Hi Incognito community,
It’s been almost 3 weeks since Privacy V2 - the biggest upgrade of Incognito so far. During the 3 weeks, besides supporting users’ issues post update, working on development stuff, the team also finalized initiatives we can commit to release in the next 3 months. A lesson from development’s delays in the past is that it’s better to only give and commit a plan/timeline for every two or three months since ideas and priority may change over time so a longer plan isn’t ideal for an R&D project like Incognito.
The following are what we will release in August, September, and October 2021:
Portal v4 (shipped)
A trustless Bitcoin bridge to make BTC shielding and unshielding 1) more secure by using multiple multisig wallets generated from beacon validators keys in the network, funds no longer managed by the team’s centralized service, 2) cheaper by allowing multiple unshieldings to execute in a batch and 3) less congestion by replacing out-chain transactions (in Bitcoin network) with higher fees to reduce waiting time.
Slashing v2 (shipped)
With slashing, the network will be able to detect inoperative and misbehaving validators and replace them with better validators. After slashing has been active for some time, this will increase the stability of the network as the network will utilize “healthy” validators. A different thing from slashing v1 is that rewards from slashed nodes will be distributed evenly to remaining validators in a committee.
pDEX v3 (end of Oct)
A new pDEX protocol that will focus on the following improvements: 1) Capital Efficiency with multiplied pricing curve setups. 2) Trading Experience with a hybrid of order-book and automated market-making (AMM) for slippage reduction. 3) Liquidity Mining with competitive rewards for liquidity providers (LPs) on multiple liquidity mining programs.
As for liquidity provision, the most popular method is currently the Provide feature, which is centralized. We’re going to end Provide and replace it with the liquidity mining above that enables you to earn crypto in return for providing liquidity. This will make the pDEX more sustainable and organic in the long term, and remove concerns around trusting the core team with your funds in Provide.
Note: Provide will still be maintained after the new pDEX for some time so that the migration can happen as smoothly as possible.
Mempool v2 (end of Oct)
A new mempool that will help increase throughput for transactions, is one of the most important building blocks for Incognito to reduce block time. Apart from this, the team will also work on performance improvements for bottlenecks in connection, storage as well as data verification. These will be input data for the team to be able to make decisions on block time reduction in the next quarter.
Staking flow v3 (shipped)
In staking flow v3, we introduce a new phase for staking flow called Sync pool. A node will get into the pool and wait in there until finishing sync prior to entering a pending committee queue, this will help mitigate for the node from slashing by missing votes because its data is not up to date. Besides, the team still continues researching for the new protocols with the goal of making the network more resilient.
That’s it for the development side in this quarter. In regards to the growth side, we’re seeking a couple of community managers who will help increase user engagement first and will push more effort on new user acquisition after pDEX v3 where users have a real utility for funds deposited in Incognito.
We’re really excited about the next steps after Privacy v2, hope you will too.
P/S: we will keep updating links for initiatives in the topic.
Cheers and thanks for your support!