Development Progress Report #1
Dear Community — now is a great time to surface from development and testing to give you all a progress report, as we just hit a milestone: closing our first round of private beta testing!
We’ve been fortunate to have incredible engagement from our alpha and beta testers — seriously want to thank you all for your thoughtful suggestions and dedication to helping us make a trading platform that will serve you the best. A few notable words of encouragement that we’d like to share with the broader audience…
“Keep up the good work guys!”
“Keep on the great work team!”
“Really dig the wrapping/unwrapping idea”
“Really loving the rest of the interface tho, especially the charts! Can’t wait to use this on the mainnet for some real action soon!”
“But truely, you guys have done a great work on the platform. I love.”
“I think what you guys did with fees is perfect”
“The interface is super responsive. It is great to see the immediate effects of placing an order. This seems like a major advantage over [Well-Known Competitor] in particular.”
“I am looking forward to future updates to the platform! The tech looks promising and the the product is needed. Keep up the good work!”
“yeah that was pretty cool, this you can’t do on [Well-Known Competitor] for instance. This right now is better then [Well-Known Competitor]”
We’ve been absolutely blown away by your enthusiasm… so much so, we’d like to open up another round of testing while we prepare for our mainnet launch! As we’ve made quite a few adjustments, we have more to test, and we invite our current beta testers to participate in this next round as well.
If you haven’t heard, we’re giving away $1000 in ZRX for detailed, thoughtful feedback. We love the idea of giving back to our community, so we’ve decided to devise a raffle with two winners — earning $500 worth of ZRX each. If you have not done so already, sign up here!
Even if you have zero experience trading, we want your feedback — all experience levels welcome.
Now for the Progress Report
In two weeks we recorded over 65 unique suggestions and bug reports from users all over the world. We’ve summarized them for you here, as well as outlined some of the progress we’ve made in developing new features.
UI Adjustments
We’ve made some larger adjustment in our v2 UI release as well as some minor ones.… and here it is!
Probably one of most apparent changes is that we offer different color schemes: for now, you can choose between our “day” and “night” themes based on your personal preference.
No trading platform would be complete without depth of market and volume indicators, so this was on the top of our feature list. Check it out in the images above.
We’ve also adjusted the font and color scheme to be more readable, as well as improved the responsiveness and optimized the experience for smaller screens.
The “Place Order” button on limit order panel now reads “Place Buy Order” or “Place Sell Order”, to more clearly indicate the consequential action. Some of our testers have indicated they accidentally created a sell order instead of a buy order and vise versa.
Additionally, we’ve created a scrolling panel with order summaries, so there is more room for the order form and order book.
There are now discrete price columns on My Orders/My Trade History with Pretty Number format, for a more detailed, intuitive history log.
Lastly, we’ve also added a pending indicator for wrapping/unwrapping ETH and unlocking tokens for trading.
In-App User Education and Activity Feedback
In addition to our UI changes, we’ve added some additional user education mechanisms, including tooltips, more informative error messages, and better on-boarding tutorials. We’re also actively working on making notifications more obvious.
More detailed logging has enabled us to notify users of events and errors relating to their activity on the platform in a more fine-grained manner. For example, we now warn against crossing the market, and indicate in more detail why some corner-case orders are removed.
As of now, we’ve refined our methods for explaining and guiding users through more rudimentary actions, such as wrapping ETH, unlocking tokens for trading — as we’ve realized since this isn’t required on other exchanges, we’ll need to provide some customer education on this front. Along these lines, we’ve been developing better MetaMask integration support — as users have to authorize each token for trading.
Unfortunately, the Kovan test network was acting up during our testing period — it had been providing inconsistent balance information to our application, which had resulted in some orders incorrectly being removed from the order book. Thus, we put stopgap measures that will decrease the impact of this.
We realize this is going to happen as Ethereum experiences growing pains as it scales to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding ecosystem. We’re actively seeking out preemptive measures for gracefully handling delays and irregularities, so the user experience is not impacted significantly.
Support Documents
A few testers requested support documentation and an FAQ list, and we’ll be creating this for future users. Here we’ll explain advanced features as well as the more rudimentary ones. We’ll also provide more detail on various error messages.
The Aqueduct Protocol and Developer Tool Kit
We’ve been asked by several beta testers about when they will be able to programmatically trade on our platform. The answer lies in our development of Aqueduct - a protocol, SDK, and set of smart contracts, which will allow not only programmatic trades on the platform, but also real-time liquidity and fee sharing across a network of partner relays using state-of-the-art payment channels.
Aqueduct is currently pre-alpha while we test early integration with a couple of partner relays. We expect to release a public beta version early next year.
What to Look Forward To
We’ll be focusing on mobile support, hardware wallet support, and additional charting capabilities in the near future, as well as a streamlined ‘first time trading’ experience and additional UI components to show a high level market/account overview.
Thank you again to all of our testers! Keep up the excellent work! Again, if you’d like to join our community of testers, sign up here. Be the first to learn about new features and news. By signing up, you can also help shape the product you want to use.
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