Reflections on the new App

It really depends on if you think 1750 prv is really that much of a hurdle to begin with.

Maybe a side point but my thoughts are is that the biggest thing right now that will drive value is building as many bridges as they can and attracting as much liquidity as possible. Especially because the pdex has only just been revised. Having circa 2.5m liquidity within the app is start up phase. Got to expand that significantly.

Validating already is very profitable as it stands and with a way lower barrier than it was only 6 to 8 months ago. Just a lot people aren’t aware of of how good being a validator is outside those that follow the project closely, especially after the pnode production ceased. Finally validators may elect to reinvest in nodes while the yield is very high. Doing so doesn’t necessarily drive trading activity and usage of the app.

I know the original topic was more centred on decentralization and privacy infrastructure can be marketed to get people drawn into the ecosystem.

I guess I’m pointing out that value creation i.e growth may be a more important issue to tackle.

More generally decentralization is important but growth can be the mechanism that gets the project there. Decentralization relies on a thriving community with several contributors. It’s currently too small IMO to really be self sustaining. A bit of a side track, my son is depriving me of some much needed zzz

3 Likes

Not a bad idea to lower the threshold as a kind of promotional, limited time offer kind of thing to get node ownership up.
Half might be extreme. But even down to 1,250 would be significant and drive ownership up.

Yikes! In my personal opinion, the only way to do that would be to go through a “hard fork” like situation. The 1750 PRV was something set in stone from the beginning of Incognito’s creation. To change that now (even for a short duration for promotion reasons) would be like the team saying instead of the originally decided hard cap of 100M PRV we decided to raise that to 150M PRV. This would devalue PRV and have everlasting negative impacts on Incognito as a whole.

The top 10 “masternodes” or nodes by price are all well above the 1750 PRV amount (cost to run 1 node on right-hand column):

2022-01-18 15_39_26-MasterNodes.Online - Brave
Side note - Looks like Incognito is not listed on that site. Going to have the growth team work on getting Incognito listed there.

If we sort the list based on the number of nodes, then Incognito’s network is actually #18 on the list. In my opinion, we are doing very well with how many nodes we currently have in our network.

I agree. Lowering the amount of PRV needed to run a node (even for a small-time period) would hurt all the node operators who required 1750 PRV to stake due to having to compete with more nodes for earnings.

This would cause a horrible “run on the bank”. Users would be un-staking in mass to re-stake more nodes.

3 Likes

Good points raised.

I think perhaps maybe one of the bigger considerations as part of the Growth plan is revitalising the marketing of the validator function under the pillar of Privacy Infrastructure. People outside of the forum really don’t understand how easy it is to become a validator and the support offered to run your own vnode. I can attest to this as I am a complete noob - I didn’t know what docker even was let alone never ever had to run powershell on a windows comp for anything.

If you say to people hey you can get an awesome yield of X by being one, the feedback tends to be one of immediate cynicism without understanding what drives profitability are driven by the emission curve, no. of active nodes, prv price, server costs etc.

2 Likes

@SPAddict25,

That is a good idea. We recently made it possible to set-up a vNode in 1 line of code. This significantly lowers the bar of entry for new users.

I can tweet about the eaze of setting up and running an Incognito node and the expected ROI.

3 Likes

Haha, when I read this I can totally relate to it :smiley:

I was in a similar position and never installed Ubuntu until delving into this project. Without the help of many in this community forum I would not have been able to do the following: Step-By-Step: How I built a Virtual Node on World's Smallest Mini PC

@Jared - I think it would be awesome if you can Tweet out just how easy it is to setup and run a vNode and also show the potential returns. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook so I can’t really assist in spreading the word. However, I do try to promote my post showcasing how a Linux newbie (like me) can run a vNode by sharing my post (see link above) on this forum wherever I can in the hope it gets the attention of new visitors to the forum.

I strongly feel that we need more growth in vNodes to improve decentralization.

4 Likes

Some feedback on the New App for the Dev Team.

  1. Please allows us to manually “Check for Updates” from within the app.
    When I leave the app open on my phone, I’m not always sure I’m running the latest version. It’s only when things stop working or my wallet screen times out, then I shut down the app and re-open it to see the “Updating app” message appear.
    Suggestion: Under the “More” --> “Settings” area in the app, have a button above the “Version Number” right at the bottom that allows us to “Check for updates”.

  2. Provide an easy way to submit Feedback / Bugs inside the app
    Suggestion: Under the “More” section in the app, provide an icon option for “Provide Feedback / Bugs” that links to a very simple form within the app that allow users to submit feedback and bugs. this information is emailed to the Incognito Core Dev/UX team.

4 Likes

Your post was actually an inspiration for me when I started, thank you for that.

My first node was setup on a virtual server, but after reading your post, I decided to throw it away and put vNodes on an old Mac mini I had. Funny thing is that many many nodes later, second hand Mac mini from 2012 is still my choice of hardware. :relaxed:

3 Likes

Hey @SPAddict25, @Linnovations and anybody else who were curious about Benefits of increasing committee size, please have a look at the topic, we collected questions along with their answers in a topic for easier reference, thanks.

@Mike_Despo wallet name’s font size was decreased to see more characters, it’s not perfect but easier to see now. Texts for bottom tabs also showed. We are still working app performance, FYI.

7 Likes

The text for the bottom tabs looks great. Way easier to navigate now, especially for new guys. There’s also enough characters now in the wallet names that I can differentiate between each of my wallets when opened.

Thanks for the changes!

