Oct 17, 2022
Yes, the ZKEX testnet is alive! But what’s next?
We’ve had a successful testnet launch of our spot crypto trading product demo. We’re now working on several cool new features, increasing performance, and improving stability.
The past two weeks have been quite hectic at ZKEX, with thousands of users road testing our public incentivized testnet demo and giving us lots of useful data. We’ve also been reading through almost 2,500 feedback reports, with the intention of uncovering new ideas and useful suggestions.
Here are several features we will deploy in the coming weeks and months to make ZKEX even faster, more secure, and easier to use:
Mobile-friendly web version
By far the hottest request has been a version that works much better on mobile devices.
We’re surprised to find almost 30% of our users have been using a mobile or tablet device, especially as our testnet isn’t yet optimized for mobile.
The testnet does mostly work on mobile, but the layout isn’t yet responsive.
So we’re writing new CSS and HTML that will adapt to mobile devices and hope to deploy it next month. We also have plans for a native app for Android and iPhone, but that will come sometime after mainnet.
Order types
We’ve already rolled out market and limit orders, but coming later are ‘stop-limit’ orders and ‘take profit’ orders which will really help traders implement automated trading strategies.
Portfolio view
Being able to tracking the status of your portfolio over time is a useful tool to plan your next trade. Here’s a sneak peek:
Usability testing
Improving the end-to-end experience is a major focus for us. In the past few weeks, hundreds of small improvements have been made, and we think there are many more incremental UI and UX changes still to be made to make a buttery-smooth crypto trading experience no matter who you are: newbie or pro-trader.
We’ve collected bug reports, feedback reports, conducted interviews, analysed statistics, benchmarked competitors, and thoroughly tested user-flows to come up with a long-list of improvements you’ll see in the coming weeks.
If you have a suggestion of your own, you can let us know on our feedback form — we would love to hear from you.
Stability and uptime
There has been some downtime with the L2 network and faucet during our devnet testing, which we are trying to prevent from happening again.
We’re aiming for close to 100% uptime for all services, but this requires building in failover and fail safes at both the code and server level. This is especially difficult as we have in mind to decentralize some parts of our infrastructure in the future.
We’ve implemented 24/7 monitoring of critical services, with a developer on call in case of unexpected downtime.
In the bottom-left of the trading screen, you’ll see a connectivity status tracker and alerts to inform you of any ongoing issue.
Performance optimization
Lots of work is going on behind the scenes to scale up throughput of our matching engine. We’re refactoring code, optimizing our tech stack at every level, reconfiguring our cloud hosting setup, and implementing auto-scaling.
Although we’re currently performing at a level similar to other order book DEXs, we are looking to lower latency and increase TPS even more, with some changes bringing a 10x improvement.
Disaster recovery testing
Many users don’t know about our emergency withdrawal feature which can be triggered at the smart contract level to unlock funds in your browser wallet. We’ll be conducting a test for this to see how it performs.
To follow our progress on a weekly basis, join the ‘product updates’ channel in our Discord community server where we list our changelog.
With all this work going on, you might be wondering “wen mainnet?”
Our estimate is most of these important changes will be completed later this quarter. We’re also working on the actual live trading pairs for our mainnet launch — with an eye for a possible late Q4 soft launch.
Exciting times, and hopefully not too long to go!
