Welcome to the latest edition of our Hydranet monthly recap! This month, we’re taking a slightly more technical approach to dive deeper into the developments happening across the project. Let’s explore some of the key highlights with some technical insights from this month’s progress.
Lithium Upgrades
This month, our Lithium protocol received a crucial upgrade with the introduction of invoice-based transactions. In the world of off-chain payments, there are two main payment methods: keysend and invoices. While keysend allows for instant payments by sending funds directly to a public address, invoices add a layer of sophistication. But why go the extra mile with invoices?
Invoices offer more than just a payment request. They carry essential details like the payment amount, a unique request code, expiration time, and valuable metadata. This makes them ideal for trading scenarios, where controlling the flow of transactions and pre-defining terms is key. By incorporating invoices, we’re enhancing compatibility and improving the structure of our trading platform. Alongside this, we’ve also made necessary updates to Lithium’s messaging system to distinguish between keysend and invoice transactions.
Channel Rental Manager
The channel rental manager has become a recurring topic in our weekly and monthly announcements and it’s no wonder — it’s a crucial feature for our trading solution as it enables users to receive off-chain payments by increasing their inbound liquidity. We focused on refining its backend logic in August to ensure a more streamlined execution process.
We also prepared our testnet server to host the channel manager by setting up a pricing API, which is essential for its operation. On the frontend, we designed and integrated a modal window for the channel rental feature. This interface has passed initial testing by our developers and is now being tested by our team, bringing us one step closer to sharing it with our closed beta testers.
Infrastructure Upgrade
August was a month of fortifying our infrastructure. We took a significant step by setting up all critical microservices — such as pricing APIs and mempool information — on our own servers. This shift reduces our dependencies on third-party providers, a necessity highlighted when mempool.space went down for maintenance a few weeks back and obstructed our development.
We’ve now transitioned to a self-hosted Bitcoin node, which has proven to be a robust alternative to external services. Additionally, we set up our own Rapid-Gossip-Sync server, which ensures fast synchronization of the Lightning Network without dependency on external servers. To top it off, we automated the entire Hub setup, making it easier and faster to deploy updates and new features. Enhanced monitoring and logging tools have also been implemented, to simplify the troubleshooting process.
Orderbook and swap functions
The orderbook and swap functions, which are the final pieces of the puzzle before our first Web DEX swaps can commence, are making progress! In August, the liquidity logic for adding and removing orders from the orderbook had its first implementation finished, alongside its first connection to the frontend. The development of the swap and matchmaking services is also well underway, with the logic for filling multiple limit orders in a single trade being worked on.
Alongside these developments, we’re creating comprehensive unit tests to ensure the reliability of our code. Lastly, the Swap API, which serves as the bridge between our backend and frontend systems for anything swap-related, is also taking shape. With that being said, it’s clear we’re getting closer to our ultimate goal: a fully operational off-chain DEX on the web! We will make it happen!
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Make sure to check out our website: https://hydranet.ai
