Crossing the Rubicon: March Development Update
Development updates and the latest news from the Rubicon team.
Happy April everyone! Like most months in the crypto world, March brought us a mix of both joy and chaos. Let us catch you up to speed on Rubicon development.
Before we get into the update, make sure to go to our website and join our waitlist so you get early access to Rubicon when we launch!
Rubicon Roadmap
Starting from the top, maybe the most important Rubicon development update comes from outside our team. This week the Optimism team decided to adjust the timeline for their mainnet launch. Their new plan will see whitelisted projects launch on a permissioned Optimism mainnet so they can gather data, push fixes, and ensure that they are ready for an open mainnet release. Their current estimate for a fully open mainnet is July.
Obviously, this adjusts the Rubicon launch timeline. Optimism is our layer 2 solution of choice; we believe they will be a leader in scaling Ethereum this year and beyond. For developers, Optimism offers the advantage of mapping 1:1 with the EVM, so existing applications built on Ethereum require very little work to deploy on Optimism. For users, Optimism keeps composability within the Ethereum ecosystem. Many of the leading DeFi projects like Synthetix, Uniswap, and MakerDAO have already announced their plans to integrate with and build tools for Optimism. With the network effects of having the leading projects and the advantage of being the easiest layer 2 solution for developers, Rubicon still has all the confidence in the world in the Optimism team.
The delays were not what we were hoping for, but we understand that when you are building a system as crucial as Optimism, there is no room for error upon launching. It is much more comparable to launching a rocket than launching a software application, you literally cannot afford for something to go wrong!
As far as what Rubicon can control, early this month we will be fully deployed on Optimism’s Kovan testnet, and soon after that means we will be fully ready for launching on Optimism’s mainnet. The delays also give us some more time to get our entire protocol architecture audited and our user experience refined.
Admittedly, the Optimism delay makes it difficult for us to put a hard date on the Rubicon launch. In the meantime, we will continue to iterate and improve our product, so whether we are whitelisted to launch on Optimism early, or we must wait until July we are fully ready to launch the best decentralized exchange the world has ever seen.
Development Update
The month of March was busy for Rubicon development. Firstly and most importantly, we built and began internally testing our native liquidity and yield farming solution, Rubicon Pools. This functionality allows users to deposit their assets into liquidity pools that earn yield while providing liquidity on Rubicon’s exchange. More specifically, user liquidity is used to perform high-frequency market-making on our open order book. Passing on market-making yield to users in a permission-less fashion is something completely novel to existing open order book protocols and we are very excited to continue its development.
On the web application front, a number of changes have been made to improve our user experience. Firstly, there are new assets on the Kovan testnet for users to try out. Moreover, we are hard at work fixing the remaining bugs on our L1 Kovan implementation. In the month of April, we will be porting the application and protocol from the slow and cumbersome Layer 1 environment to an Optimism-powered testnet - that will be a very exciting development and one of the last remaining steps before a mainnet launch. This will provide users with a 100x throughput increase and a large boost to ease of use. Also, an exciting development on the web application front is the growing interest in our pre-launch product: there are now over 1,500+ signups on our waitlist!
Another crucial piece of the development puzzle for Rubicon is our most important asset: our team. We are working hard to recruit new talent and bring on our first full-time hires to Rubicon. We have postings live on AngelList and CryptoJobsList.com where we hope to bring on a Senior Engineer in the month of April. As we continue to grow, scale, and meet market demand, it will be a continued focus for us to make sure we are bringing in talented individuals that believe in our core mission and vision. We are excited to announce any new team members that join this month on our social media channels as well as our next monthly update!
Rubicon Team
We are excited that soon we will finally get to show the world what we have been building. The best way to keep up with us is on social media. To stay updated before launch, follow us on Twitter, check out our blog, join our Discord server, and Telegram 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.