Hydranet reached yet another longstanding milestone in July. It has only been 3 months since the Lazarus patch was launched publicly, and it is already reaching its EOL phase. Atlas, the next major update of Hydranet DEX, is now live in closed beta testing. Atlas features several major upgrades and overhauls to the DEX, among which are: Arbitrum integration, aETH, and HDX coin pairs, bot trading, and the implementation of Chainlink (and CoinMarketCap) into the pricing API. All this and more will be explained in further detail below!

Website Revamp

Hydranet.ai has been updated! In addition to some rewrites, UI tweaks, and the addition of more content (including a condensed roadmap) on the homepage, the DEX has received its unique page that has been greatly elaborated upon.

Tokenomics Vote for Unclaimed Rewards

There were some disputes within the community about what to do with payouts (i.e. staking rewards or future DEX fee payouts) that go unclaimed for long periods. A variety of ideas were proposed, including burning unclaimed rewards after a fixed amount of time (i.e. 1–2 years), doing nothing, or having the DAO Multisig step in after a fixed amount of time. It was taken to a vote early in the month, and the solution that was settled on following a majority vote is as follows:

Every time rewards need to be claimed, a 1-year time frame will be imposed on the claimant. Every time a reward is claimed by the holder of an HDX wallet, this 1-year clock resets. If a year passes, and incentives have yet to be claimed by the holder of the HDX wallet, the Hydranet Multisig will claim the rewards in their place, convert all reward funds (i.e. aETH) to HDX, and send them back to the holder’s wallet address wholesale. The clock does not reset in this context. If rewards continue to go unclaimed, the DAO will continue converting them into HDX and sending them back to the absentee claimant’s wallet address.

This, we believe, is a secure solution to keep the protocol working at the behest of inactive addresses. In an initial Snapshot vote, the community voted overwhelmingly to preserve and redistribute rewards (approx 91%) rather than burn them (9%). In the following vote, approx. 59% voted in favor of a 1-year clock, edging out a sizable 38% vote for a 3-month clock.

International Community Representatives

The community has offered to step in and assist in translating Hydranet materials and providing support in a multitude of languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish!

Please welcome the following:

Atlas: The Next Major Milestone of Hydranet DEX

Atlas is life in the testgroup! As mentioned previously, Atlas is the first major update to Hydranet DEX since the Lazarus patch that was released publicly near the end of April. The primary goals of the Lazarus build were to unveil a proof-of-concept with working off-chain BTC/ETH swaps, roll out a public build of the DEX that could be used by a wider audience to help stress-test coin swaps on a bigger scale at a higher frequency, and fix bugs (both major and minor) by exclusively using testnet funds.

As was the case with Lazarus, Atlas will only be compatible with testnets and testnet funds. The primary development targets of Atlas are as follows: Arbitrum integration, ARB token coin pairs, a drastic overhaul of the orderbooks and the pricing API, and L2 Active Enhancement (multiple daemons running simultaneously). These features will be implemented into both the DEX and the light wallet.

Impressively, many of these targets have already been hit and many more are close!

Arbitrum Integration

Arbitrum has been successfully integrated into Hydranet DEX and the MCLW, with testnet variants of aETH and HDX (itself based on Arbitrum) as the first coin pairs. Naturally, HDX’s first trading pair on the DEX is aETH.

Orderbook Overhaul

Further work has been done to isolate aETH from ETH in orderbooks, transaction lists, and how gas fees are calculated.

Pricing API

The Hydranet MCLW now utilizes Chainlink as its primary source for current price data, ensuring wallet balances reflect values that are accurate to the minute, with Coinmarketcap serving as a backup.

Off-Chain Swap Upgrades

The hashed timelock timeout has been reduced down to 25 seconds to unlock L2 funds after a failed swap.

L2 Active Enhancement has proven itself to be robust. All trading pairs on Hydranet DEX are now online simultaneously. Switching coin pairs no longer cancel orders, and “inactive” coin pairs no longer require lengthy periods to sync and catch up to the present.

L1 Gas Tokenomics Revamp

Users can now withdraw from a channel to L1 using either their gas or the Hub’s gas. The Hub gas intends to allow a sort of rental for users who have all their funds on Layer 2 and have no gas upfront. This allows traders to withdraw Layer 2 funds back to Layer 1 by essentially paying a fee to rent the gas required to orchestrate the transaction. While gas hub rentals are working, they are a WIP that requires further development.

L2 Protocol Upgrades

The Connext browser node has been updated to the latest version. Additionally, Connext clients are now separated by chains, making it easier for additional chains to be integrated without disrupting what already is up and working.

Automatic reconciliation has also been implemented, allowing Connext channels to stay current automatically as deposits and withdrawals process.

aETH and HDX Testnet Faucets

If anyone is reading this and has developed an interest in joining the Atlas beta tests currently underway, we have implemented faucets for each coin pair to compliment our faucets for tBTC, rETH, tLTC, tUSDT, and tUSDC!

New Roadmap

This month, Hydranet Roadmap Part III was published (read here), extending the project’s vision from the end of Q3 to the end of 2022. Among these targets are the following:

Redesigning Vortex for Open and Easily Accessible Bot Development

Work has long been underway to radically redesign Vortex, Hydranet’s interface for bot trading. The goal is to design an open-ended API that is easily accessible for devs and existing, CEX-like market makers and arbitrage bots that mirror and provide liquidity.

In addition to offering a public API, there are plans to build and implement market maker and arbitrage bots directly into Hydranet MCLW. Everyone who uses the wallet will have instant access to bot trading.

UX Overhaul

Leading up to mainnet, the user experience must be as easy to use and as close to perfection as it can realistically be.

Mainnet (Codename Phoenix)

In classical mythology, the phoenix is an immortal bird that is perpetually reborn, rising from the ashes of its predecessor. There could not be a more aptly-suited codename for Hydranet DEX’s mainnet, which rose with a burning passion from the ashes of the former Stakenet. With a new team, new developers, new project management, and heavy community participation, progress have drastically accelerated and the dream of an instantaneous, low-fee Layer 3 DEX has been revived. What was a smoldering pile of ash has been reborn anew to soar in the sky.

Phoenix is the next stage, and it will mark the debut of mainnet funds and coin pairs on the DEX. In other words, Phoenix will allow for instant, off-chain trades that use real funds and allow several otherwise-incompatible blockchains, like BTC/ETH or BTC/USDT, to interoperate and swap back-and-forth trustlessly. Phoenix will also include mainnet Arbitrum integration, adding multiple tokens to the fourfold while providing HDX holders a definitive exchange focused on permanence.

We are hopeful that the utility of Phoenix — instant, low-fee, off-chain swaps between the biggest coins (BTC, ETH, LTC) — will prove appealing to the wider crypto community in the same way that Lazarus’ and Atlas’ use-case have proven appealing to the HDX community. We look forward to presenting more information and updates on Phoenix as development progresses over the following months. It will undoubtedly be the most exciting stage yet.

If you want to support the development, go here: https://app.hydranet.ai/#/bonds

Special thanks to our author Nighcourtfan for writing this article!

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