2020 First Half Updates
Reflecting on the first half of 2020 and looking ahead towards the future
Background
Since 2017, we’ve been shipping smart contract code every 3–6 months in cycles of intense testing, auditing, and adjusting. We’ve continued this loop nonstop up until 2020.
Anyone who has shipped smart contracts holding real assets knows that this process is extremely stressful — a single mistake in one line of code can mean losing everything you own, and all the money of every user in your platform.
The first half of 2020 has also been characterized by unprecedented challenges on a global scale. With a global pandemic uprooting our concept of normalcy, we thought it would be a good time to take a 6 month hiatus from smart contract development. In hindsight, it was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Not only does the team feel replenished, but we got to do 3 incredibly valuable things that kept get put on the back-burner in past years.
What We’ve Been Working On
- 100% migration to Go & TypeScript
The initial version of DDEX was built with Node.js and JavaScript. Although this refactor to Go and TypeScript took a substantial amount of time to complete, the result was well worth the effort as we were able to eliminate elusive bugs, increase test coverage, and boost performance.
- Heavily invested in DevOps and Kubernetes
Typically it would be unwise for startups to over-optimize on DevOps, as time is almost always better spent building new features.
However, many DeFi projects requires consistent up-time. Even a few second of service outage at the wrong time can lead to stale oracles, liquidation failures, and potential loss of funds.
Although Kubernetes sometimes get a bad rep for its complexity and high learning curve, we’ve found that with enough patience and time investment, it can become a DeFi project’s best friend.
- Bug fixes and key product improvements
As with any area of new technology, there are often some unforeseen challenges with respect to product design and UX. We spent a lot of time in the last 6 months ironing out some of the bugs and overly complex parts of the DDEX UI/UX. We’ve added liquidation notifications, full position and transaction history, 30 day lending pool and oracle statistics, a new help documentation portal, and more.
Going Forward
In the world of DeFi, your smart contract is the most important component of your platform. The contracts are where the innovations are, where the crazy mind-blowing ideas come from (things like flashloans). However, once in a while it’s a important to break from this and to focus on the unsexy stuff. At the end of the day, what really matters is delivering an intuitive, trustworthy, end-to-end user experience.
Lastly, although something new pops up everyday in DeFi, certain trends and patterns only becomes apparent over a longer time horizon. By taking a step back we could see the bigger picture more clearly, and generate ideas on what we should be working on next. Lots of interesting and exciting things to come!
