Introduction to Boost
What is Boost?
Boost is an exciting new feature designed to speed up the swap times on Chainflip, making your swapping experience faster and more efficient. A major pain-point for users is how slow deposits can be, particularly for chains such as Bitcoin where the deposits can take 30+ minutes to finalise due to the protocol's safety margin. The safety margin is there to protect the protocol's liquidity from re-orgs and ensure that transactions are securely confirmed to avoid potential deficits.
The Boost feature provides a solution to dramatically reduce these wait times without increasing the protocol’s risk.
Learn more about blockchain reorgs (opens in a new tab)
How does Boost work?
When a user wants to swap from Bitcoin, for example, can opt-in to Boost the deposit to speed up the overall swap time for fee.
| Swaps | Regular (worse) | Regular (best) | Boosted (worse) | Boosted (best) | Savings (AVG) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC → ETH | ~30.5 min | ~20.5 min | ~10.5 min | ~0.5 min | ~20 min |
| BTC → DOT | ~30.4 min | ~20.4 min | ~10.4 min | ~0.4 min | ~20 min |
| BTC → ARB | ~30.4 min | ~20.4 min | ~10.4 min | ~0.4 min | ~20 min |
| ETH → BTC | ~11.7 min | ~11.5 min | ~10.5 min | ~10.3 min | ~1 min |
| ETH → DOT | ~1.8 min | ~1.6 min | ~0.6 min | ~0.4 min | ~1.2 min |
| ETH → ARB | ~1.7 min | ~1.5 min | ~0.5 min | ~0.3 min | ~1.2 min |
| ETH → ETH | ~1.9 min | ~1.7 min | ~0.7 min | ~0.5 min | ~1.2 min |
The basic idea is to allow Liquidity Providers (LPs) to place collateral in shared Boost pools to be used as collateral for incoming deposits.
When Boost is enabled, a deposit is pre-witnessed (i.e. recognized by a majority of validators as having been included in a block on the source chain), by checking that there is enough collateral in the Boost pools.
If there is, this collateral will be used in place of the deposit (minus a Boost fee), allowing the swap to be executed early.
The LPs take the risk on that deposit being confirmed at a later point once the safety margin has been reached.
Learn more about risks of providing Boost liquidity here.
Example: Boost BTC to ETH swap
- A user states the intention to swap a given amount of BTC to ETH with Boost feature enabled
- The protocol opens a boosteable Swap Deposit Channel and generates a Bitcoin deposit address
- The user sends the desired amount of BTC to the generated deposit address
- The protocol attempts to Boost the incoming deposit, by checking the available Boost liquidity provided by LPs
- If there is enough collateral in the Boost pools, the protocol boosts the deposit after it has been included in a block (pre-witnessed), deducting a small Boost fee from the total deposited amount
- As soon as the deposit is pre-witnessed and boosted, the swap is triggered by the JIT AMM, and sends the resulting ETH to the destination address
- The user receives ETH, saving ±20 minutes of total swap time
If there isn't enough collateral in the Boost pools, the protocol defaults to witness the deposit with regular block confirmations and no Boost fee is applied.
Considerations
- The protocol will attempt to Boost any amount sent after one block confirmation, if Boost liquidity is available.
- Boosted deposits are binary — either the entire amount is boosted, or it defaults to a regular block confirmation time
- There are different Boost pools with different fees. The protocol will take liquidity from the lowest fee pool to the highest, resulting in an average final Boost fee.
- The protocol will only attempt to boost a second deposit if the first deposit has been finalised.