Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Building a decentralized swap application is relatively simple. Running in real market conditions – with robots, arbitrage and volatile liquidity – is very different. BeInCrypto sat down with Andrei Fedorov, Director of Marketing and Business Development at STON.fi and developer at the Consensus Hong Kong conference to hear how that process actually works.
STON.fi launched as an automated market maker on the TON blockchain – a swap interface with liquidity pools. And appeared OmnistonTON, its own liquidity pooling protocol, was later used as a response to fragmentation: the presence of many decentralized platforms in TON forced users to manually compare prices between protocols. Omniston aims to solve this problem by aggregating liquidity into a single access point.
The clustering achieved effective results. But the growth in size revealed new limitations.
Sponsored
Sponsored
Three lessons from production
Fedorov was honest about what went wrong in the beginning. Starting with just one code, the technology was very easy to deliver, Fedorov said. He added: Activity levels were low, and the number of users was still small. But over time the number exploded.
The first lesson is to expand. Both the front and rear ends buckled under the pressure of unexpected demand. The second lesson was more nuanced: the multi-step exchanges – routing trades through intermediary tokens – worked during the test, but outliers emerged in live conditions. In theory, all steps are carried out smoothly, “explained Fedorov. In reality, there are simultaneous trades, liquidity movements between pools, and several platforms update the status at the same time. Therefore, the first step can be successful while the second can fail.
The third lesson dealt with complexity itself. The initial model assumed a simple set of parties: the exchange of users, and liquidity providers provide. But reality has added arbitrage, robots, and more complex interaction patterns that have not yet been anticipated. Fedorov said he doesn’t think it’s really possible to solve all these things from scratch. He added: You need to launch, then monitor how it goes, and when a problem occurs, the team fixes it if something breaks.
STON.fi now accounts for 80 to 90 percent of decentralized exchange activity on TON, highlighting its dominant share of swap volume in the network. But cross-chain exchanges, the next step on the roadmap, will reset the counter to zero. Fedorov stressed that the fundamentals remain the same, but he is convinced that he will certainly face new challenges.
Because the aggregation was not enough
Omniston’s original proposal was to connect all liquidity pools for digital assets on TON and find the best execution path. But the accumulation of public liquidity has a specific ceiling. If no one adds liquidity to a particular pair, no intelligence in order routing will work.
Sponsored
Sponsored
Fedorov said that sometimes people don’t want to provide liquidity in a particular pool. He added: When a user wants to exchange a token in this pool, he will not get a good price because the liquidity is not there.
A parallel path known as guarantor swaps – which rely on private liquidity from professional market makers or so-called “solvers” – provided the solution. Instead of relying only on AMM pools, Ummonstone now evaluates public and private sources and paths each exchange for the path that gives the best result.
Fedorov said that combining the two solutions is not a silver bullet, because providing both provides the best experience.
Actions marked as stress tests
The warranty model has shown its value when combined STON.fi with xStocks – These are symbolic representations of American shares issued by Packed Finance. These are technically TONS, but they behave differently than native cryptocurrency tokens in ways that affect execution.
The team faced a bigger challenge in terms of liquidity: unlike established cryptocurrency pairs, xStocks does not yet have deep liquidity in AMM pools across pairs. Technical support for AMM is available. But the team also added an additional execution path — escrow exchanges — so users can access deeper liquidity. Today, the majority of xStocks’ transaction volume is transacted via escrow.
From the user’s perspective, Fedorov insists, the experience should be exactly the same as any other exchange. Fedorov said they want users to forget about technical complexity. Technical changes happen in the background, but users don’t notice.
Sponsored
Sponsored
Self-preservation exchange
Fedorov frankly expresses the limitations of being completely decentralized and not custodial of assets.
Some solutions are very popular – large user bases and high business volume, Fedorov said. From a business perspective, their combination will immediately increase our growth. But most of them are central. When he presents these options to the technical team, the answer is clear: It doesn’t work that way. STON.fi Do not save assets. Users keep their assets in their wallets. Trades are made via smart contracts.
Integrations with centralized systems are faster and simpler — often requiring just one API call, Fedorov noted. DeFi integrations require reliable logic at the contract level so that assets never leave the user’s wallet. Fedorov said that they could grow faster if the principle of self-custody of assets was compromised. But he stressed that in doing so, they will not be building a decentralized financial infrastructure – they will be building another layer of traditional fintech.
Fedorov explained that this waiver is not only technical. It is also educational. Sometimes, this creates a marketing and communication challenge. Self-preservation shifts the responsibility to the user – something newbies often overlook. He added that if a user loses their security phrase, the team will not be able to regain access. The team does not own the phrase and never has. However, users often come to the team expecting support, such as with a central bank or exchange.
In centralized systems, there is a safety net – password recovery, account recovery, customer service with the ability to bypass some procedures. In DeFi, security comes from not having this backdoor. The same mechanism that protects the user also eliminates the team’s ability to intervene.
Sponsored
Sponsored
Fedorov emphasizes that for STON.fi this means investing more in user input, education and a clearer user experience – without compromising the principle of asset self-custody.
Fedorov said it’s a long-term bet. He said that in the short term, education is more difficult. But in the long run, users will understand the value of the property. Especially in Web 3, this is the goal.
Distribution first, then depth
Fedorov envisioned TON not only as a blockchain option, but also as a distribution strategy through its integration with Telegram. StonedotFI and OmniStone are integrated with wallets, apps, games and bots in the Telegram ecosystem – each a potential exchange surface. They want to use the protocol because they want to enable exchanges in their applications, but this is also our distribution network,” said Fedorov. It is a win-win agreement for both parties.
The next stage is cross-chain aggregation – starting with TRON, then expanding to EVM chains – to standardize liquidity across ecosystems rather than just decentralized platforms within a chain.
Fedorov said that things should be made easier for those who do not want to think about technical things, have a wider distribution through integration in all applications, and add liquidity from several blockchains, not just one. Here’s the roadmap, now it’s about expansion.
