Beaker was an Automated Market Maker (AMM) built on Radix, with the goal of radically changing the experience of decentralized exchanges.
Vision
The purpose of Beaker was to solve issues by making a complete overhaul of the DEX experience. Beaker identified the current experience of providing liquidity as closer to gambling than investing. On most DEXes, after providing liquidity to a pool, users are left clueless about the performance of their investment. Beaker aimed to change this by using distributed ledgers to their full capacity to automate this process.
The design of Beaker revolved around three ideas:
- Radically better technology: Beaker was working on making a proper abstraction of the AMM problem to find better market-making functions. Once a proper model for the problem was found, they would work on the right solution. This work would also allow them to find a better fee model that would take into account market conditions.
- More serious and responsible DeFi: Beaker believed in #RealYield, meaning that liquidity providers would only receive the commissions due to them. Beaker would provide tools as turnkey solutions to simulate and track investments and risks.
- Simplicity and elegance: Beaker aimed to attract traditional investors but also wanted to keep it simple for those who don’t want to scratch their heads too much. Beaker would propose simple and advanced tools depending on the user’s will.
Features
Beaker ran a minimal version on Radix Betanet 2, which supported swapping and providing liquidity. It used a Uniswap v2 AMM model in which fees were not automatically compounded, a choice the team argued for in its own paper: the protocol is safer and more profitable when nobody recompounds fees. After providing liquidity, users got a Position, a Non-Fungible Resource (NFR) that gave an overview of the liquidity provided.
Liquidity Pools
Beaker used the constant-product market-making model for its liquidity pools. Providing liquidity comes with a risk called impermanent loss. Beaker did not plan on minting tokens to give additional rewards to liquidity providers (also known as liquidity mining).
Relative Portfolio Evolution
Beaker introduced the concept of relative portfolio evolution to have a better understanding of liquidity providing by taking fees into account. This concept was used to make a bet on the relative pool's rate evolution at the moment of removing liquidity.
For more detailed information, please visit the archived Beaker documentation.
Tokens/Tokenomics
Beaker did not plan to issue a token. The team was sceptical of the real utility of "DAO tokens" and saw them mainly as speculative assets that some projects use to make a profit. Therefore, issuing such tokens would be against their philosophy.
Team
The team behind Beaker consisted of three master's degree students from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, who are the authors of its arXiv paper.
- Theodore Conrad-Frenkiel, frontend development.
- Arthur Vinciguerra, Scrypto code.
- Guillaume Méroué, backend development.
Business Model
Beaker acted as a platform that matched liquidity providers and traders. This kind of platform usually takes a 15% commission fee. Beaker would therefore take up to a 15% commission on all accrued fees. They planned on making their tools free for all users. However, tools that track investments and risks would only work for their pools. If it was not sustainable, they reserved the right to charge for these tools or make them available only for liquidity providers.
End of the project
The Wayback Machine last captures the Beaker app at beaker.fi on 25 September 2023, three days before the Babylon mainnet release. No closing announcement has been found. By 21 June 2024 the domain served an unrelated French tournament site, and on 30 July 2026 beaker.fi had no DNS record at all, so the website link has been removed from the facts table.
Further Reading
- Théodore Conrad, Arthur Vinciguerra and Guillaume Méroué, About constant-product automated market makers, arXiv:2301.08558, 20 January 2023.