Chainflip Development Update — March 21st 2024

Dear readers of the Chainflip Dev Update,

On Monday the 11th we released the first full version of Chainflip, swap sizes are only limited by the available liquidity. To make that work, we introduced a price impact protection system to prevent users from getting bad prices in low-liquidity situations. We will release a detailed explanation of how this works in our docs soon.

Part of the release was also the beginning of FLIP burning! Every swap across the platform pays a small network fee that is used to purchase FLIP tokens and burn them.

This is my second time as a CTO in crypto to fully launch a product and I am extremely proud of the entire Chainflip team for working hard and being dedicated to deliver uncompromising quality.

Progress

Last week, the “Goerli” testnet for Ethereum stopped producing blocks. It was originally planned to continue operations for another month, but operators must have felt that it is not worth their efforts anymore. Because our “Perseverance” testnet was connected to Goerli, we had to switch over to the new “Sepolia” network, which meant resetting the network.

Similarly, the Ethereum mainnet performed its “Dencun” update. I am happy to report that this had no impact on our systems and swapping remained active and available throughout the update. Shout out to the Ethereum devs and community for making this so smooth.

Outlook

For the upcoming 1.3.0 release, we have a bit of a surprise in store. We are adding support for USDT tokens to the swapping system, allowing for easier integration in case external parties prefer USDT. Either way, USDC will remain the core asset through which all swaps are routed, so you can think of USDT as just another asset supported for swapping.

1.3.0 will also be the last release that requires the somewhat complicated updated procedure where operators need to run two chainflip engines in parallel. After that, updates are going to be much easier and will require a lot less coordination.

Now that our product has fully launched, we have decided to improve our communications around changes to the software. While we have already listed all changes in our changelog as part of the source code, we want to explain upcoming changes in an easier to understand and maybe more interesting format.

Vibe Check

As you can imagine, everyone was pretty nervous about the full launch. Our goal was to make this a bit of a non-event in the sense that the launch itself is just a small step. By having prepared and tested this system thoroughly over the past months, we were able to feel comfortable on the big day. Nevertheless, we decided to celebrate the launch by having a special Chainflip Cocktail Party at the office. For this occasion we created the mystical “Tequila Chainflip” cocktail, which turned out to be very popular.

Of course, we also offered non-alcoholic cocktails, and office attendance rates didn’t noticeably drop on the next day…

Until next time,

Martin