The testnet is now live at https://testnet.minswap.org! We look forward to receiving your feedback and integrating your suggestions!

As we promised in our earlier article, we want to update you on the details of how to qualify for rewards from the testnet. But, we would like to point out that the testnet will last a few weeks, so there is plenty of time for you to use it and provide feedback on the Google Form. The form will be closed in 2 weeks, and we will inform you well in advance of its closing. While the testnet will last more than 2 weeks, in order to qualify for the rewards you need to complete the form and follow the necessary steps before the 2 weeks. Please do not rush, tokens won’t be received earlier for completing the form sooner!

We have had to take measures to prevent bots and spamming. The steps thus to qualify for rewards will be the following:

1. To qualify for rewards for using the testnet, you need to be a member of the Minswap Discord. You can join now if you aren’t part of it yet. To prevent spamming, we have turned the security of our Discord to “highest”, meaning you can only access it if you have been phone verified by Discord. You can read more here about Discord phone verification: https://www.followchain.org/verify-phone-number-discord/
2. You need to use the testnet, please take your time, and provide feedback in the following form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLY7ax9GPpULr_vhnwbJGgZFqgpVz9m22521IMSFgbk9bTaw/viewform. It will not be possible to edit the form once it has been submitted and each participant will be able to fill it only once! So please take time to use the testnet and fill the form afterwards.
3. Once you have followed these steps, you need to post your Discord user ID in the Discord channel #claim-testnet-rewards. The user ID is a string of numbers such as “827830887747944479”. Please find your own user ID in Discord, you can read here to to find your user ID: https://techswift.org/2020/04/22/how-to-find-your-user-id-on-discord/.

Rewards will be calculated according to the feedback given following these metrics:

• A: incredibly insightful: feedback that makes us redesign, re-evaluate, delete or add a new feature, mention of a previously unknown bug, original ideas or detailed descriptions of how the UI/UX felt, and even suggestions on how Minswap could improve as a whole moving forward (in marketing, growth, engineering or design). These users will receive a 5x bonus on their second testnet MINt rewards.
• B: very insightful: mention of a previously known bug or issue or statements that are too concise or inconsequential. These users will receive a 2x bonus on their rewards.
• C: insightful: anyone that responds to the quantitative questions exclusively. These participants will receive normal rewards.

The duration of the testnet is not set in stone, but there will be 2 weeks to fill the form. We want to provide community members ample time to report detailed feedback while we work on fixing bugs and integrating suggestions. Each user will only be able to complete one form so please bear that in mind before sending it.

As we mentioned, to make this initiative more inclusive and open towards those whose first native language is not English, we will review feedback in Chinese and Spanish as well. Those respective forms for Spanish-speaking and Chinese-speaking community members will be published in the following days on the respective Twitter accounts for Minswap Chinese and Minswap Spanish.

(P.S. if you want to live the experience of using the DEX to the fullest, we recommend you activate the audio from the slippage settings. Oh, and don’t forget to have fun!😉)

How to get rewards in the testnet was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re stoked that we’re only 2 days away from the launch of our testnet! Please read below to learn about the rewards, how to get involved and for further updates from the team!

Testnet Participation Rewards

As we explained in our last piece, we are keeping our promise to reward those who participated in the first testnet and qualified for their MINt rewards. However, since we are aware many community members couldn’t execute all the transactions needed to get the rewards, we believe it’s fairest to commit the same amount of 5 million MINt tokens for the participants in this second iteration of our testnet. If you want to read about MINt tokens, how they differ from MIN tokens, and how to convert them to MIN, please have a look at this article.

As we mentioned previously, we have rethought and decided to change the second testnet’s incentive mechanism. We believe it is likely our last incentive mechanism was counterproductive in that it encouraged the spamming of transactions, which is not the most optimal scenario for a testnet. Going forward, we want to align the protocol’s incentives with community member’s incentives as much as possible.

