Cardax Newsletter: 28/02/22

Howdy fellow Cardaxians,

It has been a dark week on the geopolitical front, the events unfolding in Ukraine have been horrible and sad to witness. As always, the actions of the few rarely speak for the views of the many. 

We, the rest of the world, stand with the people of Ukraine and the majority of Russians who don’t support this invasion.

If you want to do something to help, I urge you to view this tweet and donate some crypto.

Right, now let’s get back to the usual update.

General Cardano Ecosystem Update.

Last week, we have seen Cardano surpass the transaction volume of both Ethereum and XRP. This news further solidifies our decision to make the Cardano blockchain our home and should also do the same for you.

For further reading read this article.

In other news, layer 2 protocol, Milkomedia, have launched an Ethereum to Cardano Bridge on their testnet. 

Things are certainly surging ahead…very exciting times!

Cardax News.

The Cardax Website and Academy

Last week, Derek from our front-end team has been finalising the new version of our website and academy. This week, he will be testing and fine-tuning both, once done, both platforms will offer a much better user experience.

Major Development Milestone Reached

Also last week, our development teams reached a huge milestone.

We were able to complete the first complete user round-trip! 

From the user creating a pool, registering for the pool, submitting an action, the action getting merged and, finally, all merged actions getting executed.

There is obviously a lot of work left to complete in order to make all the puzzle pieces robust and feature complete. 

Nevertheless, we are now able to improve the parts since the full chain is connected.

Audit

Well, the contract has been signed. Tweag audit will start on 28/03/22 and will take approximately 3-5 weeks to complete. The quick-minded ones amongst you will already have realised what this means…

We will have to delay the launch of our DEX, this is something we did everything possible to avoid. It is only right therefore that we explain why the audit has taken so long to arrange and why we have decided to postpone the main net launch.

However, all is not bad, we do have some test net dates for you below.

DEX Launch Delayed.

Key Takeaways:

• Unlike our previous postponements, this is NOT going to be for a full 3 month Quarter.
• The full mainnet launch will be 16/05/2022
• We now have a public testnet launch date, along with a full breakdown of key dates, from now till public maninet launch at the end of this post.

So, why have we postponed the DEX launch?

Well, it is based on the audit and the platform we are building the DEX on.

Firstly, we have always held the stance that we would not launch our DEX until it had been audited. As a DeFi platform, we will be responsible for our users’ money.

This is something that we will never cut corners on.

Why did the Audit take so long to arrange?

Background

When we started the development of the Cardax DEX, we were using the Plutus Tx language but very quickly we realised that if we continued using Plutus Tx, the DEX would suffer from major scalability and transaction throughput issues.

After having lots of discussions with our technical partners, it was decided that they would create Plutarch. Like Plutus Tx, Plutarch is a Haskell language but it achieves 300% more efficient performance.

In simple terms, we found a better way to build the Cardax DEX, that would be much faster to use and not struggle with scalability.

Whilst having to convert all the work we had done to Plutarch was annoying, it was not unforeseen. we think you’ll agree it was the necessary, obvious choice.

So, why has it been delayed again?

Reasons for the Delay

The problem arose, however, that MLabs having created Plutarch, could not be the ones to perform 3rd party audits on platforms using it. This is why we started talks with Tweag. Since Plutarch is very new, Tweag was unfamiliar with it.

In order to agree on a contract with Tweag to audit the Cardax DEX, they had to consult with MLabs to learn and understand Plutarch and decide if they had the capacity to complete our audit.

The majority of the delay has been not due to changing from Plutus Tx to Plutarch but in preparing everything for the Tweag audit.

Items that needed our attention before being able to agree on an audit timescale:

• Refining and adapting the Streaming Merge design to include PAB tools and the creation of a local testnet
• Implementing “Streaming Merge” correctly on-chain.

In the end, all has worked out well and Tweag will be auditing our code and giving us the seal of approval.

This is why we have been forced to postpone our launch.

Key Cardax Launch Dates

• 28/02/22. Commencing this week, We will start testing the functionality of the Cardax DEX on an internal test net.
• 28/03/22. Tweag to start the Audit. 3-5 weeks for completion.
• 12/04/22. Public test net launch.
• 16/05/22. Full public main net Cardax DEX launch.

Thanks for sticking with us, we can’t wait to bring you the best DEX on Cardano.

Speak soon,

Paul and the Cardax Team