Clipper (SAIL): The DEX Designed for Blue Chip Token Swaps

When it comes to purchasing crypto for investments, the exchange you choose matters. Certain exchanges can offer more favorable prices or lower fees than their competitors. One new decentralized exchange, Clipper, hopes to offer their users big savings and reduced market manipulation. In addition to being a crypto exchange, the network behind Clipper also offers some appealing DAO and token staking services. 

Does the Clipper network actually work, and should you try it? Here's what you need to know.

Key Takeaways:

• Clipper is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange that specializes in the purchase and sale of blue-chip tokens. 
• Some of its notable features include Swap, Pools, Coves and Rewards.
• Looking to trade Clipper tokens? Bybit now offers the SAIL/USDT Spot trading pair.

What Is Clipper?

Clipper is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX) that specializes in buying and selling blue-chip tokens. Its unique architecture can provide more favorable pricing for popular cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum (ETH).

What Is AdmiralDAO?

History of Clipper

Clipper and AdmiralDAO are part of a project initially launched by Shipyard Software. The Shipyard Software team consists of several developers and crypto experts. Founder/CEO Mark Lurie has also worked on other blockchain startups, such as Codex, and the team's Chief Scientist/CTO, Abe Othman, previously worked with Vitalik Buterin on the Augur project.

Shipyard Software's goal is to create customized exchanges for every type of crypto trader. While there are a lot of other exchanges available, Shipyard’s founders realized there was a demand for exchanges that use special features to assist with specific crypto trades. Clipper is just one of several exchanges that Shipyard Software runs.

The Clipper DEX and its governing DAO have specifically been created to optimize blue-chip token swaps. Clipper gets its name from a type of 19th-century ship, called a clipper ship, that helped to revolutionize trade by increasing shipping speed. This basic concept of enhancing profitability by prioritizing efficiency has greatly influenced Clipper's design.

What Does Clipper Aim to Achieve?

Clipper's aim is to facilitate blue-chip trades while optimizing liquidity provider profit. What does this mean for the average user? First of all, Clipper tries to solve the problem of excessive gas fees and unstable prices. When trading blue-chip tokens like ETH and USDT, many other exchanges perform pricing computations on-chain and then pass on the costs to the traders. Clipper's unique design is meant to save users money by reducing on-chain computations.

Another major goal of Clipper is to increase decentralization. Centralized crypto companies have faced criticism due to their lack of privacy, the amount of trust the user must place in the platform and the security risks that come with centralization. By using a decentralized autonomous organization, Clipper hopes to solve some of these issues. They put power into the hands of users and ensure that no single party can manipulate the exchange.

In addition to making things better for traders, Clipper also strives to help liquidity providers, who supply tokens in exchange for fees that are a percentage of the total purchase. Since asset prices fluctuate, liquidity providers can end up losing more money than they make in a transaction. This happens when one contributes to a liquidity pool and the token values deviate from the initial prices. This is known as impermanent loss, and it's a major issue in the industry. Clipper's unique algorithm avoids impermanent loss, so it provides more money to liquidity providers and incentivizes more people to provide liquidity for the exchange.

How Does Clipper Work?

The main mechanism behind Clipper is its method of pricing, called Formula Market Maker (FMM). This special pricing formula combines real-time prices from oracles and token ratios to create highly accurate pricing quotes. It also employs a variety of complex mathematics, including an invariant function family. 

FMM provides many advantages for Clipper. Since prices are so accurate, liquidity providers are less likely to encounter impermanent loss when they provide tokens. In addition, Clipper's unique formula allows it to calculate pricing data off-chain, and go on-chain only to verify this information. By moving calculations off-chain, Clipper saves users more money. Its formula further verifies any variation in pricing data between on-chain and off-chain calculations to ensure all data remains as accurate as possible.

Features of Clipper

Although Clipper’s DEX is fairly small and specialized as compared to more popular crypto exchanges, it still manages to offer several helpful features.

Swap

Clipper's DEX offers several different types of swaps. Since the site was originally designed for retail traders, it incentivizes smaller trades and only lists blue-chip tokens known for being reliable investments. With the Clipper Swap system, people can exchange various cryptos without having to pay excessive fees. Current tokens supported on Clipper Swap include ETH, WETH, WBTC, DAI, USDC and USDT.

