Sifchain Update — Beginning of August 2022
This article is a recap of the development and project progress for Sifchain for the first half of August.
Sifchain in the News
Sifchain is campaigning for an open-access funding grant from Cardano’s innovation fund, Project Catalyst. Our grant application would help offset costs from developing the Peggy 2 bridge and provide a pathway for collaboration to connect Cardano to Cosmos. The idea of a Cosmos to Cardano bridge has been getting fantastically positive media attention and has been showcased in a number of outlets! Check out just a few of these features below.
Interview with Sifchain Core Contributor Jazear Brooks by Crypto YouTuber Alexandrus
This interview reached more than 20,000 views on its first day, on topics like Omni-EVM, Peggy 2, and the Cosmos to Cardano Bridge. It also features our Cardano grant application for the building of a #CardanoCosmos bridge, and includes a link to our application to help support our campaign!
SifDAO
Within SifDAO, permissionless working groups are forming, and the tooling needed for devs to build in the Sifchain ecosystem is improving.
Two major updates include the formation of a DAO onboarding group, and a software upgrade that will increase the nakamoto coefficient of Sifchain by hard-coding a minimum commission on chain and limiting delegations to validators with over 6.6% voting power.
Council Updates
Validator Delegation Council
The validator delegation is working on refining the Validator Delegation Program scorecard and scoring the validators that applied for the program. A new stack-ranking methodology has been devised that will be proto-typed this round by the council and then opened to the wider community. This enables the community to weigh the criteria that are used to score the validators, which can help create a more relevant and fair scoring process for the validators!
In the near future you can expect the scoring results to be released as well as a statement from the council.
Token Listing Council
The token listing council’s work to hide low liquidity pools is nearly complete. On the pools page the suggested toggle button is already implemented. Additionally, the final steps to adding ~100k of liquidity in the ROWAN:DAI pool are underway and expected to be completed soon.
As you may have read in previous weeks, the token listing council has also requested to shift the reference pair from USDT to USDC, which will improve the trading experience for arbitrageurs and traders on the DEX. This is because bots and other arbitrageurs often trade against the “reference pair”, making the associated stablecoin more likely to maintain its peg. Because USDC has more pool depth than USDT, shifting the reference pair will give arbitrageurs of other assets more liquidity to swap against, and USDC will have a high probability of quickly returning to the $1 spot value after swaps are made.
On-boarding and Contribution Zones
One new group that has grown out of the SifDAO round-table is the on-boarding and contribution zones circle. This open group seeks to establish more clarity and coherence around how new users can join SifDAO, what contribution-tiers exist within SifDAO, and what abilities and responsibilities each group has in the DAO.
Some of the inspiration for this group comes from Raid Guild and Forefront.
Feel free to join the meetings in our discord! Here is a calendar link with the time and date.
Governance
The following proposals are in discussion period in discord.gg/sifchain & on commonwealth.im/sifchain:
The following proposals have passed:
- Limit Delegations to Validators with > 6.6% voting power
- Kwak Tax Compensation
- Token Listing Council Compensation
- Validator Delegation Council Compensation
- Sifchain Ambassadors Compensation
SifDAO Events
The bi-weekly SifDAO roundtable meeting took place on August 4th. Watch the recording on YouTube. Join us for the next event on August 18th to ideate, incubate, and initiate work within the DAO, while earning a one-time, unique NFT badge for your attendance.
August 4 Roundtable attendance badge.
Other Updates
The code to block delegations to validators with greater than 10% voting power as well as hard-code the minimum commission rate at 5% is being implemented on Friday, August 12th.
Get Involved
Stay tuned in the #DAO-chat on discord.gg/sifchain or on commonwealth.im/sifchain to participate in governance.
Product & Engineering
Updated Core Feature Timeline
- Cosmos SDK .45 Upgrade (with support for AuthZ): Aug 23rd, 2022
- Re-enabled Asymmetric Liquidity Adds: ETA Sept 2022
- Margin Trading 1.0: Soft launch ETA Sept 2022
- Peggy 2.0 Launch: Upgraded ETH<>Sifchain bridge to Peggy 2.0: October 2022
- Peggy 2.0 Next chain integration: November 2022
Peggy Bridge Team
Of the 4 audits on the Peggy 2.0 code bridge, the team has completed all remediations from two of them and continues to work on the last remaining open items from Certik and Halborn’s audits.
Front End Team
The front-end team continues to make progress on the front-end for Margin Trading, finishing key features and hooking up data services and sifnode core functionality. This front-end design has gotten feedback from our alpha testers, and it will enter into a 2-week test phase starting on August 15th. Once in a stable position, our goal is to invite additional users from the community to get involved in our TestNet version of Margin for a week or so before we officially deploy it to BetaNet.
The team also made some updates to the current as-is DEX, including:
- Auto-hiding of pools on the Pools page that have liquidity less than $10,000
- Removal of the Rewards tab
- More prominent placement of the ‘Stake’ buttons within the DEX.
Data Team
The data team focused on creating internal, external, and DAO centric data dashboards that will be used to support Margin Trading. This will empower the various audiences with the data they need to do research and analysis on the system after Margin Trading is launched!
Developer Relations Team
The DevRels team continued to support the community, as well as created documentation and tutorials around various topics. This includes:
- Create Sifchain Notification Bot inc. requirements
- Troubleshooting and fixing Margin User Guide — CLI
- Margin — Reformatting / Formatting / Modification (as above)
The team is also planning around how to get more community developers involved with weekly calls, as well as some other more structured ways. More on this to come soon!
Sifnode Team
The Sifnode team released a new software upgrade which included key CLP refactoring updates. They also tested and prepped the next release, which includes setting of a minimum commission rate & maximum voting power with ETA to be live on Aug 16th, 2022. They time spent time testing and prepping for the next subsequent release, which will be the upgrade to v0.45, which includes AuthZ. Lastly, the team is working on re-enabling asymmetric liquidity adds. They hope to re-enable this behavior alongside margin trading.
Margin Trading Team
The margin team is in the final stretch! The past two weeks have been focused on FE integrations, data dashboard integration, bug fixes, and scenario modeling. Be on the lookout over the next week or so for an explainer of ‘Margin Trading at Sifchain’, which will include the various phases of Margin Trading, demos/screenshots, and invitations to get involved in final testing for the feature before we launch it!
Get Involved
This is what we’ve been working on in the last two weeks, and we give regular updates via Medium & Discord to keep you in the know.
Plus, here are three simple things you can do to get involved in Sifchain right now:
✅ View & vote on DAO proposals at https://wallet.keplr.app/#/sifchain/governance
✅ Provide liquidity on the dex at https://sifchain.network/
✅ Tell your friends about how epic Sifchain is and join our Telegram & Discord!
Official Channels
Media & content creators, contact us at communications@sifchain.finance.
