SecretSwap Post-Product Launch AMA/Update: Figment, Enigma, Secret Foundation
Greetings Secret Network community. This AMA took place at noon (CST) on 4/1/2021 approximately 24 hours after the launch of SecretSwap. A special thank-you to everyone involved with the launch — it was historic in so many different ways. -Secure Secrets
[ Begin AMA]
[Tor Bair / Secret Foundation]: I wanted to start with some directed questions so we could go over what’s been going on in the network and with the SEFI launch. So, we can start with the Enigma folks — SEFI launch drove a ton of network activity, with record transaction and gas volume. It’s definitely uncovered some opportunities for improvement. Let’s start with the what — in your own words, what was the network experiencing yesterday, and what are we continuing to see today?
[Cashmaney / EnigmaMPC Dev]: Hey all. I think I can take this one. So basically, what we’re seeing is some Blockchain growing pains. We’re starting to hit the limits of what our nodes can do — in terms of serving requests at a very high rate. The problem (and I guess this is a good problem to have) is that we’re starting to reach uncharted waters in terms of the cosmos ecosystem — there just haven’t been that many chains that have this sort of traffic generated by services, and we’ve having to deal with some fundamental issues to be able to get to where we want to be.
What this means is that we’re currently working in 3 main directions:
- Scale up our node infrastructure — just add more nodes to be able to handle the current burst
- Optimize the code of our apps to make sure to make the least amount of requests possible
- Work on improving the performance of the nodes themselves
We got some great tips from Terra on possible causes for the issues we’re seeing, and we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to make some progress on these issues — fingers crossed.
[Guy Zyskind / EnigmaMPC Founder & CEO]: Building on what @Cashmaney said, it’s important to also realize that Secret Network’s privacy by design prevents doing things like ‘caching the entire blockchain state’. Since it’s not public, and each user (and actually, tx) has its own encryption key, we can’t use such ‘hacks’ and need to focus on the avenues @Cashmaney mentioned.
[Tor Bair / Secret Foundation]: Thanks @Cashmaney and @Guy | Enigma — that’s helpful. We also have @ajc here from Figment
For everyone: were there any other learnings from the SEFI launch, or anything else that you saw?
Andrew Cronk/ CPO & Cofounder at Figment: Hi — Andy from Figment — we’ve been running Secret nodes in DataHub. We were planning for around 100 requests per second, and at the peak we were seeing 500–1,000 requests per second. So we had to make a hard choice of letting that traffic overwhelm the nodes and serving no requests, or doing some rate limiting. We chose the rate limiting path and by mid-day North America time we were successfully serving 99% of requests. Big learnings for us were around how to scale up the computationally heavy workload of Secret — it is unique among the blockchains we work on.
[Can Kisagun / Co-Founder and Product lead at EnigmaMPC]: One learning for me is: we experience significant demand/load on the network when we launch new products (SecretSwap, SEFI). Both launched marked the highest gas used day in SN. This is a really good sign that people are excited about what we are building. We need to expect similar levels of demand for the next big milestone event and make sure that the improvements Itzik mentioned is able to improve the user experience
[Tor Bair / Secret Foundation]: Good place to move on @Can | Enigma since the focus of this AMA was originally meant to be about upcoming milestones for Secret DeFi and SecretSwap, so we can move into questions focused on that as well. We just saw the routing feature for SecretSwap go live — that was exciting @Assaf.
[Can Kisagun / Co-Founder and Product lead at EnigmaMPC]: There’s on going work to bridge BSC assets to Secret Network and provide privacy to BEP20s similar to Ethereum assets. We measure our success by the privacy value we provide to the blockchain ecosystem. That means assets bridged to Secret Network and the value of assets native to Secret Network. This launch will help us improve that metric and bring privacy to BSC users.
[Community Question]: Hey there awesome job on the launch, have you guys thought of a way to incentivize running full nodes ?
[Can Kisagun / Co-Founder and Product lead at EnigmaMPC]: Network can potentially vote on such a mechanism or give a grant to do it, but not otherwise. There’s also room to pay service providers who provide that service (e.g., we’d rather do that and not run our own nodes).
[Community Question]: One thought/suggestion we’ve seen in regard to node incentives would be to possibly include a flat fee that all node runners receive each block in addition to typical block rewards. Slightly decrease the usual block rewards to keep inflation the same, but this would lead to more diversification of delegations and allow more, high quality nodes to come online. Just a thought.
