IDEX Q1 Update
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It’s been a busy last few months at IDEX as we continue to build out our vision of the best DEX platform. We’d like to take a moment to provide our community with an overview of the latest developments as well as insights into what we’re working on right now. This update includes information on staking, new UI/UX, scaling, and more!
#1 All-Time
A few weeks ago IDEX passed Ether Delta to become the number one all-time most used DEX! IDEX launched over one year after Ether Delta, but thanks to our user-friendly design and hybrid execution model we were able to overcome some of the UX challenges that held back DEX adoption in the past. We’re super proud of the team’s work and thankful for the support of our community to get us to this point. But we’re not done yet!
Staking
On January 10th we released the first version of our staking software. It was a long-time coming, the culmination of many months of research and product development, and hotly anticipated by our community. The success and adoption was greater than we could have anticipated! By the numbers:
- 559 ETH paid to stakers since launch
- 200 nodes signed-up within 72 hours, and the network has stabilized at over 300 active nodes
- ~50% of the circulating supply is being staked, a phenomenal level of participation by our community.
- APY is currently ~20% and has been as high as 30% in recent staking periods
- 6 product releases adding new features and reports and improving stability
- ~50% of nodes achieved perfect uptime during our last staking period
As of now development work around the existing staking system has transitioned to a “maintenance mode” consisting of only necessary bug fixes. This allows us to shift our focus to the two primary initiatives of new UI/UX and our layer-2 scaling solution which will include the next iteration of our staking platform.
New UI/UX
The past 4 months our product and design teams have been working on a new UI/UX, a process which wrapped up last week. To kick this off we conducted extensive research, including user interviews, to understand where the pain points and opportunities exist in the current application. Some areas we already knew we wanted to improve (removing scrolling!) but we also wanted to understand unique opportunities that pertain to IDEX given the use of a private key for both account access and trade authorization. Our lead designer has experience creating trading platforms for both cryptocurrency and traditional finance, and the resulting product reflects this experience. The designs have been passed off to our front-end team so they can begin implementing IDEX 2.0.
Scaling
As part of the roll-out of the new version of IDEX, we’ll also be implementing our layer-2 scaling solution. In 2018 the Ethereum miners earned $148M in gas fees, and IDEX users paid $4.4M of that! Additionally IDEX has become the largest contract on the Ethereum network, surpassing both Ether Delta and Cryptokitties in the fall of 2018. Reducing our usage of the underlying network will drive down the fixed costs of trading on IDEX and address one of the biggest pain points of trading on a DEX.
We spent a lot of time exploring almost every scaling solution that’s been proposed (plasma, state channels, starks, snarks, etc.) and the research from the community was hugely valuable. However, given our unique hybrid architecture we’ve actually created our own custom solution that optimizes on the areas we care about and scales our existing transactions by orders of magnitude. This has been in development for ~6 months and will be released along with the new UI/UX. As the release date gets closer we’ll provide more specifics about the solution, including a whitepaper, that will allow the community to dig in and provide feedback.
Licenses and Registration
As we discussed in Q4, IDEX is taking a pragmatic approach to regulation. Part of this includes working through all of the different applicable regulatory requirements in order to trade every type of token. From a tech perspective a token is a token, and integration of new token types is quite simple (with the exception of a few things such as security token whitelists). However, from a regulatory perspective it’s possible that a token could fall under any one of a number of regulatory bodies. We believe the challenge is finding the right set of corporate entities to house these different businesses while still creating a seamless user experience within the product. As part of this we’ve been working on the acquisition and registration of a broker dealer, a process which is also almost completed. This is one of the many building blocks necessary to create the right business structure to support our growing product offering.
New Asset Types
One of the reasons we launched on the Ethereum network was the growing number of teams building on the same platform. As new products and services are released, IDEX is positioned to easily integrate and support them. One particular area we’re excited to explore is the emerging space of derivative tokens. These assets use a variety of mechanisms to give customers exposure to other asset classes, such as S&P500 index, leveraged BTC, or short Ethereum. As this asset class grows over time, IDEX customers will gain additional options for more sophisticated trading strategies.
That’s it for now! If you have any feedback or would like to get started as an IDEX staker, please join our discord community and we’ll be there to help you out.
~Team IDEX
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