The Road to Public Launch
Approximately two weeks ago, on the 22nd of November, the Connext Labs team deployed Connext’s Amarok upgrade to mainnet.
This upgrade is the culmination of almost a year’s worth of research and development to build the first truly trust-minimized generalized interoperability protocol, enabling secure communication between chains and rollups.
Connext is now live in a closed beta state. The protocol is deployed with very limited liquidity while the Labs team works on the following final steps prior to our Public Launch.
Mainnet Testing & Load Testing
A big lesson that we’ve learned from launching NXTP (the previous version of Connext) last year, is that it’s absolutely crucial to test decentralized infrastructure at scale in a production-like environment prior to launch.
This involves not only testing our own protocol, but also that dependencies such as RPCs, subgraphs, and other supporting infrastructure hold up when lots of users are using the system at once.
Load testing for the protocol is now complete. Through our testing, the network has remained stable and continued to operate as (or better than!) expected.
Updating Documentation & Interfaces
The Amarok upgrade significantly changes how both developers and supporting interfaces interact with Connext.
For the past two weeks, we have been iterating on feedback from community members and crosschain developers on improving our documentation for building on Connext. We’ve also worked on designing the interfaces for new user flows such as liquidity provision.
Apart from collecting feedback, we had set an internal objective to measure how effectively builders are able to create projects on top of Connext as part of EthIndia using our developer docs.
We performed better than we thought on our test!
26(!) teams successfully built on top of Connext during the hackathon, with just few questions arising from the docs around xcalls. This indicates to us that our network is now at a point where devs can build on it independently with minimal handholding needed from the core team & community.
Watcher Implementation & Fire Drills
Ensuring the security of user funds and data moving across chains is our #1 priority as an organization & network. This philosophy is reflected in our network design through the use of Watchers.
Watchers are offchain agents that continuously monitor the network and act as emergency circuit breakers in the event of a hack of Connext or compromise of the underlying canonical rollup/chain that Connext relies on. If Watchers identify any malicious activity or unexpected behavior, they pause the connection from a given domain to the rest of the network, halting all transactions to and from it.
The team has already begun development of a Watcher implementation that monitors mainnet communication on the network. After development, we intend to run fire drills: simulations that will test how Watchers and the rest of the network respond on testnets and mainnet in the event of a hack.
The network will initially go live with a small whitelisted set of Watchers to start with, but our goal is to work towards a model where every Connext router will also function as a Watcher.
Liquidity Bootstrapping Plan & Rollout
The Amarok upgrade introduces passive liquidity provision to Connext. This means that, in addition to migrating existing routers from the legacy network to the new one, we also need to build a plan to bootstrap liquidity into the upgrade.
The team is already at work building models for fees and incentives that we believe will be lucrative for LPs. Once this (and our Watcher fire drills) are complete, we will begin a Liquidity Bootstrapping Phase, where users and routers can begin deploying capital into the network.
Wen Public Launch
The team is hard at work to bring the Amarok upgrade live as soon as possible.
As all the onchain and offchain pieces of the new architecture fall in place and get tested internally and by selected community members, we are heading full speed towards the long-awaited Public Launch, which is finally not too far away.
Stay tuned, the Next 🌊 is coming.
About Connext
Connext is a network for fast, trustless communication between chains and rollups. It is the only interoperability system of its type that does this cheaply and quickly without introducing any new trust assumptions. Connext is aimed at developers who are looking to build bridges and other natively cross-chain applications. To date, over $1.5b in transactions have crossed the network.
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