Optional’s Venus (v0.2) upgrade is a result of what we have learned from Mercury (v0.1) our first production-build of Optional. It is an enhanced experience for depositors and social traders (managers) from what we have gathered. You can read the details here. Our original launch date has since passed, but Venus hasn’t been deployed yet. Why?
Discovery of Smart Contract Bugs
Originally, we wanted to launch Optional’s Venus (v0.2) upgrade on October 21st, but prior to launch the code was peer reviewed again and it was discovered there were several minor bugs. As a precaution, the launch was pushed back by at least a week until we could patch the bugs and add the needed tests to verify.
After verifying the bugs have been patched we still had another hurdle to clear: the cost of deploying our smart contracts.
Costs of Deploying and Operating
Optional is not backed by venture capitalists or any other kind of investors and was solely bootstrapped from a developer grant by Opyn, personal funds, and additional funding from Gitcoin. We tried to keep our spending low as much as possible and at the time with gas being over 100 gwei, it would have totally blown our entire budget.
We tried to deploy onto mainnet, but after several days of waiting and raising the gas price, we decided to cancel deployment and ask the community for where Optional should be deployed: Arbitrum, mainnet, or both. The community signaled overwhelming support for an Arbitrum-only deployment which will enable cheaper deployments and usage that can easily fit within our budget.
The only thing we need to do is patiently wait for AirSwap to safely deploy their contracts on Arbitrum to enable trustless OTC swaps since Venus depends on this piece of infrastructure.
So, what now?
Currently, we’re already silently building Earth (v0.3), the next major upgrade to Optional. It is a complete rewrite for both the frontend and smart contracts to better the user experience and add more features.
Our frontend is in the process of being rewritten and redesigned from the ground-up. The redesign will give a truer feel from a social trading perspective and the rewrite will give developers less of a headache to work with.
The smart contracts themselves will be rewritten to a modular design and become agnostic to option, lending, and exchange platforms. For example, we could expand our option integrations, or no longer use AirSwap and perhaps something like Gnosis Safe.
Gitcoin Grant Round 12
We participated in Gitcoin Grant Round 11 from last month to be able to finance the project to cover for the project’s costs. The Gitcoin and Optional community was able to raise about more than $1800 with an additional $148 from Gitcoin quadratic matching (thank you!).
We want to be able to use these funds to pay for bounties, developers, operations, and if we raise enough, a smart contract audit (these are not cheap!).
If you’d like to support our endeavors, feel free to contribute here! It means a lot to us and the community! Gitcoin Grant Round 12 is just around the corner!
With much love from the Optional team!
Make sure to keep tabs with us on Discord or Twitter!
Optional: https://optional.finance
Discord: https://discord.optional.finance
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OptionalFinance
GitHub: https://github.com/Alpha-Serpentis-Developments/Project-Mimic