Pools

If you're interested in earning rewards through Clipper, check out its liquidity pools. Clipper Pools let you deposit crypto tokens to be used during swaps. There’s one Core Pool for each chain supported on Clipper. In addition, there are farming pools, which are multi-asset pools with extra rewards for staked crypto. Entering a pool and earning rewards is as simple as connecting your wallet to your Clipper account. When you're done participating, you can withdraw your principal from the pool.

Coves

Clipper Coves are single-sided pools that offer especially low trade fees and flexible swapping. People can enter any asset into a Cove and then withdraw their funds in the form of the underlying asset and LP tokens. This helpful system facilitates boundless swapping and extremely cost-effective trades. Clipper Coves hasn’t officially launched yet, but users can join the Clipper community to get the latest news. 

Rewards

Clipper's system relies on liquidity providers who temporarily make tokens available to the community. To compensate these providers, Clipper offers multiple rewards. Each time someone uses your liquidity, you get a reward based on the size of the trade. As a liquidity provider, you can withdraw these rewards in the form of the assets in the pool for which you're providing liquidity. You also get some SAIL tokens in exchange for your liquidity, which can be used to participate in community governance.

Clipper Road Map

In 2021, Clipper’s team started designing their system. After creating a working platform, they conducted a soft launch with $1 million in liquidity to test the system, and an official launch that opened the exchange and liquidity pools to the public. Clipper's road map has changed a little over the years. They originally focused on retail traders making small trades, but have expanded their project to include larger trades as well.

Now that Clipper has a workable platform and supports several trading pairs, their next goal is to fine-tune their DAO. Turning over control from the creators to the community takes time, so Clipper is in the process of welcoming new members, creating community guidelines and finalizing decision-making mechanisms. The platform hasn't announced many plans for what’s to come after getting the DAO up and running, but some users speculate they’ll be working to expand their exchange to support even more cryptos.

SAIL Tokenomics

SAIL, Clipper's native token, comes with multiple use cases, the first of which is to provide rewards for liquidity providers. In addition, you can earn SAIL by staking blue-chip tokens in a liquidity pool and collecting SAIL rewards. Holding SAIL also gives you the ability to participate in the Clipper DAO because as a governance token, SAIL gives you a voice in directly deciding how the AdmiralDAO will function.

SAIL is an ERC-20 token with a total supply of 1 billion coins. This current supply is a soft cap, and more may be released as needed. Due to the way the tokens are set up, the DAO can also vote to burn tokens as needed. SAIL tokens are distributed in the following manner:

• Shipyard Software: 40%
• Clipper Community: 30%
• DAO Treasury: 20%
• Service Providers: 10%

SAIL Price Prediction

Just released on Aug 22, 2023, SAIL is still an extremely new token without a lot of pricing data available. When the token was first released, its price was $0.01390500, which is so far its all-time high. It then dropped to its current price of $0.00700693 (as of Aug 24, 2023).

Since SAIL is still so new, it's difficult to tell exactly what will happen to its price. The token is only listed on a few exchanges. Furthermore, the lack of a hard cap for token supply could cause some inflation issues that might drive prices down. However, Clipper has generated positive press with its move to welcome traders (besides retail traders) and its DAO launch. If the project continues to gain hype, SAIL prices could potentially rise. Since SAIL is a governance token with uses beyond price speculation, it retains some inherent value, no matter what happens.

Where to Buy SAIL

If you want to buy SAIL without having to stake liquidity in Clipper, Bybit is currently one of the only exchanges listing the token. This reliable exchange offers the token as a SAIL/USDT Spot trading pair. Purchasing crypto through Bybit is fast and simple. Simply sign up for an account, fund it with cryptocurrency and go to the SAIL/USDT Spot trading page.

Is SAIL a Good Investment?

So far, SAIL doesn't seem like it's going to generate unusually impressive profits. Unlike many wildly popular crypto trends, SAIL doesn't have any notable investors, groundbreaking promises or newsworthy price swings. However, it's still a solidly reliable project that could be quietly successful. Shipyard Software has done well with past projects, and Clipper does offer users the potential to reduce impermanent loss. 

Those looking for an investment with slow-yet-steady growth might want to consider SAIL. It's neither high-risk nor low-risk, so this investment may be a great way to add some diversity to your portfolio.

Closing Thoughts

With its ability to provide low fees to traders and improved profits to liquidity providers, Clipper is an exchange that benefits all participants. The addition of a DAO governance system and a unique algorithm to calculate token prices helps it stand out from competitors. Even those who don't plan on using the exchange may want to check out the project’s new SAIL token.

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