Crossing the Rubicon: August Monthly Update
Recap of a busy month for Rubicon! We are live on Optimistic Ethereum!
The Summer of Scaling™ is over and Rubicon is now live on Optimistic Ethereum! Get up to speed on our latest developments, our launch on layer 2, and what is next for Rubicon.
Overview of Layer 2 Scaling
As using Ethereum becomes busier and more expensive, DeFi applications will migrate onto layer 2 (L2) scaling solutions (also called rollups) to achieve low costs and high throughput.
As of writing, a simple swap on Ethereum costs $100. Much has been written about Ethereum gas costs, but in our eyes, there are two main takeaways:
First, despite the outrageous costs, the demand to use Ethereum continues to grow. Spearheaded by DeFi and more recently NFTs, users are collectively paying more than $40 million a day in transaction fees to use the network!
Second, while the growing demand for using Ethereum is a positive sign, these transaction costs are pricing out the majority of potential users. A financial system cannot reach billions of users if it costs $100 for a single trade.
Enter layer 2 scaling. The best and brightest in the Ethereum community have been working on scaling the network for years, and in 2021 we got to see the fruits of their labor on full display. Layer 2 networks are here, and the migration of applications has already begun!
Rubicon on Optimistic Ethereum
Rubicon is at the forefront of this scaling revolution, being one of the first applications to launch on Optimistic Ethereum (OΞ), the layer 2 scaling solution from the Optimism team. On OΞ, traders have >10x gas savings compared to L1 as well as instant trade confirmations. As of writing, you can make ~50 limit orders on Rubicon for the cost of one swap on L1!
But the scaling does not end there. Optimism’s roadmap is full of exciting developments that will lower costs even further and continue improving their developer experience! We look forward to a flourishing DeFi ecosystem on Optimistic Ethereum, supercharged by low fees, lightning-fast transactions, and security in its minimal differences from Ethereum itself!
Rubicon App Upgrade!
This past month our development team was very busy overhauling our web app and enhancing pretty much every feature we have. Time to show off the new and improved Rubicon UI!
Trade
Browse trading pairs, change your quote token, examine the order books, and look through price charts on the Trade page in the Rubicon app.
Currently, the app supports popular trading pairs like ETH/USDC and ETH/DAI. We will continue to add support for more pairs, and ultimately facilitate permissionless markets!
Portfolio
The Portfolio tab is your one-stop-shop for tracking your positions on Optimistic Ethereum. Simple charts to track your trading performance (candlesticks soon!) and a convenient dashboard to see your current holdings. Know that this is just the version for launch, we have big plans for the Portfolio view! Our team plans to add all the graphs and charts you could ever need to analyze your portfolio performance.
Pools
In Rubicon Pools, you can passively earn on your crypto while strategists use your assets to make markets on the Rubicon order books. You can stake your ETH, USDC, DAI, and WBTC in our flagship liquidity pools today and get a share of the yield from high-frequency market making on the Rubicon exchange. Learn more about Rubicon Pools in our most recent blog post!
History
Use the History page to see your past trades on Rubicon, complete with order size and execution price, as well as Optimistic Etherscan links for every trade to see more details. You can also cancel your outstanding limit orders on the History page.
What’s Next for Rubicon?
We are thrilled that Rubicon is live on L2, but our work is just getting started! Here are just a few things to look forward to:
Rubicon is integrating with The Graph so traders and developers can easily fetch order book data from our subgraph. (Thanks to platocrat for the help here!)
Further cementing Rubicon’s place within the Optimism ecosystem; supporting more pairs, more liquidity pools, and integrating with other protocols and applications!
Continuous improvements to Rubicon Pools, all in the name of improving capital efficiency, liquidity utilization, and LP returns
Support for new layer 2 networks! Across the board, layer 2 teams are making fantastic progress, and Q4 2021 will be an exciting time as Ethereum scales
We hope you enjoyed this recap of Rubicon’s busiest month on record! Now, time for us to get back to work.
Join our Community
To keep up with Rubicon, follow us on Twitter, check out our blog, and join our Discord and Telegram communities where you can keep up with our team day-to-day. And if you are inclined to check out the Rubicon protocol yourself, you can review all of our contracts on our Github. You can also reach us at contact@rubicon.finance
Alea iacta est.