Regarding the recent issues with the Polygon chain
06.03 UPDATE: We have released the block confirmations update to the website using a value of 10 blocks (20 seconds), and the trading experience is reliable and pleasant despite the chain intermittent issues still happening. The feedback we received from traders is overwhemingly positive. This makes us optimistic concerning the UX for our platform on Polygon. Even more optimizations are coming in the following weeks.
If you’ve been using the Polygon PoS chain recently, you most probably have noticed issues in the user experience.
The exact cause of the problem is unknown to us, however it seems to be related to the consensus and validators being inefficient, by looking at the validators channel in the Polygon discord group.
The consequences are frequent reorgs (most of them are under 50 blocks but one reached nearly 200 blocks recently), and therefore issues with the RPCs / Matic nodes, which are under a lot of stress.
The polygon team seems to be working on a fix, but we don’t know the ETA (could potentially stay like this for weeks), so we have taken the matter into our own hands.
We are not putting the blame on Polygon entirely, the recent issues with the chain have revealed unoptimized spots in our website backend too. We have been working hard to solve them in the last few days.
Optimizations done to the website backend are already very significant (already 5x increase in throughput), and there is still a lot we can do. It was also a great timing to work hard on the scaling / efficiency of the website backend so we can handle the next wave of adoption.
We’ve also been working hard to optimize the frontend to make sure it’s as efficient as it can be. It should also be possible to detect on the frontend if the RPC the user has selected is unsynced, and then offer them the ability to switch to a more synced one. Every optimization like this one can make a big difference regarding the UX.
Also, our chainlink nodes team now has proper monitoring dashboards in place too so we can react as fast as possible if there is a problem, and see there consequences easily when we tweak settings to optimize execution times.
If reorgs stay consistently that deep, like they are now, we will address the issue by increasing the block confirmations on the frontend.
This would mean slower trading orders (depending on the depth of reorgs), however we believe it is much better to provide a consistent and reliable user experience rather than trying to optimize speed in an environment that doesn’t allow it properly.
Finally, we are open to changing our strategy by going multi-chain if needed. If the reorgs keep happening and block confirmations have to be increased permanently or for months, we will seriously consider the possibility of deploying on other chains as well even before zk rollups are live.
Please note that the user experience during the following days might be unstable until we decide to increase block confirmations and until we have optimized everything as good as we can.
If you have been affected by the recent issues and have lost DAI, please contact us on telegram. We will use up to 10,000 DAI from the project fund to refund regular traders who had issues during that time while there was no warning on the website.
We didn’t put a warning on the website until now because we were focused on optimizing everything we could and thought the problem would have already been fixed by patching the consensus / Matic nodes.
Thank you for your understanding.
Regardless of how the situation evolves, we will do our best to handle it properly, whether it is increasing block confirmations or even deploying on another chain.
We will solve anything that gets between us and our vision.