3 Likes

Hey @duc and Dev Team, I second @Mike_Despo comment above. The text under the icons is MUCH better from a user experience point of view. Also, thanks for adjusting the Wallet Name button at the top right. I had the same issue as Mike_Despo, but now with the latest update it’s better.

I really love the fact that the dev/UX team are very responsive to feedback. I am so glad to be part of this project and supporting it’s growth.

I just saved up enough PRV to deploy an additional vNode, so I’m super excited by that. The script and instructions that @Rocky put together here - How to setup your own node in a blink of an eye (Now support multi-nodes per host) is AMAZING. It was super easy (even for a Linux Noob like me) to add a vNode. I didn’t even have to shut down docker to mess around with opening ports etc… Thank you Rocky!

3 Likes

It seems that the default slippage on pPancakeSwap should match that of the original PancakeSwap: 0,5%. Otherwise people are always shown worse rates compared to PancakeSwap. The last user-selected slippage should probably also be remembered and the currently chosen selection displayed along with the other key info (balance, rate, trade path, price impact and fee), rather than accessible only from a the hard-to-see dropdown menu “advanced”.

1 Like

Noted, will discuss this with the team.

The slippage (and price impact too) term is a bit advance that requires users to understand how the trading mechanism works. Yes, PancakeSwap users would be familiar with this but not sure how others feel, let’s get more feedback from other users too. Do you guys think slippage should be moved out of the “advanced” section?

1 Like

I really like the recent changes with displaying rate, path, and price impact on the swap page. Good job! :+1:

I noticed that the rate when trading PRV to BTC is truncated to 5 decimals. Right now it’s telling me that 1 PRV = 0.00001 BTC which is quite a large rounding error (48%!), as the current swap rate is 0.000019348.

How about extending the display based on digit precision instead of just the number of decimals? I think you already have some logic for this because trading the other way from BTC to PRV, you show it as 50620.52 with only two decimals. This gives us 7 digit precision when trading to PRV, but only 1 digit precision when trading to BTC.

I personally think 5 digits precision would be enough (only accounting for decimals, not rounding integer numbers). PRV/BTC could be 1 BTC = 50620 PRV and BTC/PRV either 1 PRV = 0.000019348 BTC or multiplied in 1e3 multiples 1000 PRV = 0.019348 BTC

2 Likes

Hello Incognito Team,
I’m really enjoying the new app and it seems to be getting better and better, well done!

Here is a User Experience improvement / idea:
This idea makes it super easier to “Provide” more coins to a pool.
When I’m inside a particular coin wallet (E.g. XMR) when I click the 3 dots menu (top right) I’m presented with 2 options:

  1. “Receive”
  2. “Send”

My idea would be to include a 3rd button “Provide” and by clicking on this button, the user is jumped across to the “Provide more” screen for XMR were the user can enter the amount they wish to provide to the pool. This removed many taps and steps and makes it super easy.

Thoughts anyone?

Not sure if it’s just me but the mobile app is just getting worse and worse. I took a 2 month break from incognito and I opened the app this morning and after a few minutes of usage my feeling was “wow this is bad”. Here’s a few things that contributed to that feeling:

  • EXTREMELY slow and laggy, even on newest iOS/iPhone. Switching tabs takes 2s+, clicking has a huge delay, switching keychains took 10s+ in some cases! Luckily I automated most actions with the incognito-cli and don’t have to use the app day-to-day, but I feel sad for new users that have to.
  • Where’s the liquidity? Limit order books (buy/sell) are empty so can’t use them. I can’t even swap $10k without 3-5% slippage, I thought pDEX v3 was supposed to improve things, now we have higher slippage and huge fees.
  • Can we please show pools liquidity on trades! Let’s not mention the horrible confusion between buy/sell/swap, but at least show pool sizes so people don’t lose money due to slippage.

Honestly the old app was much faster, more straightforward for newcomers, less clutter/simpler, trading UX was better, switching keychains was fast etc. If users have to manage more than 10 nodes/keychains it’s impossible without the incognito-cli.

1 Like

It took a bit of getting used to for sure. The transfer from one account to another is not instant. It takes sometimes 20 sec or more. That would frighten 1st time users. One has to understand the account does not update until the transactions are verified, and that is never instant. This project is continually evolving and improving so change is necessary but not often a welcome experience. I have found that in app transfers and swaps post quicker. Still there is that gap time from committing trades/transfers to posting in account. Maybe a “verifying on chain” note over the balance being effected would help.

2 Likes

Definitely appreciate these adjustments.

I would like to add my support to the issues raised about the UI and confusion/ease of use.

The buy/sell screens would be greatly improved if the main 3 fields could all be edited:

  • Quantity (base currency)
  • Price (counter-currency)
  • Total (counter-currency)

…and the user could just enter the two pieces of information they preferred, and the third would be calculated automatically. So for BTC/USDT, something like this:

order window

And that layout would be the same regardless of buy or sell being selected.

As it is right now, only the quantity (called Amount in the app) and limit price can be entered. This means that on the buy screen, you have to either do your own calculation or keep testing different Amount values until the quantity of counter-currency you’re trying to spend gets displayed in the “Total” field.

It would be much easier if that field could be edited like the other two.

1 Like

Is it just me, or did the app get even slower over the weekend?

@adrian @drusin @Mike_Despo and others who had a bad experience (app unresponsive and laggy), sorry again for that. With the latest app release (v5.1.2), the app should feel more snappy and responsive. However, there is still room for improvement, we keep improving it and make it better in the next releases.

4 Likes