Welcome

Welcome frens to the inaugural Deep Dive community newsletter.

The Deep Dive is Swell DAO’s community newsletter where we’ll cover key protocol updates and other bits and pieces happening around the DAO and our industry.

Big thanks to everyone in the Swell community, partners, and our backers for supporting the protocol in our push to launch the protocol in the next few weeks.

With all the headwinds coming off the back of macro and CeFi blow-ups and increased regulatory scrutiny of centralized exchange staking products, what remains clear is that real decentralized finance continues to work.

For the Swell community, it’s great to see that the Ethereum LSD narrative is continuing to pick up steam around CT and the wider crypto media. We have long believed in the fundamentals of this vertical and are committed to building a world-class liquid staking protocol for the ecosystem.

We have big plans this year. You can expect more news and announcements coming soon as the DAO looks to shake up the industry and bring some much needed choice and innovation for stakers everywhere.

Shanghai is around the corner

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Congratulations to the Ethereum devs for the recent go-live of the Zhejiang testnet. With withdrawals soon to be enabled in the coming months, we’re expecting to see the risk profile for staking reduce even further and hope to see more ETH staked in aggregate over time. On top of this, with increased regulatory scrutiny of centralized staking service providers with news out of the SEC, we expect to see a shift towards more decentralized liquid staking protocols. This will ultimately help bolster the economic security and diversified resilience of the Ethereum blockchain at the protocol layer.

Branding and UI refresh

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We are almost finished with our branding and UI refresh efforts. In our focus on creating the best possible staking experience with our revamped reward-bearing token, we’ve made headways into designing what the community has asked for when it comes to ETH liquid staking. We’ll release a sneak peek in an upcoming edition of Deep Dive.

Core contributor news

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Swell Labs has some key updates to the core contributor team. Lecky will be shifting into an external advisor role, stepping down as CTO - and Aaron, our Tech Lead, will be taking his place to help lead the charge to mainnet launch. With the handover complete, we are very confident in Aaron’s capability as a highly experienced technology leader in blockchain. Outside of this, we have made several key hires in engineering and marketing to bolster our plans for launch. We are also hiring for a Community and Content Marketing Lead, so if you know anyone who might a great fit for the role, please let us know. You can find more information on the role at our Swell Lever page: https://jobs.lever.co/swellnetwork.io/8e92100f-fdf4-42c6-beca-e7f3e11503ae

Architecture upgrade is on track

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The architecture upgrade is making strong progress and we’re clear skies for our second guarded launch in a few weeks. Swell devs continue to work around the clock to make sure our original guarded launch stakers are migrated without a hitch and that we’re all set for go-live!

‍Get ready for our upcoming launch

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Just a reminder that our current estimate for launch is around late March. As we move closer to the date, there’ll be much more content and information about Swell and our exciting liquid staking offering. As part of this, we’ll be soon announcing our list of launch partners which will comprise some of the best DAOs, protocols, and OG projects around.

Get your ETH ready to stake with Swell! 🌊

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