Minswap testnet reflections
Minswap recognizes that our public testnet launch did not meet expectations. We apologize to our users, the Cardano community, and those in the broader crypto ecosystem who were let down. Being the first isn’t easy, but we felt it was important to deploy our DEX on the public testnet to begin gathering data and iterating on our designs. After all, that’s the purpose of a testnet.
We sincerely appreciate the outpouring of support and encouragement we’ve received over the past few days from the Cardano community as we work towards fixing the issues we encountered.
While the FUD and finger-pointing that resulted from our testnet deployment was unsettling, we believe this experience will result in a stronger and more cohesive Cardano community moving forward. It’s clear that improving the level of collaboration and communication between teams and organizations in the ecosystem will benefit everyone. Minimizing the common design challenges we face and withholding potential solutions is detrimental to adoption, growth, and realizing the long-term vision of Cardano.
Minswap has known about the concurrency challenge since we first began building on Cardano over 6 months ago. It’s an issue that every competent team and development lab building DeFi protocols on Cardano must overcome. It’s not a fundamental flaw, but is simply a design challenge that must be addressed.
Individual teams have been working towards solutions, but thus far efforts have been siloed with little exchange of information amongst teams. Minswap has a few approaches to dealing with this issue and is weighing the trade-offs associated with each solution. The on-chain approaches we’ve explored are limited by the transaction memory limit and the off-chain ones either need a centralized entity, or a robust L2 system. Both of them take time and require a robust simple DEX first. That is the reason why we decided to launch our DEX first, gather feedback, and polish it before applying an additional scaling layer upon it. We’re confident that we’ll settle on an optimal solution soon. This challenge is merely one of many interesting problems to solve and is what we enjoy working on and why we build.
Bringing attention to these challenges, having honest conversations, and working together on open-source solutions is what we should aim for as a community. To say solving these challenges is the domain of IOG or alternatively the responsibility of dApp developers misses the point. These are challenges we face collectively as a community and should work on solving together.
We understand teams want to gain a competitive advantage and derive value from proprietary solutions. However, there are a number of foundational pieces of infrastructure that are prerequisites to building scalable Cardano DeFi protocols. These solutions should be open-source public goods rather than barriers to entry for builders and developers.
The path forward is clear and we look forward to releasing our next iteration soon. In the coming days we’ll release a detailed technical analysis of our take on the concurrency challenge, our choice for the solution, as well as address some lesser-known technical impediments. We look forward to open sourcing our proprietary PAB and FISO tools in the coming weeks. We appreciate your patience and understanding.