Thus, the new incentive scheme will be the following: each participant that has used the testnet and intends to collect rewards will have to provide feedback. Feedback will be both:

1. a quantitative series of KPIs to be set by the design team, through which we expect to gather valuable data (e.g. rate the UI from 1–10, select favorite feature…).
2. a qualitative series of questions (e.g. what features would you change or add…).

All feedback received will be manually reviewed and testnet participants will be rewarded according to the insightfulness of their comments as deemed by the team. Feedback will be classified into these 3 categories with reward bonuses according to insightfulness:

• A: incredibly insightful: feedback that makes us redesign, re-evaluate, delete or add a new feature, mention of a previously unknown bug, original ideas or detailed descriptions of how the UI/UX felt, and even suggestions on how Minswap could improve as a whole moving forward (in marketing, growth, engineering or design). These users will receive a 5x bonus on their second testnet MINt rewards.
• B: very insightful: mention of a previously known bug or issue or statements that are too concise or inconsequential. These users will receive a 2x bonus on their rewards.
• C: insightful: anyone that responds to the quantitative questions exclusively. These participants will receive normal rewards.

We believe this is a better reward system than the last one, as hereby we are ensuring it’s the community members that most want to contribute to the protocol, those that are getting rewarded more. Measures will be taken to prevent bots and spamming. We will reveal how to provide feedback once we have launched the testnet, so please stay tuned on how we plan to enable that in our next announcement!

To make this initiative more inclusive and open towards those whose first native language is not English, we are planning to review feedback in Chinese and Spanish as well. More information regarding this will be published on the respective Twitter accounts for Minswap Chinese and Minswap Spanish.

How to use the Minswap Testnet

The Minswap Test Flight Mission will launch on the 25th of January. The interface to it will be available on our website: https://testnet.minswap.org/

• It will only be available through the desktop, and with the following wallets: Nami, CCVault (integration with more wallets is in progress and will be announced later).
• Please make sure you switch the network on the settings of your wallet from mainnet to testnet.
• Once you are on the DEX interface and have connected with your testnet wallet, you will be able to claim test tokens from our faucet by clicking on your address on the top right corner.
• That’s it, enjoy swapping, providing liquidity and other features!

Since it’s an incentivized testnet, we ask participants to take their time and to try as many features as possible, while bearing in mind we are expecting bugs. The duration of the testnet is not set in stone, as we rather provide community members ample time to report detailed feedback while we work on fixing bugs and integrating suggestions. As we are rewarding participants according to the insightfulness of their comments, we encourage the community to provide as much detail as possible including screenshots and accurate descriptions.

Technical Features

We also wanted to provide our community with a technical update as we promised to conduct a load test but this time on mainnet. As a reminder, during the last load test on testnet we managed to achieve 12 swaps per batch transaction and 4 batches (48 swaps) per block (meaning 2.4 swaps per second). This time, we conducted a more representative test, as we set up a bot to execute as many transactions as possible throughout one hour on the mainnet, which was under 90% network congestion. In that hour, we executed 56 batches, each batch processing about 10 swap orders, meaning about 9.3 swaps/minute. If you are interested, please see below the Cardanoscan link of the load test:

https://cardanoscan.io/address/7196a6d04ac183d349f277f00d93ac79fe170dce37713ea9a493f79f81

Follow Minswap on Medium and other channels below to keep up to date with the latest news!

Medium: https://medium.com/@minswap

Discord: https://discord.gg/ZhUV6wjx

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MinswapDEX

Telegram channel: https://t.me/MinswapMafia

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MinSwap/

Merch: https://minswap.creator-spring.com/

Announcing the Incentivized Test flight Rewards was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, Minswap is excited to announce that the official date for the launch of our upcoming testnet will be the 25th of January! The Laminar Flight Test mission is of key importance towards our next step, landing safely on the mainnet! We look forward to receiving feedback from the community members that explore the testnet and will need their help to identify issues and bugs. In addition, we would like to announce that our audit with Tweag is already under progress.

