Crossing the Rubicon: June Monthly Update
Better late than never! Recap of our testnet trading competition, some more launch details, and general updates from the Rubicon Team.
Happy Summer of Scaling™! The month of July was named after Julius Caesar, making it the perfect month for Rubicon to share some good news. Continue reading to see the awesome progress we made in June, why we are optimistic about a July launch date and learn everything you need to know before Rubicon is on mainnet!
Development Update
Our internal motto for the month of June was “heads down”, trying to emulate Formula 1 drivers when they are locked in.
This mentality paid off, as June was the most productive month in Rubicon’s short history!
As per usual, we spent much of the month obsessing over our user experience and overhauling the Rubicon app, adding new features, and squashing some bugs. In the name of continuous improvement, throughout June we sought user feedback from our friends, families, and strangers alike! As is always the case, we learned a lot from our users.
Our team started to rework some aspects of our Portfolio view, hearing that users wanted an entirely separate page dedicated to their Portfolio with charts, stats, graphs, etc. breaking down their holdings. The future of both Rubicon and DeFi is multichain, so we added support for users to view their portfolios across multiple networks. Rubicon is launching first only on Optimism, but once the protocol is live on multiple layer 2s you will have the ability to one-click switch to your portfolio on other networks.
Speaking of switching networks, we added support for Optimism Gateway, the official Optimism bridge, into the Rubicon app!
Bridging assets from Ethereum mainnet to Optimistic Ethereum takes a few minutes to finalize, but the bridge has no fees aside from gas. Alternatively, you can use a general token bridge like Hop, which offers near-instant cross-layer transfers, but charges a fee for their services. Ultimately the choice will be yours, a cheaper bridge with a short wait or a more expensive one with no wait, but for now, the Rubicon app will default to Optimism Gateway as a bridge.
Friendly reminder that withdrawals from Optimism have a wait time of 1 week! This window exists to keep your funds safe. More info on this delay can be found in Optimism’s FAQ.
We also reworked our Trade view and refreshed the tokens listed on our testnet app in anticipation of our trading competition. This new list more accurately reflects the crypto assets our app will support for our Optimism launch, although it is not comprehensive or exact.
As we mentioned in our last update, Optimism integrating Etherscan as an ecosystem partner was a massive boost for our History view. The support from the industry-leading block explorer means the Optimism network will benefit from the same level of transparency that Etherscan brings to Ethereum! It also means Rubicon users will have a great place to view their transaction details and browse the activity of this layer 2 network.
And last but certainly not least, we designed, built, and shipped the first interface for Rubicon Pools! As with most of our app, there are still a few tweaks on the Pools UI we want to make before launch, but users can already deposit and/or withdraw assets, as well as receive and/or redeem bath tokens all on the Rubicon app now!
We made our June development progress with a single future goal in mind, deliver a production-ready app for the Rubicon testnet trading competition in the first week of July!
Testnet Trading Competition
A few weeks ago we announced the details of a testnet trading competition on the Rubicon app, with 600 USDC in prizes for the top traders. And just a few days after that announcement, we had to push the competition back a week because of Optimism Kovan upgrades.
We are happy to say that the contest was a massive success! But rather than telling you all about it, we think showing some highlights from our Discord community is the best way to tell the story:
If I had to describe our testnet traders in one word, it would be bullish. They had absolutely no love for the sell button and did their best to pump every token on the app, even if prices were plummeting. So really our testnet was just a microcosm of real crypto markets.
It did not take much investigating to find that a large portion of contest participants threw everything they had into pumping RGT. And yet the Rari conspirators did not win any prizes, which is honestly a complete failure on their part.
All jokes aside, the competition was a massive success because we got great feedback on the Rubicon app. We found some new bugs, saw some areas where we can improve our trading experience, got to see Rubicon Pools in action, and we had fun along the way. That’s all you can ask for. Thank you to all of our community members who participated, and congrats to the winners!
Looking Forward to Launch
One of the best things that happened in June was the progress made by the Optimism team. Under the constant pressure of the outside world asking “wen layer 2”, the Optimists were able to tune out the noise and make great strides towards their open mainnet launch. This progress led to their team revealing that both Uniswap and Synthetix would be able to deploy their contracts on mainnet in July. This is great news because regardless of Rubicon needing to wait for an open mainnet or getting whitelisted, that means Optimism mainnet is right around the corner and they feel comfortable with the system handling some of the biggest DeFi incumbents.
We are excited to see what the rest of July has in store for Rubicon, and we are optimistic that we will be able to launch on Optimism towards the end of the month. We will make sure to update our social channels in the event we get more clarity and are able to set hard dates for launch.
In other news, we are hiring! If you want to join a team working on the cutting edge of decentralized finance, check out our new Jobs page. You can follow Rubicon 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.