March/April recap

Aura & YouStock

The past two months have whizzed by as the backend architecture for Auradex and YouStock are being developed as well as some basic GUIs.

With Auradex, a major milestone was made when the first atomic swap took place between Ethereum’s two test networks Rinkeby and Ropsten. Since then the protocol was rearchitected to make adding bitcoin based coins easier to integrate into the system. Near the end of March development focus was switched to the YouStock beta.

The YouStock token and decentralized exchange smart contracts have undergone a couple iterations now, and a design was chosen inspired by Radex’s implementation using ERC223 tokens and being fully on chain. A hybrid approach was considered similar to that of Etherdelta, but ultimately a fully on chain design was selected for max decentralization. Anyone can easily create a separate interface for the exchange, and can even use a simple wallet to interact with the dApp and create and fulfill orders if they choose. There are 0 trading fees, only network transaction fees which are fixed instead of being a percentage of the order and currently extremely low on the Aura blockchain.

In addition, the YouStock smart-contract goes one step further and is a full-on token factory and decentralized exchange. A single contract is responsible for creating all new tokens, and supporting the exchange of said tokens. This solution is unique to YouStock and comes with efficiency gains that will help the project scale on chain. The current version of YouStock smart contracts can be seen on github.

Last month the core team expanded with the addition of co-founder Vlad Farcas from Cluj, Romania. Vlad will be involved with project management, product strategy, organizing hackathons and otherwise increasing exposure of the project in general, as well as assisting in development.

In other news, you can now track Aura (ARA) in blockfolio, the #1 cryptocurrency mobile app for iOS and Android.

The future is looking bright and the project is still on track to having an open beta by the end of June as outlined in the original roadmap.