Diving In: First DeHub Liquidity Pools on Pancake Swap
By DeHub Team — 2021-05-30
Our first liquidity pools went live on PancakeSwap in Q2 2021. It was the first time DHB could be bought or sold by anyone, and the first time the decisions the community had made actually cost something.
The vote came first
Before any of this, the token's fundamentals were put to a vote in our Telegram group. Not a signalling vote — the binding kind. The community chose the chain we would build on, the initial listing price, the starting market cap and the total supply.
That is an unusual amount of control to hand over, and it constrained us in ways we felt for years afterwards. It also meant that when the pool opened, nobody on the outside was being introduced to terms decided in a room they were not in.
Why PancakeSwap
BNB Chain was the community's call, and PancakeSwap was where the liquidity on that chain actually was in mid-2021. There was no serious alternative if the goal was for an ordinary holder to be able to trade without a centralised account, a KYC queue, or a gas fee larger than their position.
That last point mattered more than anything technical. A large part of our early community could not have participated on Ethereum mainnet at the fees of the time. Choosing a chain is partly a choice about who is allowed in.
What a first pool actually is
A liquidity pool is not a listing. Nobody approves it, nobody schedules it, and there is no announcement from an exchange. You provide both sides of a pair, the pool exists, and from that moment the price is whatever the market says it is.
The parts that are easy to underestimate:
- Depth is the whole experience. A thin pool means every trade moves the price against the person making it. Early depth is what stops a project's chart from being noise.
- It is permanent and public. Every add, every removal, every trade is on-chain and attributable. That is the point, and it is also the pressure.
- There is no support desk. If something goes wrong, it is yours to explain and yours to fix.
The line from here
This pool is the direct ancestor of everything in our liquidity policy since: the automated provision strategies we moved to in late 2023, the DEX transparency commitment published alongside it, and eventually the decision to leave centralised exchanges by choice.
It also predates the two hardest things that happened to DHB — a v1 contract vulnerability and, a year and a half later, a tax-trigger malfunction that froze the token and the pool together. Both are covered honestly elsewhere in this archive. Neither changes the fact that this quarter is where DHB stopped being an idea with a vote attached and started being a traded asset with consequences.
What we would tell a project doing this now
Depth first, announcement second. The instinct is to publicise the moment the pool exists, because that is the exciting part, and the result is a chart made almost entirely of slippage for everyone who arrives early.
And be clear with yourself about what a pool commits you to. Once there is a market, every decision the project makes has a visible price attached within minutes, including decisions that are correct and unpopular. We made several of those later — leaving a centralised exchange voluntarily, dropping a chain we had listed on a year earlier — and each one cost something immediately and paid back slowly.