Crossing the Rubicon: Devcember Monthly Update
The secret is out, we are working on Rubicon's biggest upgrade ever. App Upgrades, new API, new v1 protocol, and more L2s coming soon!
Happy 2022 from the Rubicon team! We are fully embracing #L222, as we join others in the Ethereum community predicting that layer 2 (L2) scaling will be a dominant narrative in crypto this year. Dapps like Rubicon would not be possible without the reduced transaction fees and fast confirmations that L2s bring to Ethereum! Let’s recap our progress last year in 2021.
(I regret to inform our Substack Readers that the beautiful Roman painting we selected for this issue is too large for Substack. We could either cut sections from our most important monthly update ever or cut the cover image. You can view this post on our blog in all its intended beauty.)
2021 in Review
We built a lot, we learned a lot. In 2021, Rubicon went from an idea on a whiteboard in January to one of the first protocols live on Optimism in September. Since launching on Optimism we have been met with open arms by the DeFi community. To date, 8000+ unique users have used the Rubicon protocol to facilitate over $8 million in trading volume over just seven trading pairs.
In addition to the growth of our product, we saw our community reaching over 1,500+ members in our Discord, whose feedback has directly shaped the Rubicon platform into what it is today! Rubicon is building Ethereum’s Order Book Protocol, and it would not be where it is today without the support of so many amazing people across the world who believe in our mission of opening, democratizing, and accelerating financial markets.
To better meet the needs of Rubicon users, our team had to grow. We went out and hired some of the brightest minds in DeFi to help bring the Rubicon Protocol into its next phase of growth. Our team has grown from two founders in January to a full-time team of eight in December (nine by the end of this month!).
Rubicon is building an order book exchange protocol for Ethereum, which to us means building an order book exchange protocol for the entire world! We learned a lot about our system in its first implementation. We learned what it did well, and what it needed to do better. So in December, or rather, Devcember, we broke out our whiteboards once again, and started outlining what future versions of Rubicon needed to look like. We needed to take Rubicon from its proof-of-concept v0 to an improved and scalable v1.
Scaling to Infinity (and Beyond)
We have hinted that we are working on something big for some time now, and now it is time for us to stop keeping secrets. Our team has spent the last month heads down completely revamping our product, including a simplified Trade UI, a new open API, and a reworked Rubicon protocol that will be the first permissionless order book exchange ever!
Rubicon App Redesign
We simplified our Trade UI to make it easier to place limit and market orders as well as track your open orders. We got super helpful feedback from our Discord community on early mockups of the redesign, and are now in the final stages of stress testing the new layout across different screen sizes. Expect to see the new UI in the coming days!
New Open API
Our team is building a new Rubicon API using subgraphs! The Graph is the leader in indexing and querying blockchain data for decentralized applications, and we are excited to deprecate custom servers and use their open APIs to enhance our level of decentralization.
Going forward, the Rubicon app will use these new subgraphs to fetch historical data and the user’s web3 connection to populate real-time data. This way we can completely remove a point of failure for our app and rely only on the blockchain.
A dedicated post with more details on the API and developer documentation outlining specs are coming soon so stay tuned.
Protocol: Rubicon v0 -> Rubicon v1
Rubicon v0 is the current and first form of our protocol. It includes a fully on-chain order book exchange for ERC20 tokens (RubiconMarket.sol) and Rubicon Pools, a system of smart contracts that enable passive liquidity providing and active liquidity management on the order book exchange. While the exchange works with any arbitrary ERC20 token, in v0 Rubicon Pools was not permissionless, and relied on our team to create new liquidity pools. We knew this did not scale, but while our system was young we thought it was best to maintain control over pool creation.
Rubicon v1 is the natural next step for the protocol. This new version brings permissionless order books as well as permissionless liquidity pools and was built to scale alongside the Rubicon subgraph APIs. Anyone can create a liquidity pool for any token in Rubicon Pools!
Order books are critical DeFi infrastructure, and we cannot wait to see what people build on Rubicon v1! If you want to bring L2 liquidity to your token/project/DAO, join our Discord and reach out to our team, let’s talk.
Also, v1 is going multichain and will be deployed on multiple L2s… but that is an announcement for another day.
You can expect a full Rubicon v1 whitepaper soon outlining inspiration, specifications, and our ambitions for Ethereum’s new order book protocol!
Join the Rubicon Community
Thanks for reading! To keep up with the latest Rubicon news and updates:
Follow Rubicon on Twitter
Join our Discord community
Check out the Rubicon blog
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter
Review our code on Github
You can also send a note to contact (at) rubicon (dot) finance
Alea iacta est.
very gooooooooood