Highlights
- In February ’24 Rune affiliate fees were up 287% MOM from January ‘24 representing the fourth straight month of 200+% growth.
- We have now fully migrated backend infrastructure for the following chains to leverage NowNodes: Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Avalanche, BSC, Polygon, and Arbirtrum. This has allowed us to scale back the number of replicas for our self hosted infrastructure, leaving only minimal redundancies while we continue to monitor the performance of NowNodes.
- Released support for the Arbitrum Nova blockchain in production, completing the engineering requirements for the DAO to receive 12,500 USD in grant funding
Lowlights
- There have been very few (<10) applicants for the open Engineering Workstream Leader role and the DAO may find itself in an increasingly challenging position as the bull market continues to consume engineering talent in the space.
- 27 bug tickets were created in the month of February (compared to 17 in January) and 4 production issues were encountered, quantifiable evidence that a growing number of users are encountering issues with the application. These numbers highlight our need to better validate our changes and expand our testing during releases.
- The size and capacity of the engineering team is a growing concern as usage of the app increases combined with a packed roadmap from product and prioritization of new features from the community (rFOX).
Last Month
Work completed in the last month largely focused on a few primary areas: Thorchain LP support, triaging production issues, and bug fixes. We are excited to introduce what we believe to be a best in class Thorchain LP experience. This implementation was technically complex as well as novel adding significant development time compared to some of our other similar integrations. This complexity carries additional risks and we have allocated cycles to thorough peer reviews in order to mitigate these concerns. Thorchain LP is now code complete and being thoroughly tested internally prior to enabling the feature flag in production.
The production issues encountered during the month caused a variety of interruptions to users. 3 of them were related to recent code changes introduced to production and 1 due to stale ethereum nodes from our new infrastructure provider. Users have also continued to raise concerns about the latency of the application, in response we kicked off research to reduce the load times for wallets with medium to large transaction histories and asset counts and created proof-of-concept implementations that we expect to productionalize in the coming weeks.
Other notable work this month included improvements to the transaction history views, re-introducing EIP-1559 support to the swapper, and the addition of WalletConnect into the mobile application.
This Month
Our priorities for the coming month are focused around the following areas: coordinating with operations for a smooth roll out of the Thorchain LP functionality (ETA week of 3/11), performance improvements for users with medium to large transaction histories and assets, and assessing our current testing practices to determine how we can better validate changes and reduce the number of bugs reaching production environments. We have broken down work for adding Limit Order functionality to the swapper and plan to take that on as the next large feature.
We will continue to make progress with our cutover to NowNodes and are in the process of contract negotiations for a dedicated Cosmos node. While we have seen some cause for concern with recent stale blocks persisting for 7+ hours in their production ETH nodes, we still believe this is currently our best option to reduce our infrastructure and operations costs. By early April, we hope to have the needed confidence in NowNodes to fully descale some of the less critical coinstacks and gradually transition to removing all of our self hosted redundancies.