Crossing the Rubicon: Monthly Update #3
What a busy month! Let us catch you up on Rubicon news and developments.
The Rubicon team wishes you all a happy March. Life moves fast in the crypto world, and we are more excited than ever to share our progress with you. Let’s get into it.
Rubicon Launch Waitlist
First and maybe most importantly, we launched the waitlist for Rubicon beta access as we prepare for our Layer 2, mainnet launch. In just two weeks we reached 500+ signups, so make sure to grab your spot soon! Waitlisted users get exclusive access to Rubicon once we are ready to launch later this month. If you have not yet joined, go to our website, click the “Join the Waitlist” button, and drop us your email so we can get you early access.
Rubicon and Optimism
In case you missed it, this past month our team announced that building on Optimism’s layer 2 solution is the best way for us to scale Ethereum and provide an excellent user experience. With existing DeFi applications at less than a million users in total, we need to focus on what the current hurdles are for mass adoption. Perhaps the largest barrier keeping new users from entering the DeFi ecosystem is current Ethereum transaction fees. We want to build a better financial system, and $50 fees on a single trade are not how we can show regular people that finance on blockchains represents a big improvement over existing infrastructure.
Thankfully brilliant people like the Optimism team have been working on this scaling issue for years now, and they are set to launch on Ethereum mainnet this month! We are incredibly excited for the Rubicon protocol to be live on layer 2 - we are targeting a full launch later this month and will notify those on our waitlist first. Our team believes that the launch of Optimism could represent the most important change to the Ethereum ecosystem in a long time, with transactions on the world’s most popular blockchain costing only cents to use and taking milliseconds (a stark contrast to the slower more expensive transactions of Layer 1 Ethereum today).
As of writing, we are still finishing our integration of the Rubicon protocol smart contracts with the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM). We have enjoyed developing alongside the Optimism team in their Discord and have found them extremely helpful with all of our questions. If you are building in DeFi, we highly recommend you consider implementing your project on Optimism!
Development and Recruiting
This past month the majority of our time and energy was spent modifying our smart contracts to be layer 2 compatible for the upcoming Optimism release. With our core protocol almost production-ready, we will start to spend time on the last few items we need before launch.
One of our main focuses is putting the final touches on the Rubicon app so users can seamlessly interact with layer 2. This includes integrating a fiat on-ramp from Ramp so users can purchase crypto on Rubicon straight from their bank account, adding support for more wallets so more users can use Rubicon upon launch, and a number of final optimizations before we go live.
As we get closer to launch, we want to grow the Rubicon team so we can scale quickly and continue improving our offerings. We are hiring for full-time positions as well as introducing an open token bounty program for contributors to our protocol. If you want to learn how you can get involved with Rubicon, check out our Call to Arms blog post for more details, or reach out to us at contact@rubicon.finance and let us know how you want to help!
Liquidity on Rubicon
In addition to our layer 2 efforts going into launch, the Rubicon team has been examining one of our biggest issues with launching an exchange: liquidity. Order book exchanges do not have simple liquidity providing solutions like AMMs, and often require professional firms to build out the depth of the order books. We set out to find a way to democratize market making in the same way that AMMs do while retaining the order book structure for optimal capital efficiency.
Ultimately this led us to create Rubicon Pools, a liquidity providing system that allows users to deposit their assets and automatically win spreads and earn yield, just like traditional market makers. Users can deposit custom amounts of each asset in the pair into the pool, so they can always rebalance their position based on market conditions and preference. Rubicon Pools’ placement of orders follows the Stoikov optimal market-making model.
We are still developing Rubicon Pools, and believe that the project could provide great yields to liquidity providers while building out the Rubicon order books. If this project sounds interesting to you and you want to get involved, do not be afraid to reach out, we would love to hear from you!
Rubicon Launch
Our team is aiming to launch our waitlisted beta on layer 2 in late March. We will provide more details about exact dates soon, but for now, it is important to remember that our initial launch will only be available to people on the waitlist. Make sure to join the waitlist on our website if you have not already. To keep up with us before launch, follow us on Twitter, check out our blog, and 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.