In the following days, we will reveal our new incentive mechanism for the launch of this second iteration of our testnet. But before that, we want to shed some light on the rewards for the previous testnet as well as to update our community on the technical progress we have made since the first iteration.

Previous Testnet Participation Rewards

We owe our community an update regarding the testnet participation rewards for the first testnet. We promised 5 million MINt would be rewarded to users based on participation and we want to keep that promise. As we established in the first article regarding testnet rewards, you must have stored the 24-word seed phrase in order to claim the incentivized testnet rewards. Later, these will be airdropped to that wallet used in the testnet, as it can be restored in a Yoroi or Daedalus mainnet wallet. Rewards will be calculated according to the metrics set in the aforementioned article. First and second testnet rewards will be claimable from the same date, throughout a period of 10 days (2 epochs). The date to claim them will be announced later on.

Technical Features

We have made strong technical progress since our last testnet deployment. We geared most of our efforts towards optimizing the transaction size of our smart contracts and are glad to have achieved significant throughput thanks to that. A recent load test we conducted on the public testnet resulted in 12 swaps per batch transaction and 4 batches (48 swaps) per block. This would equate to 144 swaps (or transactions) per minute meaning 2.4 swaps per second.

While we believe these are very promising numbers, we would like our community to bear in mind parameters in testnet are up 11.11% in comparison to mainnet, and that this load test was conducted only for one block. In our next update, we will publish our numbers for a prolonged load test conducted on mainnet, which will be a more representative benchmark regarding the throughput once we deploy. If you are curious, you can find our load test results here: https://testnet.cardanoscan.io/transactions?blockHeight=3230825

Furthermore, we designed our batching solution to address concurrency named Laminar, which allows multiple operations in one block while being DoS-resistant. In the first release of Laminar on our upcoming testnet and mainnet, only a handful of trusted batchers will batch transactions. In Laminar’s first phase, the Minswap team will be batching all transactions while polishing the batching software and algorithm. In the second phase, we will expand the batcher selection to an elected number of reputable and technically capable SPOs. We expect to start implementing the permissionless and decentralized phase two of our Laminar solution after CIPs 31–33 have been implemented.

Moreover, we are very excited to have integrated with Nami’s dApp connector! Integration with further wallets is dependent on them rolling out their dApp connectors. Nonetheless, we are working to integrate in our testnet the following 6 wallets: Typhon, GeroWallet, CardWallet, CCWallet, Flint, Yoroi.

In addition, we have added a novel feature since our last testnet, namely Zap-In. This is a feature that simplifies the process of providing liquidity for users who might only have one asset of the pair they want to provide. The user would only need to provide one asset of the pair they have selected to provide and half of the amount of this asset would be automatically swapped for the remaining asset of the pair, so the user can receive their LP tokens in a single transaction.

Closing Remarks

As we reflected in a previous article, our first testnet iteration was not optimal. We acknowledged and learned from it, and it has only spurred us to work harder to build a DEX that is up to the demands of the community. That being said, as other DeFi protocols have been stressing, we believe it is highly important to set realistic expectations when utilizing any of the early versions of Cardano based DeFi dApps.

Cardano is still in its early stages as far as dApp development is concerned. Thus, joint efforts such as the CDA (Cardano DeFi Alliance) are of the utmost importance, to set up a framework for Plutus protocol development that leverages the Cardano blockchain’s strengths to create a robust and dynamic DeFi ecosystem. Naturally, the road towards that objective will be progressive and challenging, so we count on the support of the Minswap and the greater Cardano community on every step of the way.

Follow Minswap on Medium and other channels below to keep up to date with the latest news!

