Snapshot of Early Rubicon Users, Pools Upgrades, and New Team Members!
Detailing recent Rubicon upgrades, early Rubicon user snapshot, and new team members
After discovering the Rubicon Pools exploit on October 27th (more details in the official post), our team effectively put Rubicon Pools on pause to limit liquidity risk. During this period, markets were relatively illiquid, and spreads on the exchange were large as we worked on addressing the issues found in the exploit.
While all of this was going on our team has been hard at work over the past few weeks improving all areas of the Rubicon tech stack. Today, along with our launch on OVM 2.0, we are excited to update you on a few of the things our team has been working on:
Upgrading our protocol to protect liquidity providers
Taking a public Snapshot of early Rubicon users
Revamping the Pools market-making strategy
Investing in protocol security and implementing a bug bounty program
Growing our team (apply today!)
Snapshot of Early User Addresses
Part of our mission at Rubicon is to build better, stronger, and more fair financial markets for all.
Rubicon Pools was created out of a desire to fulfill this mission. Pools is a novel and ambitious product that we believe will revolutionize liquidity by removing barriers to entry that give priority to institutions over individuals.
Like any new instrument in DeFi, Pools brings with it the risks, realized and unrealized, of a new system of smart contracts. Even after a months-long period of testing the system on testnet, Pools remains a new mechanism that is being tested in production. In its first implementation, the protocol had flaws that allowed logic to be exploited and ultimately led to substantial losses for liquidity providers.
We are incredibly sorry that some have been financially harmed by actions that occurred on our platform. We have not lived up to the standards that we hold for ourselves. Most importantly, we have not lived up to the expectations that you, our community members, have for us.
While we cannot change what happened, we will do right by our users. You trusted us to build a reliable product, and we breached that trust. We are committed to improving, and we hope that through our actions in response to the exploit, our correspondences with the community, and our continued work going forward, we can demonstrate the value and respect we have for every member of our community and Rubicon user, and work towards restoring the trust in our team.
We wanted to ensure that we have a permanent record of all early Rubicon users before Optimism’s state was wiped in the November 11th network upgrade. On November 9th, we took a snapshot of all the addresses that completed a trade or swap on the exchange and deposited/withdrew from Pools contracts. You can read the file and search for an address on our GitHub here.
If you are a user who interacted with the platform on or before November 9th and cannot find your wallet address in the snapshot please feel free to message us through Discord or by email at contact (at) rubicon (dot) finance.
Protocol Upgrades
We redesigned the rebalance() function to be much smarter than its first implementation. In its initial form, the function naively rebalanced liquidity between the single asset pools after every trade. Now the function gives the strategist the ability to control the quantity that is rebalanced, as well as rebalance when fills are equal on both sides of the book.
What this means is that the new rebalance function cannot be manipulated like the previous one! Instead, the single asset pools will rebalance and realize yield in tandem, as fills equalize on the order books. You can read more about the new rebalance function in our docs.
New Market-Making Strategy
During the last few weeks, we worked hard to completely replace our initial naive market-making strategy with a much more robust one. The new strategy uses an improved liquidity curve, naturally incentivizes fills on both sides of the order book, and increases protections for Pools LPs by tailing off risk from large orders.
Additionally, our new strategist logic will tail-off inventory risk on other trading venues. This immensely helps Rubicon liquidity providers, as the strategist is able to win premiums and pass on yield to the pool LPs. You can read more about the new strategy logic in our docs.
Overall, the new strategy provides greater protection to pool liquidity, enhances the protocol’s ability to react to changing market conditions, and provides deeper liquidity on the order books. If you are interested in contributing to the strategy, join our Discord and send us a message in the #strategists channel!
Investing in Security
Outside of the measures mentioned above, we are continuing to invest in security by partnering with the Immunefi team to establish a Rubicon bug bounty program on their platform. While we are still early in this process, we view this as one of the best long-term approaches to investing in the platform’s security. This bug bounty program will put us on the map for their army of whitehat hackers who will help secure Rubicon smart contracts, protect user liquidity, and get paid to do so.
Bug bounty programs play an important role for any novel smart contract system, and we are happy to be working with the best of the best over at Immunefi. Be on the lookout for an announcement post with full details in the coming weeks!
Growing the Team
Rubicon is looking for new team members to join our mission of bringing decentralized exchange to the masses. You can view all of our open roles on AngelList and apply there, or send a note to contact (at) rubicon (dot) finance and tell us about what you would bring to the team!
We are super excited about our newest team member who joins us today as a full-stack engineer with 10+ years of experience. Additionally, in January we have a Growth Lead and a Junior Web3 Engineer joining our ranks!
Current open roles on the Rubicon team are:
If you fit the description for any of these roles, apply today! With this newest addition, our team is now five strong. We are handing out swords; join the fight and play a role in our journey! ⚔️
Join the Rubicon Community
To keep up with the latest news and updates:
Follow Rubicon on Twitter
Join our Discord community
Check out the Rubicon blog
Subscribe to our newsletter
Review our code on Github
You can also send a note to contact (at) rubicon (dot) finance
Alea iacta est.
Thanks to Denver Baumgartner and Benjamin Hughes for their contributions to this post