps the most annoying aspect of using all of the current bridging options is that you can send your tokens to your wallet on the new chain, but can’t do anything with them when they arrive unless you buy and send yourself some of that blockchain’s gas tokens.

An example of this might be using Polygon for the first time and sending your $START from BSC to Polygon. You may be thinking, I’ll just sell some of that $START on QuickSwap for some MATIC so I have some native gas tokens for Polygon, but you can’t. You need MATIC to do that, and so begins the inconvenient process of using a CEX or another chain to get the MATIC tokens and send them to your wallet so you can pay gas fees.
Relay will airdrop you a little of each blockchain’s gas token when you do your first swap, so you can approve your first transaction and perform a DEX swap or two.

Speed — Many of the current bridges are painfully slow, which can make arbitrage almost impossible. The average bridge transaction on Relay Chain completes in under 2 minutes. This bridge is literally built for arbitragers.
Five blockchains from the $START — Not one, but 5 different ecosystems will be connected to the Relay from the start: Ethereum, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Relay. With Solana, HECO, Cosmos, Fantom, and Near (Aurora) in the works.

The Business Case for Relay Chain

All bridges will take a small fee at some point during the transaction, and Relay Chain will be no different.

However, what Relay Chain does with those fees is rather unique, and something they call the gas token index:

The bridge generates fees
Those fees reward $RELAY liquidity providers
Those fees go to yield farms to generate positive protocol revenue
Those fees go to token buybacks and burns, thus making the $RELAY token deflationary
High-emission liquidity rewards are a notion of the past — replacing the unsustainable inflationary concept with one that rewards in HT, AVAX, MATIC, ETH, and BNB and is constantly being generated through bridge volume

An idea of approx how many bridge crossings equal in buyback and burn

Generating volume on the Relay will be key to the increased value of the $RELAY token, the ecosystem, and rewards for the community. Therefore partnerships to generate volume are key.

So far, Relay has secured a partnership with QuickSwap.Exchange, the largest AMM & DEX on Polygon, Bridge Mutual, Bitcoin.com, Zokyo, and ChartFX, with more to follow.

Tokenomics

Total Supply: 10,000,000 $RELAY

Advisors — 4% — tokens are fully locked, if an advisor is signed, they received 10% of their tokens after 30 days, 15% after 60 days, and the remaining 25% each quarter thereafter.

IDO — 2.5% — Initial DEX Offering, helps enable us to bootstrap liquidity on the initial RELAY pools. Vested over 4 days. 20% on TGE and 20% daily.

Legacy Zero Holders — 1% — Snapshots already taken. Weighted based on current ZERO holdings. Linearly vests each day for 6 months. Fully vested 12/2021

Network Growth Fund — 25% — Linearly vests each day for 2 years. Helps incentivize developers and partners to build on/with RELAY. Fully vested 6/2023.

Community Incentives — 15% — As needed (for liquidity mining for example) — 24 hour timeclock to withdraw any funds from the incentives contract. The community will be notified of the withdraw and an event will be broadcast on blockchain.

Team — 10% — 6 month cliff. Linearly vests each day for 1 year each day after the expiration of the 6 month cliff. Fully vested 12/2022.

Marketing — 7.5% — Linearly vests each day for 2 years. Fully vested 6/2023

IDO Details

As $RELAY is launching by exchanging the $ZERO token for $RELAY. The exact $ price of $RELAY will be dependent on the price of $ZERO on the day.

Those who purchase through Starter will get an exclusive 15% discount on that listing price.

Audit: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L03snyb245tzPnhEcls8VqB3Eby0T-Jm/view?usp=sharing

Date: 2nd August, 2021 @ 1800 UTC
Guaranteed Allocation: Yes, headstart 5 minutes.
Direct Link: Creation in progress (token and listing prices will be updated closer to the IDO to adjust for changes in QUICK price)

Softcap: $25,000
Hardcap: $100,000
IDO price: $RELAY will be exclusively available at a 15% discount of the price of $ZERO
Listing price: Dependent on the price of $ZERO at the time

Liquidity allocation: 100%
Liquidity locked: 90 days