Medium: https://medium.com/minswap

Discord: https://discord.gg/ZhUV6wjx

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MinswapDEX

Telegram channel: https://t.me/MinswapMafia

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MinSwap/

Merch: https://minswap.creator-spring.com/

Minswap Test Flight Mission Announcement was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

December is the month during which we are racing towards completing our smart contract for auditing. At this moment, the smart contract for v1 of Minswap DEX is feature-completed and we are writing tests, refactoring and preparing documentations for our imminent audit.

The off-chain team has been making sure that the Minswap SDK is an easy-to-use interface to interact with Minswap’s Smart Contract. While we hit a roadblock with hashing script data in the transaction body, this will only affect advanced features and it doesn’t affect our testnet launch. In other words, Minswap testnet is progressing on schedule and we can’t wait to announce the official launch date.

We are also honored to be officially part of the Cardano DeFi Alliance! The CDA offers a framework for protocol developers to work together on critical issues and strategic development. We hope that this will bring more opportunities for Cardano DeFi projects to collaborate, craft and publish best practices, and innovate within the Cardano DeFi ecosystem.

Lastly, we would like to express our utmost gratitude to the Minswap community that has been following, supporting and encouraging us for the last 8 months. 2022 will be the year that we step towards becoming the best DEX on Cardano. Happy new year!

December Development Update was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Go to https://fiso.minswap.org/my-rewards. Enter your stake address or payment address to check your rewards.

2. Click the button Claim now.

3. Use the wallet that you staked to FISO to send exactly 2 ADA to the above address and the rewards along with 1.5 ADA will be sent back to your wallet within 2 minutes (except when the network gets congested).

4. After the rewards have been sent, the rewards page will show the Cardanoscan link. Note that it might take a few minutes for the transaction to appear on Cardanoscan.

Note for claiming MIN:

• While MINt can be claimed all at once, the MIN token will be released linearly on an additional 45 day vesting period, after 45 days of linear vesting, you can withdraw 100% of your MIN.
• If the claiming times are valid and your MINt wasn’t claimed, you’re able to claim both MINt and MIN in 1 transaction.

For Nami users: If you use a different wallet to stake and use Nami to claim, then the tokens might not appear on Nami wallet because we will send the token back to the original address that you used to stake but Nami only display funds from a single address. For clarity, you can check on Cardanoscan or other wallets that support multiple addresses.

Policy ID: 29d222ce763455e3d7a09a665ce554f00ac89d2e99a1a83d267170c6

Asset Name: MINt, MIN

How to claim FISO rewards was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In November, our team has made lots of good progress on smart contract optimization and wallet integrations. We have openly shared our optimization techniques in our recent Tech Drips #1. On front-end side, we have successfully integrated with Yoroi and Nami wallets, and we will continue integrating with other wallets that have the Dapp connector available. We have also successfully wrapped up the Fair ISO event and continued testing the airdrop claim system.

Integration with Nami wallet

Integration with Yoroi wallet

Launch timeline

We would like to be fully transparent with our community regarding the protocol launch timeline. In the October Update, our contracts were mostly feature-completed and we anticipated to begin the formal audit on November 8th and launch at the end of December. However, after some careful benchmarking, discussion and feedback gathering, we have decided that it is best to not rush things to ensure a smooth launch and avoid unnecessary rumors. Minswap launch will be secured, fast, liquid and censorship-resistant. To that end, we have significantly scaled our engineering firepower. We will share more concrete progress on performance and speed with the community in our future updates.

Minswap November Update was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tech Drips is Minswap’s new blog post series focusing on the technical aspects of building on Cardano. This series is one of our efforts towards open knowledge-sharing and fostering the Cardano developer ecosystem.

With the current surging popularity and demand for Cardano, it is more important than ever to think about optimizing Plutus scripts since every DApp optimization will reduce the end user’s fees and leave more block space for other transactions. Following a recent discussion, we would also like to contribute our learnings regarding the topic. These techniques are independently discovered by the Minswap smart contract team and have been used in most of our internal contracts. While low-level optimization is almost always preferred to allow developers to write contracts in a natural and idiomatic way, our tips and techniques will allow any DApp developer to optimize their contracts today and save block space and fees. They will also be helpful for DApps that are performance-sensitive.

