May has been another pivotal and busy month at Hydranet. A number of exciting long-term monumental shifts have transpired, and we believe they will have a positive impact on HDX into the future.

For anyone who may not be immediately familiar, Cryptopia was a popular cryptocurrency exchange based in New Zealand and well-known for trading and listing lesser-known altcoins. XSN, the predecessor of HDX, was listed there and approximately 4.52 million coins were in their custody. In January 2019, Cryptopia suffered a major security breach and lost several million dollars in various cryptos to theft. Several coins were not affected or stolen in the hack, however, and remained completely intact. Cryptopia subsequently closed its doors and began a series of lengthy formal procedures in concert with legal firm Grant Thorton to liquidate the remaining funds on their exchange and return them to the accounts they once belonged to. Grant Thorton began their liquidation process just a little over 3 years ago in May 2019 and periodically releases updates on its status of it here. As Cryptopia had claimants in over 183 different countries, the liquidation process is quite complex and still underway at the time of this writing.

Over the past three years, there have been many discussions within the community about what to do with the XSN in Grant Thorton’s custody. It was taken to a community vote on more than one occasion, and each time an overwhelming majority voted to keep the funds intact and wait on updates from Grant Thorton before taking any further action on the matter. The swap from XSN to HDX and discontinuation of the XSN blockchain brought this dispute to the forefront once again, as HDX uses an entirely different blockchain run by an entirely new team. The coin swap lasted for 10 weeks. Maintaining the former XSN blockchain during this swap took a significant amount of time, effort, and resources that were simply unsustainable on a longer timeframe.

It was taken to one final community vote on Snapshot (link) at the end of April, and the result was to burn the 4.52 million coins reserved for Cryptopia. In conclusion, the Hydranet team reached out to Grant Thorton once more to remind them of the swap and discontinuation of the XSN blockchain, emphasizing that no equivalent amount in HDX will be reserved.

The first public release of the Hydranet Bridge, a bridge aggregator that searches for competitive trade rates and network fees via the Goerli ETH testnet chain, launched on May 6 as a proof of concept. Hydranet Bridge was a project initiated by and taken over by the former XSN team. While ambitious, further development of the Bridge would be a very costly endeavor — especially to make it competitive with similar aggregators currently leading the industry.

To determine whether or not the HDX team should continue developing it, it was taken to a community vote on Snapshot (link). The community has voted overwhelmingly to focus the team’s development resources on the Hydranet MCLW DEX which had a successful testnet launch on Windows and Linux at the end of April. Be sure to watch the DEX Live Demo with WOAS if you have yet to see it, and feel free to give the testnet DEX a try! https://hydranet.ai/.

On May 15, we released an updated roadmap with emphasis on specifics and short-term goals for the remainder of Q2 and Q3 2022. Among the exciting goals we are working towards are:

- L2 Active Enhancement, which will allow our DEX to run multiple LNDs for multiple coins at the same time.

- Stabilizing the SSUI (Simple Swap UI), which fully automates the process of moving funds from L1 to L2 and L2-based channel management on the DEX.

- Arbitrum integration.

You can read the full roadmap here! https://medium.com/@Hydranet/hydranet-roadmap-update-ea5e32493f24

The coin swap began on March 12, shortly after the launch of the new HDX chain. It took a colossal amount of effort, time, and resources to maintain the old blockchain. While the swap was originally intended to run into the end of June, the XSN blockchain became increasingly unstable as its participants swapped out of it and into HDX.

For matters of security, expense, and allotment of resources, a Snapshot vote (link) was proposed to move the final swap date back from June 30 to May 20, and the community voted overwhelmingly in favor of it.

The swap has now concluded, the swap page has been shut down, and almost every remaining swap request left in the queue has been attended to manually. We can’t thank Alex and Xhiroz enough for all their help and support during this process!

Regarding HDX’s liquidity on Uniswap, we have taken a look at the current POL strategy being imposed and banded various community proposals together into a Snapshot vote. The end goal of these proposals is to significantly improve HDX’s liquidity. See the proposals here.

At the end of April, a few members of the HDX team put together an article to explain their backgrounds and what led them to work together on Hydranet. On May 10, we released a follow-up including additional team members, aptly titled Meet the Team: Part II. Be sure to give them a read!

Part I: https://medium.com/@Hydranet/meet-the-hydranet-team-part-1-93e990ca6d66

Part II: https://medium.com/@Hydranet/meet-the-hydranet-team-part-ii-25f61b9ee21e

(Since the writing of Part I, Victo has stepped down from his unique role in getting Hydranet DEX back on track and returned to the community. Thanks to his efforts, progress on the DEX accelerated rapidly and developer transparency was significantly enhanced. We are especially grateful to him for this.)

HDX is coming to WhiteBIT! A trusted and highly-reputable CEX based in Estonia and in full compliance with European Exchange and Custody laws, WhiteBIT is in the Top 15 crypto exchanges by volume. We are delighted to be working with them!

WhiteBIT is currently working on integrating Arbitrum into its platform, and HDX will be among the first ARB-based tokens added. We will be sure to keep the community posted and provide status updates as this listing moves forward! You can read more about this listing here!

Special thanks to our author Nighcourtfan for writing this article!