This week we begin to prepare for the move to Mainnet — things are beginning to move quickly from this point forward. You may have seen our tweets around our further development of our avatar and logo, “The Rider”, but our changes are far more than simply cosmetic. Today, we have decided our focus will be on the continued development of the WingRiders platform, and the reason behind our deployment of a second testnet.
To understand the need for this second testnet, it is important to better understand our timeline in a little more detail.
When Plutus contracts entered the Cardano space, it took a few months to understand the implications of this, and to determine if from a technical perspective a DEX on Cardano was not only feasible, but secure and stable. We began building later than some of our competitors, our Proof of Concept (“POC”) was completed in September/October 2021. Back in November when our Minimum Viable Product (“MVP”) was shown to some early stage presale participants around that time while still in stealth mode. The same Minimum Viable Product (“MVP”) was published on 17th of December as we as a project officially launched.
What do we mean when we say MVP? It is the core functionality of the WingRiders platform as an AMM DEX — the ability to swap normal ADA-to-token pairs only. We had not yet begun to build out more enhanced functionality, such as:
- Staking functionality
- Farming functionality
- Usability via other wallets
From a pure “Infrastructure on Cardano” approach, it was exciting to early presale participants, as from the MVP stage we were able to embed this DEX functionality directly into a third party wallet (Nu.Fi). It was a full, seamless integration with a new product, where, from a user perspective, you see no difference when switching from one product to another. This type of functionality simply hadn’t been attempted by any of our competitors.
So — TLDR — When we launched our platform on testnet (lets call it WingRiders Integration Testnet V1.0), it was directly integrated with the Nu.Fi staking wallet. As such, much of the UX/UI that users saw was that of the Nu.Fi platform directly. As Nu.Fi is a staking platform already on mainet with a roadmap to cover 11 different blockchains, this gives you an idea about our potential future development plans.
Since late December, our development team has been hard at work, enhancing security and increasing functionality. We’ve significantly enhanced the platform. To properly demonstrate these new changes, we have decided to demonstrate these enhancements to the community via a second testnet release.
Previously, when you logged into the WingRiders testnet, the first screen you would see was a NuFi screen where you would then set up a test wallet to connect to the DEX.
On our new, direct WingRiders Platform Testnet V1.1, the first screens you will interact with will be the UX of the WingRiders platform itself.
There are a few reasons for this:
- The previous testnet (WR Integration Testnet V1.0) was a direct integration to a wallet (Nu.Fi) while the new testnet (WR Platform Testnet V1.1) is the direct WingRiders platform, able to connect with multiple wallets.
- The new testnet now supports not just Nu.Fi, but CC Wallet, Nami, Flint, Gero wallet.
- The new testnet has added functionality — more on this below.
Our new enhanced DEX testnet offers a number of functional improvements over the early (Integration Testnet V1.0) release. We will spend some time to outline these functions below, one by one.
The WingRiders platform now supports not only ADA-to-Token swaps, but also Token-to-Token swaps, (Eg. direct liquidity pool exchange between Cardano native tokens without having to move to ADA and back out.) This allows for greater flexibility and better exchange rates for users, as they can now complete swaps without having to move through Cardano.
Our second new function is actually a first — We are the only Cardano DEX Platform that provides staking on those Cardano in liquidity pools — eg. When you are holding your ADA in a liquidity pool (“LP”) you don’t miss out on your approx 4.5%/ year average earnings that you normally earn by staking your ADA. A functionality to vote on where the ADA will be staked is under development will be released shortly.
In terms of farming, your LP tokens held on the platform will entitle you to future yield of WingRiders Governance Tokens and potentially other form of rewards. This functionality is built, but as we have not yet minted our governance tokens it will not yet be enabled. Farming will be turned on the testnet later.
Also — another first, the WingRiders platform will be the first DEX on Cardano to support Hardware wallets directly! Our development team, powered by Vacuumlabs, meant that we are the most experienced wallet integration team in the Cardano space. Both Ledger and Trezor are now integrated. Ledger’s new update planned in the coming weeks will activate their usage on our platform. For Trezor, the new update cycle takes place in May, so at WingRiders it can be used from that next update cycle.
Last but not least, we are one of only a few DEXes on Cardano to support the Flint wallet, which, when combined with Milkomeda and MetaMask, grant access to side chain functionality. We will consider future sidechain and other integrations as they become available.
While all this functionality and more is in the works, we will be releasing support for them in phases. In the first phase we want to gather feedback on the interaction flow of creating swap, providing liquidity among others, receiving feedback on events through notifications and discovering our transaction history. In the next phases, we will be rolling out staking, farming, more wallet support, more data aggregation including unrealized profit and loss for liquidity providers, governance interactions, to name a few.
So, to recap, since we’ve been on testnet since December, the WR community has had a chance to test our deep integration into the Nu.Fi wallet for some time. We call this Wingriders Integration Testnet V1.0. We’d like to thank Nu.Fi for their support on the deep integration, and also everyone who has participated for their feedback! Now, as we begin the move to mainnet, we’d like you to begin testing us with other wallets, and check out the full WingRiders platforms UX and UI, as well as our contract optimization. This will be labeled WingRiders Platform Testnet V1.1. We will also soon upgrade the WingRiders Integration Testnet from V1.0 to V1.1 — once we do that, any test tokens from WingRiders Integration V1.0. will be locked.
Between now and the mainnet launch, the two obstacles that we were waiting to complete before launch were our audit by CertiK, which is complete — you can read about that here. Now we are in final testing, which is also largely complete. We have no significant code changes based on the audit, and have received excellent feedback. We will update more on this in the coming days…….
Join our community:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wingriderscom
Discord: http://discord.gg/wingriders
Telegram: https://t.me/WingRidersOfficial
WingRiders Team
