Chainflip Development Update — June 20th 2024
Dear readers,
Since our last update, the chainflippers went on a company offsite and spent 3 days among the beautiful lakes of northern Germany. In this type of retreat, we bring everyone together, whether they typically work at the Berlin office or remotely. That way, people get a chance to spend time with colleagues they usually only see on a screen, discussing new features and tricky development problems face-to-face. Of course, it wouldn’t be complete without some good cooking and chess, so we assembled some teams and got our hands (and clothes) dirty. In this particular instance, it was a combination of Daal and dishwashing water…
Progress
Despite the aggressive mosquitoes during the retreat, we made tremendous progress:
- Our block explorer now exposes more information about each swap, including a detailed breakdown of the individual fees and more details about the underlying transactions such as the raw transaction data and the transaction hash
- Until recently, if you wanted to do a swap from your phone, you were greeted with a page stating that swaps are not supported on mobile devices. Although, if you really wanted to, you could simply rotate your phone sideways, because the horizontal layout was wide enough to display the desktop version of the website! But now, we officially support swapping on mobile phones and made sure that the experience is as smooth as on desktop, no matter how you hold your phone.
We are also in the final stages for releasing version 1.4, including cool features like:
- Backwards compatible engines that will allow node operators to just update their engines once a new version is available, without needing to run multiple version in parallel or doing the update at a specific time.
- Boosting of swaps to increase the speed of deposits, particularly in Bitcoin. Simon recently posted a separate article with a detailed explanation of this feature. It will be part of version 1.4, but we don’t plan to enable it immediately to give integrators more time to get ready.
- Support for Arbitrum. After having added USDT in version 1.3, our implementation of Arbitrum is finished and ready to hit swapping in mainnet.
- Affiliate Brokers. This might seem a bit obscure, but is actually highly requested. Basically it will allow Brokers to share their earned fees with third parties who helped them in facilitating a swap.
All of these features are already out on our Perseverance testnet, so feel free to check them out there.
Outlook
We are not the only ones who can convert coffee into quality code — so we decided to launch a Hackathon, inviting other devs to come up with and implement cool new features and integrations with a chance of winning some nice funds from the prize pool. I’m very excited to see what people come up with!
Vibe check
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know that the Chainflip company offsite wasn’t the only instance of a team of professionals travelling through Germany in order to compete in tournaments. I’m of course talking about the UEFA Euro Cup. I had the great fortune of drawing Hungary in our office-raffle. This way the outcome of Wednesday’s HUN-GER game (see what I did there?) didn’t really matter that much to me… But with such an international and diverse team at Chainflip, every game is exciting and the vibe in Berlin and the office is excellent!
Until next time,
Martin