All examples in this post can be seen on GitHub: https://github.com/minswap/plutus-optimization-example

How to analyze script size and costs will depend on which toolchain you are using:

• For PAB users: Use writeScriptsTo
• For CLI users: Use our open-sourced exunits-calculator

Avoid deserializing unnecessary ScriptContext fields

Deserializing ScriptContext from BuiltinData has some cost. The cost will increase linearly with the number of inputs, outputs, and assets in the transaction. However, not all scripts use all fields in the ScriptContext and we can create a custom ScriptContext type and use BuiltinData for the fields we want to skip deserializing. Note that since a record-syntax type definition is serialized as Constr Integer [Data], we need to specify all fields in the correct order even if we want to skip them. For example, a script that only needs to know the transaction outputs can have its custom ScriptContext defined like this:

data TxInfo = TxInfo
  { txInfoInputs :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoOutputs :: [TxOut],
  txInfoFee :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoMint :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoDCert :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoWdrl :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoValidRange :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoSignatories :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoData :: BuiltinData,
  txInfoId :: BuiltinData
  }
  deriving stock (Generic, Haskell.Eq)

data CustomScriptContext = CustomScriptContext {scriptContextTxInfo :: TxInfo, scriptContextPurpose :: ScriptPurpose}
  deriving stock (Generic, Haskell.Eq)

After defining a custom type for ScriptContext, we will use the normal mkValidatorScript instead of mkTypedValidator, and then use unsafeFromBuiltinData to manually deserialize to the custom ScriptContext.

Use Bang Pattern in let-binding

Bang Pattern is a Haskell language feature that allows forcing evaluation of lazy expressions. Even though Plutus Core is a strict language, we have found that using Bang Pattern in let-binding from Haskell code will yield smaller script size and cost. The reduction will be more noticeable if the name binding is used in multiple places.

Example:

let
  !outVal = CC.txOutValue ownOutput
  !amountA = assetClassValueOf outVal mdCoinA
  !amountB = assetClassValueOf outVal mdCoinB

Avoid exhaustive pattern-matching in error cases

Missing pattern matches in Plutus will result in an error () call in the compiled code. That is why if you find yourself writing this:

case condition of
  pattern1 -> doSomething
  pattern2 -> traceError "boom"
  _ -> traceError "boom"

then you can remove the traceError lines:

case condition of
  pattern1 -> doSomething

and the behavior will be the same but we save some compiled script size. The only downside of this method is that there wouldn’t be any trace in PAB logs.

The amount of transaction size and cost reduced will vary greatly based on the DApp architecture. That is why after publishing this article, we would like to hear the community’s feedback on whether these methods can be successfully applied to their DApps. It has only been 3 months since smart contract launched on Cardano but the speed at which the ecosystem is evolving is truly fascinating. That is precisely why we believe that every kilobyte or execution unit saved will contribute greatly to the normal user’s fees and the overall throughput of the network.

Tech Drips #1: Optimizing Plutus script to reduce fees and increase throughput was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Minswap is proud to have pioneered the FISO model as a way to distribute its tokens to community members. We believe that while Cardano has emerged as the most decentralized PoS blockchain network, with more than 3000 nodes and 70% of total supply staked, every effort ought to be made to maintain and advance this level of decentralization, educate and raise awareness on the subject.

When we designed the FISO, we aimed to empower small and medium SPOs to benefit from the emergence of DeFi in Cardano by enabling them to build trust and reputation as ISO partners, and in that way contributing our small part to further decentralizing the network. The FISO has been a resounding success, with more than 200 million ADA delegated across our 25 stake pool partners over 3 months, minting 2400 blocks in the process.

