Hello Incognito community,
One of the upsides of the bear market is that it’s a good time for builders to focus on fundamentals (aka building infrastructures and products) so let’s sit down together to retrospect things the team has built in the last quarter and then discuss things we will be building in this quarter (Aug - Oct).
Summary of Q2
In the last quarter, the following initiatives have been done:
- Instant finality
- Unified Privacy Tokens
- State Pruning
- Bulletproofs code improvements for faster transaction verification
- Incognito wallet extension (alpha version)
- Incognito web app (alpha version)
- Network Explorer V2
In addition to those, the team tried piloting to build new bridges to two non-EVM blockchains (Solana and Near). It turned out that building bridges to the non-EVM blockchains was viable regardless of the discrepancy of their programming models to EVM-based counterparts.
You could check out the demos of the non-EVM bridges at:
In fact, the bridges’ code was ready for audit (by 3rd security firms) but we’ve decided to delay the audits until after the pEthereum improvements so that we can make the workflow of both EVM and non-EVM bridges consistent as well as achieve faster/more reliable processes and cheaper fees.
Things the team will be focusing on in Q3
In this quarter, we are shifting our focus on Universal Swap - a product that is leveraged by all key capabilities supported by Incognito: privacy, multichain, and interoperability (by allowing cross-chain sending tokens and arbitrary messages).
Speed
There is a foreseeable barrier that might prevent the Universal Swap to be a usable product - the speed, especially in the cross-chain workflow. Therefore, we will be addressing the speed problem first by:
Initiative | Goal | Ship date |
---|---|---|
Instant finality V2 | Reduce unshield & papp swap processing time in Incognito chain from (1 timeslot + 1 oldconfig offset = 48s) to (1 newconfig offset = 10s) | Shipped |
pEthereum improvements | Make interoperability faster, more reliable, and cheaper | Shipped |
Blocktime reduction to 20s | Reduce tx latency that will speed up all Incognito features by up to 50% compared to the current latency | Shipped |
Blocktime reduction to 10s (or 15s depending on the network’s situation) | Keep speeding Incognito features up by up to 75% compared to the current latency | Moved to Q4 |
We expect that once the improvements are released, the refund rate will be significantly reduced as swaps won’t take much time to be executed with the outchains’ DEXs.
More bridges and DEX integrations
More bridges may bring more users and assets from the bridging networks. More DEX integrations may bring more liquidity and cross-chain options for the swap.
Initiative | Goal | Ship date |
---|---|---|
Aurora bridge | Bring more users and assets from the bridging networks to Incognito | Moved to Q4 |
Avalanche bridge | " | Shipped |
Near bridge | " | Shipped |
Solana bridge | " | Pending |
SpookySwap integration (Fantom) | Bring more liquidity and cross-chain options for the swap | Shipped |
Uniswap integration (Ethereum) | " | Shipped |
Trader Joe integration (Avalanche) | " | Shipped |
Trisolaris integration (Aurora) | " | Moved to Q4 |
Raydium integration (Solana) | " | Pending |
Swap aggregator | Find the best rate for swaps that also take fees into account | Moved to Q4 |
Web and mobile apps
The next step is bringing everything we build in the previous sections to end-users via a simple UI/UX on the web and mobile.
Initiative | Goal | Ship date |
---|---|---|
Swap function on the web app (with new pEthereum workflow) | Support the cross-chain swap function on the web | Shipped |
Swap function on the mobile app (with new pEthereum workflow) | Make UX on the mobile app consistent with the web app | Shipped |
Decentralization
Lastly, we always need to keep improving the decentralization of the network.
Initiative | Goal | Ship date |
---|---|---|
Increase committee size to 64 | Reduce fixed node dominance to 34% | Shipped |
A design for decentralizing Beacon chain | Design a protocol and its plan for decentralizing Beacon chain | Shipped |
While we’ve planned to increase the shard committee size to 64 in the last quarter, we changed the plan and prioritized Instant Finality V2 and Blocktime Reduction since both initiatives depend on validators’ operation and block rewards that would conflict with a big change like committee size increase.
Closing thoughts
In the last couple of weeks, the team has regrouped to discuss the goals of the quarter along with initiatives to obtain the goals. Specifically, we came up with two main ones: 1) grow cross-chain swap volume by better usability. 2) grow the number of network validators. But we just presented the technical roadmap here, the growth plan and actions will be updated in the weekly newsletter because they usually depend on product development’s outputs that are subject to change for whatever reason.
As always, the goals will be more challenging without your help, please share your thoughts or concern if any in the comments below.
Thank you!