The second month of 2023 was a productive one! The DEX development made major progress and Phoenix is getting closer by the minute. Let’s recap what happened during February in this monthly update.
DEX updates
As you may be familiar with, there are a few features that have been deemed necessary before a launch of the Hydranet DEX on mainnet (Phoenix) can happen. Our devs have worked tirelessly on these features this month and reached several milestones!
Watchtowers
Watchtowers are an integral part for user safety. They are services used in state channel solutions, such as the Lightning and Connext networks, to protect users from fraudulent behaviour. They monitor the state channels and to ensure that all parties are following the rules of the channel, even if some parties are offline. The latest update on this topic is that watchtowers, both for the Lightning and Connext networks, have been implemented into the Hydranet DEX! For the Lightning network, the Hydranet DEX uses the watchtower solution included in the Lightning Network Deamon (Lightning Labs’ implementation of a Lightning Node). However, for the Connext network, our devs had to develop their own watchtower(!), since no other solution was available on the market.
DDoS protection
We want nothing else but success for our DEX, but we are not certain that everyone else has the same intention. Our devs therefore started working on DDoS protection as a means to protect ourselves from users with bad intentions. The good news is that our devs managed to run all communication between the orderbook (HUB) and wallets (client side) through Cloudflare, a specialised DDoS mitigation company. Some fewer issues related to Lightning network routing still exist, but these are being ironed out as we speak.
Connext DEX fee refunds and taker-pays-maker
These two features are both related to the DEX fee paid by users on the DEX. The taker-pays-maker function solves payment from the taker to the maker in a trustless manner so that makers can benefit from a smaller trading fee when using the DEX. The Connext DEX fee refund function handles all refunds of DEX fees for orders that are cancelled or, for some reason, failed. The code and architecture behind these functions were unfortunately not in the best of shape when taken over by our devs, and there has been constant debate on how to proceed with these features. But with some help from external developers (Alex’ team), and a lot of stubbornness from our own devs, the state of these two features are now shining brighter than ever. A so-far successful build of the Connext DEX fee refunds and taker-pays-maker features have been implemented on our dev build and is being tested as we speak.
Cross-chain rental extensions
A bug was discovered related to the channel rental extensions which hindered users from extending their rented channels and paying for it with another currency than the one being rented. After recognition of the bug our devs were able to solve the issues fairly easily.
Besides the larger features mentioned above, our devs also made progress on the SSUI, made UX improvements, and fixed a smaller bug related to market orders. All mentioned features are continuously being tested, and will eventually culminate into a major DEX update (still testnet) for the community!
DAO
The DAO had to work a lot this month as several governance votes were initiated. Starting at the end of January was a vote about the new tokenomics version and whether it should be used in the near future or not. The highlight of this version is that it focuses on strategic liquidity, meaning that the DAO share of the DEX revenues will initially be used to strengthen the state of the Hydranet token liquidity. The vote finished in the beginning of February, and the outcome was in favour of the new tokenomics version.
The second vote during February was related to the staking APY. To stop diluting the token the team initiated discussions about the staking rewards. A community vote was held to decide whether the staking rewards should cease to exist or continue as usual. Through the vote, the DAO took the decision to stop the staking rewards, which is believed to be positive for the future development of the Hydranet project. Token holders do not need to take any actions. The currently staked tokens can be left as they are!
The last governance vote of February concerned bond sales. As proposed in the Tokenomics paper, every new bond sale initiative will be decided on by the DAO via a governance vote. The raised funds from this bond sale will be used for HUB infrastructure upgrades, which includes funds for channel liquidity, better servers, DDoS protection, etc. The DAO voted in favour of a bond sale. If you are interested in buying bonds to support the project, you’ll find the currently available bonds here.
At the end of February, the team initiated discussions on whether to keep the token ticker (HDX) or change it. With a new token planned, we face a decision to set us apart from other projects with similar tickers. For instance, our current ticker, HDX, is shared with another project with many similarities. This project is called HydraDX. It’s a cross-chain DEX residing on the Polkadot network, and the similarities between HydraDX and Hydranet creates a significant PR conflict of interest.
The team let the DAO come with suggestions for a new token ticker. The plan was to let the DAO pick two favourites among the suggestions, which would then be voted on via a governance vote. The creator of the most popular ticker will be rewarded with 5000 HDX.
Roadmap
We know that you have been waiting for this, and February finally provided it: the roadmap to Phoenix! You can find the roadmap on the Hydranet website, along with the completed activities during 2022. What’s even more exciting than the roadmap itself is that the team and devs have already made significant progress on many of the listed activities. Stay tuned for further updates and make sure to follow the Hydranet project on Discord and/or Twitter to get the latest and greatest news about the Hydranet DEX!
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