We would like to thank the 14,000 delegators and our stake pool partners: ADAHS, ADATA, ALFA, ALPCH, AMOON, APOOL, BACK, BLADE, COINZ, DEGAS, EU01, EUSKL, FUNGI, GINGR, HYPE, JUST, MALU, NOVA, QCPOL, RSV, SOLIA, SWELL, TREE, VAULT and YOADA for being part of this journey with us.

For delegators

Though there has been a recent security concern about spoofing the stake key, it doesn’t affect Minswap as we will send rewards back to the payment address in the delegation transaction, not the claiming transaction. Therefore, in the event that an attacker spoofs a delegator’s stake key, we will still be able to send the rewards back to the original delegator. That being said, we’re taking a more careful approach and will deploy the claiming system on testnet for 1 week before launching it on mainnet. The testnet for claiming system is only for testing only without any incentive.

The final epoch’s snapshot for calculating rewards will be taken at November 26th 22 PM UTC. Here is the timeline for claiming tokens that you should be aware of:

• December 7th: MINt tokens can be claimed on testnet and we will publish a how-to guide for claiming MINt tokens and what to do next with them.
• December 13th: MINt tokens can be claimed on mainnet.
• January 3rd: MIN tokens can be claimed on testnet.
• January 10th: MIN tokens can be claimed on mainnet.
• February 1st: Last day to claim MINt tokens.
• March 1st: Last day to claim MIN tokens.

The claimable MIN tokens will be based on the vested amount. For example, on January 15th, you can claim 1/9 of your MIN tokens.

For stake pools

We wish you all the best on your journey! This is not the end but the beginning of our series of events and campaigns that will involve SPOs. In the future, we can expect to have exciting features like Laminar node operators, or delegating ADA from our liquidity pools to small and medium-sized SPOs. Stay tuned!

FISO is ending, what’s next? was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the first half of November, we have made lots of good progress on both the front-end and the smart contract side. Our smart contract team keeps pushing forward on optimizing batching size and cost, we have discovered advanced optimization techniques that help us reduce script size and cost up to 6 times!

Our front-end team continues to work on integration with Cardano wallets in accordance with the CIP-30 that has been recently merged. We are integrating with Nami and Yoroi wallets first but we are also keeping a close eye on more wallets launching soon on Cardano.

In addition, our team has completed the claiming system for FISO rewards and it is currently undergoing QA process. The smart contract team is also working on the vesting contract for MIN tokens from FISO airdrop.

Mid-November Development Update was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Minswap October Update is the next post on our monthly update series after the September Update. This month's focus was more on the internal growth of our team. Our team has been hard at work onboarding core developers into full-time positions, interviewing new software engineers and QA engineers to help us speed up development, and training a new cohort of Plutus engineers.

We have spent most of our engineering efforts this month in building internal toolings and infrastructure to help us quickly iterate on developing and optimizing smart contract execution costs, thus further increasing transaction throughput. Though this has slowed down the progress of user-facing features a bit, we have built a robust foundation that would accelerate product development in the months to come.

Our community has continued to grow on Twitter, Discord, and our governance forum. This is a positive sign as we keep building towards a true DAO. We expect a simple form of on-chain voting to be live in Q2 2022.

Catalyst Fund6 voting is closed and we have won one proposal: Open-source ISO Toolkit. We would like to express our gratitude to our community who has trusted us with their votes. This additional funding will support us in delivering an ISO toolkit with reward calculation and token claiming service.

Wen testnet? Wen launch?

The eUTxO smart contract model has introduced a novel DEX architecture that can have additional functionalities but also need to be supported well at the interface level for a smooth and predictable user experience. While most of our engineers are geared towards optimizing smart contract cost and preparing the final snapshot for the audit, our product team has done qualitative UX research to ensure a nice and easy-to-use user interface. We estimate to launch on mainnet in December and the testnet 1–2 weeks before so that our community will have ample time to collect rewards.

Minswap October Update was originally published in Minswap English on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.