Welcome to Vega’s new mini-blog series consisting of regular tech updates from the Core Engineering Team. These updates are designed to concisely outline where Vega is at with regard to upcoming releases and will be written by the people responsible for each project.
Release Status:
There are 2 features in the final QA (Quality Assurance) for the next release. These are:
Spam protection
Checkpoint support
Our current estimate, assuming no issues are found, is that these should be signed off on the 22nd, at which point we’ll tag the next release, which will run on an internal testnet before being promoted to Fairground.
This release is a large one, containing the features above and also:
Staking & delegating to validator nodes
Rewards in the form of a portion of the Infrastructure Fee paid to stakers
Data-node (see below)
Last month a governance proposal nominated a set of validators, and since then some of those have been operating private networks in order to provide the developers with feedback on the experience, and some of that feedback is already in the roadmap for the next release.
What’s taken longer than expected:
Since early on in the project, validator nodes have also served GraphQL and REST APIs so that client applications, like Vega Console, can interact with the network. As part of this release, we’ve separated that responsibility out into a separate project, called data-node. This has been a long time coming, and making our Continuous Integration & automated testing pipelines work with this new setup has taken us longer than estimated. There are a tonne of benefits to this improved architecture — the most obvious being that serving API clients should not ever compete for resources with the job of validating transactions on the network. It also means that data-node can iterate faster than the core node, and improve how data is stored and processed to make it more convenient for clients.
LP Rewards Status:
Two weeks ago, the VEGA token launched on decentralised exchanges and we announced an incentive scheme to reward liquidity providers (LPs) for contributing to the VEGA pools on SushiSwap. The development team have been working hard on implementing a smart contract that calculates the VEGA rewards owed to LPs in real-time as they accrue. We have also been developing a staking dashboard, which will allow LPs to view an estimate of their rewards.
The interface for staking SLP will be on token.vega.xyz when the contract is deployed. That site will walk you through depositing your tokens and will explain the rewards in detail.
Retroactive rewards have been calculated from the date the SushiSwap pools were created (3 September 2021) up to the date that the staking contract is deployed. We anticipate that the staking contract and dashboard will deploy on 2[X] September 2021; exact timings will be confirmed in a blog post that will go out later this week.
Claim Codes Status:
When designing the incentive process, we had to find a middle ground between accessibility and preventing bots/fraudsters from creating many accounts. Some of the team voted to use Twitter as a partial solution for this but, unfortunately, it has its issues (with sending mass messages to winning participants). As we only collected Twitter IDs and because tokens are vested for 12 months, we cannot just airdrop them to participants - there needs to be a claim process.
Meanwhile, it makes little sense to reassign the whole engineering team to this at the expense of the product releases. So even though it is not ideal that it is not possible to batch DM the rewards and we are having to build another solution with a small amount of resource, we have little choice (and hence the prolonged delay).
Nonetheless, we are very happy that we have created a good working beta for this independent claim process. Some bugs were found in testing concerning the front-running of transactions when users try to claim but they have now been resolved. Because of the limited resources, we’re prioritising getting the LP rewards complete before final testing on claim codes. Rest assured that tokens will eventually be distributed.
Much like the LP interface, claim codes will also be redeemed on token.vega.xyz. When you receive a code, you’ll also receive instructions on how to use that site to claim your reward.
Other Projects:
Vega Console has not seen a release for a while, as a lot of attention has been focused on getting token.vega.xyz ready for users. That means there are a few features that haven’t made it out yet, the most exciting of which is our revamped depth chart. Before it’s live on Fairground, you can out a preview on: https://github.com/vegaprotocol/pennant

Wallet usability has also been a priority. We know everyone is not comfortable with the command line, so we’ve got a few initiatives underway to improve that:
In the near term, we’ll have much-improved command-line instructions to help guide you
After that, we’ll add a UI to the wallet
We’re also looking at web extensions/embeddable wallets
And finally, planning for the next milestone. We’re looking at making the gaps between releases shorter, so the next one should be sooner and more iterative than they have been while getting these last fundamental features out.