Newsletter, 4th of April
🔥 What happened last week…
- More than 5M dollar already traded on Margin protocol
- Preparations to work on the new UI for Jarvis exchange
- Unfair new rules for the Gitcoin grant
👨‍💻 Protocols
Margin Protocol (we need a sexier name…)
Current version: Venezia 0.1
A new milestone in trading volume has been reached: $5M have been traded through the protocol, generating 58 Dai of commissions. And it is still a one-man trading activity.
The commissions are split equally between the protocol and the liquidity provider.
This week we had our first brainstorming to draft the requirement of the next release, Venezia 0.2, which will increase the trustlessness of the protocol, and therefore its security, a mandatory step before making an official launch. We will still need a few brainstorming sessions with Petar, CTO, and Alessandro, Blockchain engineer before to have a final technical requirement.
The most important requirement being: in case of an attacker gaining control of the private key controlling the smart contract, or in case of an attacker modifying their trading history or the price feed, it should be impossible to steal the funds of other users and of the liquidity provider. We had successfully passed a penetration test last year, which was meant to penetrate the system (and from there to be able to modify trading history, gaining control of the private key etc.) but: we cannot rely on this single test; social enginerrering attack and gaining access to the company’s computers (which could access the backend) are also threats whose we should mitigate the risks.
Synthereum (Synthetic Protocol)
Current version: Bled 0.1
We had an important call with our Blockchain engineer William, based in NYC, to review the draft of requirements for Opatija, the version 2 of Synthereum. We need to overcome 3 issues before to have the final technical requirements, but we already can make a rough estimation: it will probably take at least 5–6 weeks to release it on the testnet.
This week, UMA warned us that they will not support their old contract on the mainnet, in order to push all the efforts towards their new priceless framework. We support this decision and we will not launch Bled on the mainnet, and therefore we will keep our current synthetic assets on the testnet, open-source, so anyone can reuse our code.
After all, it is better this way: it would have created some friction to move from the old jEUR to the new one.
📱 Applications
Jarvis Exchange
During the brainstorming dedicated to Venezia 0.2, we also discussed the implementation of the final trading interface.
Remember that the current UI was quickly developed for testing purposes and was never intended to be the final product.
We have two options: start from scratch, or refactor all the code. Starting from scratch will allow us to redo the architecture of the platform completely, and might take from 3 to 4 months of work. Refactoring the code might take 1–2 months and consist in modifying the existing code.
While it might be better to redo it from scratch, the long-term plan is to move all the codebase to Flutter, to support web, desktop and mobile versions easily. Therefore we will not spend time and resources redoing from scratch the current trading platform.
After the code being refactored, we plan on launching a bew feature every 2 weeks to have a constant flow of updates.
Burner Wallet
It was a bit naive to think we could do everything we wanted within a month, especially the first month of a new remote team. Many of the features we wanted to have are not possible without heavy code and are very cost in term of gas price.
As an example, buying a lottery ticket would cost the user 50 cents (for 1 dollar ticket) and using meta-transaction outside of a contract wallet is barely impossible with Pooltogether or Set Protocol. It is also very complicated with Compound but we implemented it.
If we had the funds to pay for the users’ gas, we might have done it of course. But we currently do not have a budget for that, at the moment.
It is a bit deceiving but Ethereum is still not ready for some use cases, especially when it comes to playing with small amounts.
Nevertheless, we have now a burner wallet, which creates a wallet for a user by just visiting a website; no email; password; phone; just a simple visit.
Main Wallet
No new updates for you here, the team continues to work on the integration with Blocknative.
🚀 Business
Grant
As you can imagine most of our community did not have Github account, therefore most of the people contributed from a newly created one. Our grant success (1st in DeFi category after the first day and 3rd in the general leaderboard) caught the attention of people who started to “red flag” us thinking we were cheating and creating fake GitHub accounts to steal the grant’s money.
After defending ourselves on Twitter, the Gitcoin team decided to change the rules of their grants, which penalized us A LOT: since the 27th, the donations of new GitHub accounts would not be matched. Therefore, most of the money that people donated after the 27th were unfortunately useless.
It is very unfair for few reasons: first no-one communicated about this rule, we discovered it two days after, by discussing with the Gitcoin team. So for 2 days we kept promoting our grant and asking people to donate for nothing, spending their and our time; then it gives more chaces to grants whose community are developers or people who already had a github account. We estimated that we might have lost 3–4 thousands dollars of funding because of this new rule.
It means that we need everyone to create NOW a Github account to get ready for the next round in June.
This is all for now, stay safe, wash hands and see you next week!
Vsevolod.
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