Highlights
- Transitioning to NowNodes has cut monthly infrastructure costs by approximately $5K USD. This trend is expected to continue as we scale back our footprint and migrate additional chains, potentially saving over $10K per month and freeing up approximately 20 engineering hours weekly.
- The workstream is in the final stages of vetting a new potential full time contributor who would begin work in May
Lowlights
- None
Last Month
In April, the team continued our focus on Thorchain as a critical component of our offerings. Early in the month, we added volume and liquidity charts to the Thorchain LP experience, which was the final remaining task from the LP launch in March. Additionally, we invested time into several internal improvements within our Thorchain functionality. We added memos to all app-generated Thorchain transactions to better troubleshoot user issues and consolidated all of the transaction generation logic. We also added a reusable warning component for when users are taking risky actions across the app. With Thorchain lending, we fixed a variety of small paper cuts with user approvals, payback quote errors, and confusing copy when attempting to fully repay a loan.
The team completed the initial build-out of the solidity-based smart contracts for rFOX. This work included the creation of a large suite of unit tests using Foundry and a proof of concept implementation of a script to help with distributions of RUNE rewards based on staking balances. The smart contract interface was used to inform several conversations with the product workstream to mock out user flows in figma. We also started work on an enhanced user experience for handling multiple accounts within the application for wallets that support more than one account (ledger, native, etc).
Throughout the month, the team also addressed a number of smaller bug fixes related to issues when no EVM wallet is available, FOXy, and LiFi multihop trades. Work was also started on the ability to swap from a thorchain supported asset directly into an arbitrary erc20 (“long tail swap”) that isn’t directly supported by thorchain. The mobile application also received a number of improvements with the ability to now add assets to a watchlist, a new mobile friendly navigation bar and an explore page.
On the infrastructure side, we have identified a potential solution to gnosis Blockbook instability that should help to reduce downtime experienced with that chain and should potentially be applicable to other high volume EVMs in the future. We also put in place a SOP for falling back to our remaining self-host infrastructure on “tier-1” chains or occasions when NowNodes services are unavailable.
This Month
The team currently has 3 features in-flight that will remain our priorities over the month of May: enhanced multi-account support, rFOX, and full Base support. The enhanced multi-account support work should wrap up and be released early in the month. For rFOX, the team will focus on moving the smart contracts to audit, finalizing the accounting scripts needed for distribution of RUNE to stakers, and the build out of the user interface in the app to interact with the contracts. With audit lead time and resolving any fixes to issues identified, we expect to see a release of this feature in June.
For Base, we currently have a fully synced node up and running and are now syncing a Blockbook instance as well for access to indexed data. While Blockbook continues to sync over the coming weeks, we will take on the (minimal) work for adding Base to the UI and coordinate with Operations on testing ahead of a release. Eventually, we hope to transition the Base infrastructure to NowNodes as well.
Additionally, we expect to cutover from our self-hosted Cosmos node to a dedicated NowNodes instance the week of May 6. We are also transitioning the proxy service for accessing market data from the Foundation-owned accounts to remove the last remaining dependency on the Foundation-owned AWS account. The team is also experimenting with Sentry to more easily root cause issues reported by users to operations. Finally, if all goes well, we will spend time onboarding a new engineer to the team in the second half of the month.