How Lightshift helped ICHI go Cross-Chain

Scarcity of web3 developers is one of the most important challenges for Web3 ecosystems. Even the best founders and projects rate this as one of their main concerns. It’s often not about lack of skill, but an inability to adjust engineering throughput to the breakneck pace of the industry.

Lightshift’s principal early stage investment strategy is designed to answer this challenge. We aim to deliver the most impactful value-add by having a core engineering team that contributes directly to the codebase of projects in portfolio.

ICHI was no exception, and even before closing the investment, engineering teams on both sides were already discussing how Lightshift could help develop a new major feature: Launching on Polygon.

For around 6 weeks Lightshift dedicated two of our engineers to help ICHI make their cross-chain move. The effort was twofold:

• Helping the team adapt the codebase to work in multi-chain scenarios (and in particular Polygon);
• Designing, building and deploying a UX/UI to support interaction within the newly added chain.

“Lightshift boosted ICHI to new heights by getting us on Polygon and building a token bridge so that we can scale to more networks in the future. Lightshift developers are fast, efficient and very knowledgeable.”

ICHI’s CTO

How ICHI is transforming DeFI

ICHI enables any crypto project to earn revenue from stablecoins and liquidity programs, which are two critical components of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that typically remove value from protocols.

ICHI has two main features which solve key problems through a DeFi-native model:

• oneTokens — allow communities to create their stable token worth $1, redeemable 1-for-1 for USDC. Essentially, a branded dollar/token. This keeps crypto projects that need stable assets to conduct business from being forced to sell their tokens in exchange for traditional stablecoins like USDC or USDT;
• Angel Vaults — provide a way for crypto projects to retain liquidity of their own branded tokens and offer deflationary rewards at the same time. This prevents traditional liquidity programs from forcing crypto projects to put their tokens up for sale in exchange for necessary liquidity.

ICHI is already being used by projects like 1inch, Filecoin, Uniswap and others.

How we helped them do it

Use case, impact & value

Launching on Polygon will allow DeFi users to benefit from ICHI’s unique solutions while also taking advantage of lower transaction fees. This will enable ICHI to expand their addressable market by making new use cases possible. New projects have already started joining ICHI resulting in a substantial increase in the ecosystem value.

The launch on Polygon will start with two new Vaults specifically designed for the Bitcoin community to earn ICHI rewards by investing BTC. The vaults on Polygon allow users to deposit wBTC or oneBTC, to earn ICHI rewards. oneBTC and the Bitcoin Angel Vault on ICHI allow BTC investors to keep holding while also earning passive yield. BTC holders can mint oneBTC through a combination of wrapped Bitcoin and USDC through the ICHI app.

The approach

When analyzing projects, Lightshift goes through a process of deep tech due diligence. Having a team of engineers that have past and recurring building experience in web3 allows us to gain a good understanding of the tech stack, codebase and implementation of projects before we invest.

Even before we make the final investment decision we are already trying to help the project form an engineering perspective, engaging with the core team. We try to understand what their roadblocks are, and by the time we invest we are already scoping the effort and considering which engineers to allocate.

Working with a strong core team like ICHI is paramount to the success of our strategy. ICHI’s engineering team not only has a solid technical background and full command of the technology they are implementing, they are also extremely comfortable in open source software development environments. Our success in delivery was due in great part to the quality of ICHI’s team.

Going multi-chain

To be able to have ICHI working on the Polygon network it was necessary to build the support that allows the bridging of ICHI tokens onto Polygon and for existing core ICHI contracts to be deployed on the new network accordingly.

Our back-end/smart contract engineer dedicated most of their time adapting the existing codebase to work with multi-chain deployments and specifically Polygon. There was an initial research effort, with the support of ICHI’s core team, to understand ideal solutions for price oracles but mainly to find solutions to adequately bridge between Ethereum and Polygon. We ended up moving forward using the main Polygon PoS as it was the more robust solution.

This involved future-proof boilerplate work on the required deploy scripts to make them chain-agnostic. For Polygon specifically this meant deploying to mainnet/rinkeby/polygon/mumbai with the correct parameters for each. At time of deployment we handed the keys to the ICHI team and their machine kicked into gear to continue on onto a testing phase and finally a production ready environment. Even when handoffs happen Lightshift engineers stay around until code is in production and features are working as designed.

Interacting with ICHI on Polygon

A great part of the heavy lifting that is allowing ICHI to launch on polygon happened at the UX/UI level. That’s why one of the engineers that we brought on board was someone with ample experience in React and in integrating UI with web3 stacks.

Together with the ICHI team, we scoped the user experience and designed the new UI that would allow users to interact with ICHI on Polygon. There was an existing codebase for the main app UI that needed to be adapted to the new flow and integrated with the new smart contracts to be deployed.

The new flow required that the UI and respective contract integration support:

• Account for the need to upgrade from ICHI legacy to the new ICHI token contract when needed, which includes the case of bridging to Polygon;
• Account for the edge case need of reverting from ICHI to ICHI legacy tokens;
• Adapting the minting/redeeming process to work with the contracts on Polygon;
• Depositing ICHI tokens on the bridge smart contract on Ethereum;
• Moving tokens across different blockchains;
• A user-friendly automated checkpoint confirmation which simplifies the Polygon bridge process;
• Approximation of gas fees estimates when bridging.

The bridging process can be complex especially from the user’s perspective and there are a lot of possible loose ends that need to be accounted for. Iteration and testing are critical when developing in this context and this required a combined effort between engineers on both sides.

Going above and beyond

To be able to contribute to the codebase and building effort by integrating the core team is certainly a win-win scenario. Investing in the future of Web3, an industry in its early days and for which there is a severe dearth of tools and tried-and-true best practices, implies a more hands-on attitude than for other forms of investment.

From the perspective of the projects we invest in, we are bringing real value-add that can have an important impact at a critical stage of the venture effort. We are learning, gaining knowledge, and improving our own skills, while making sure to not replace core teams or contribute in ways that are only transactional. We build alongside the very best, and we strive to fit in that category as well.