[Cashmaney / EnigmaMPC Dev]: Not really. The actual output of the network is not affected by the amount/quality of nodes (mostly). The issues have to do with how many external queries a single node can support (and still keep up with processing the txs on chain). Services such as Figment’s Datahub run a specific infrastructure meant to handle these types of requests
[Reuven / EnigmaMPC Dev]: In essence non-validator nodes are only useful for applications to track the state of the chain, or in other words, for queries. Unlike validators, there’s no reason to have nodes online if they’re not being used by some app. So you can say that the incentive to run nodes is the revenue from the application whose UI uses them for queries. (either by collecting on-chain fees, or other monetization techniques). As guy said above, there’s plenty of room for companies to provide these nodes for applications that want to run on the network.
[Community Question]: Where do you see the benefits of the SEFI token in the future, contrary to using SCRT for everything?
[Can Kisagun / Co-Founder and Product lead at EnigmaMPC]:
SCRT vs. SEFI.
SCRT is the native network token and it’s intended to secure the network + used in governance. We want high staking ratio so that the network security ($) is higher. The more SCRT is staked, the less can be and should be used in network applications.
SEFI on the other hand is designed first to govern SecretSwap and provide incentives for SecretSwap users to scale the application. From a governance perspective, stakeholders who are best suited to govern SecretSwap, are not necessarily the same people who are governing the Secret Network. We believe a fair launch is a great way to provide folks who are most invested in running SecretSwap have a say in the future direction of the project. Another reality is that SEFI is a great way to bootstrap liquidity for SecretSwap and make it a better product for the whole blockchain ecosystem.
Having a front-running resistant AMM is a huge deal, we should all acknowledge that ~$1bn a year is lost to miners and arb bots. However unless we can bootstrap liquidity and you have high slippage in your trades, front-running resistance loses its value.
[Community Question]: For people who think they should have gotten some SEFI but didn’t (assuming it’s not just network issues), is there a way of verifying through a block explorer which addresses were eligible? Knowing when the snapshot(s) took place could help with this as well. Just trying to get some definite answers for people who are still unsure about why they didn’t receive anything
[Can Kisagun / Co-Founder and Product lead at EnigmaMPC]: I think this is something we can build. You query your address and see whether you received SEFI or not. We first need to solve some of the more pressing issues though. Maybe we can collaborate with @superfish | 🐄 or @ian🐉secretnodes.com on this.
[Ian🐉secretnodes.com Founder]: There are some short term solutions to mitigate the issues but I believe we ultimately need tendermint fixes.
[Community Question]: Thanks for the throughout answer. Chaining onto this: Do you see other applications that will come in the future building on SEFI as well or would you imagine that there are custom tokens for each kind of application? (1)
Would you ever consider build a DEX order book for Secret Network under SEFI brand? (2)
[Can Kisagun / Co-Founder and Product lead at EnigmaMPC]: It’s really up to future projects. 25% of SEFI supply is allocated as a development fund. This can be used to build new products and integrate SEFI as an incentive system to them as well (like lending) or potentially other projects which are building different stacks of decentralized finance can ask for a grant to integrate their liquidity to SecretSwap and receive SEFI. It would be up to them whether they’ll do a new token or not. However a lending protocol + secretswap sharing liquidity would be prettty dope.
We are also working on a new app page for SecretSwap, which will live on app.secretswap.io
Imagine your funds earning interest as well as fees from the pools.. I think we have an exciting future for secret defi. (1)
It’s too early to tell. However order book DEXs on SN = dark pools which is a great application. We need to increase liquidity on SecretSwap for these experiments to be fruitful. (2)
[sneak peek] There’s a project that currently being tested — it allows you to add limit orders to SecretSwap. Your orders will be private :)
[Community Question]: I hear that SIENNA will use the Secret Network ETH bridge backend, but with a separately created front-end specific for SIENNA. What is the architecture design decision behind this? And how do you see this evolving in the future with “separate” bridges?
[Cashmaney / EnigmaMPC Dev]: SIENNA is independent from Enigma, and their design choices reflect that. Personally we welcome everyone to come build on Secret Network — we’re in this together. If anyone wants to integrate with our apps — that’s great. If you want to build your own then we’re happy to support that as well
[Community Question]: Is there any deadline for the SEFI claim, or will it work for people coming in way later?
[Tom / EnigmaMPC Dev]: No, it will be always claimable.
[Reuven / EnigmaMPC Dev]: In principle, we have a list of the addresses that are eligible for the claim, and in a few months/years if we will really want to remove the claim UI we can check if 99.99% of them have interacted with the claim contract, but even if we will, the option will always remain open on-chain.
[ End of AMA]
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