May 2025 has been a landmark month for Hydranet. After nearly two years of development and months of closed alpha testing, the Hydranet WebDEX has officially entered its public alpha phase. This release is more than just a product milestone, it represents a real step forward in our journey to make decentralized, gasless, and self-custodial cross-chain trading accessible to everyone. We are more than just another DEX; we’re a completely disruptive solution offering capabilities previously seen only on centralized platforms.

WebDEX Public Alpha is Live

On May 23rd it happened, we launched the public alpha version of the Hydranet WebDEX on testnet. From this point on, anyone can access our decentralized exchange by simply visiting the Hydranet Wallet — no login, no registration, no KYC required.

The alpha build includes a range of wallet and trading functionality, with the most important capability being our unique off-chain atomic swaps, enabling trades with minimal delays and fees, and without any intermediary.

Dive into this article to get a full breakdown of what users can expect and how to get started, and don’t forget to share our alpha promo video with your network!

Development Progress

In the lead-up to the public alpha, the development team delivered substantial upgrades. Among the more technical achievements, we added logic for canceling expired Lithium invoices, enabled automatic withdrawals from rental channels, and finalized updates to gas estimation functions to improve the availability of the platform. gRPC microservices now include keep-alive logic, and communication compression has been introduced to improve overall performance.

Lithium’s smart contract also saw progress, including the implementation of watchtower-based rewards for reporting malicious behavior and force closure mechanisms. Post-alpha development is already underway, including (but not limited to) work on a full-featured spot order book for advanced traders, SimpleSwap backend logic for true one-click trades, and watchtowers for state channel monitoring services. We are also working on a new order matching logic that will enable users to swap between non-direct trading pairs.

DAO Activity and Treasury

Governance has continued to move forward in tandem with technical releases. The final increment of DAO Proposal #35 passed with 100 percent approval in late April, representing over 13 million votes. Following the successful vote, 25 million HDN were transferred in May to a multisig-controlled address to support continued project development and execution.

More about the proposal and the results can be found on Hydranet’s Snapshot page.

HDN Token Update and Exchange Access

After over a year of restricted availability, HDN has now been fully re-listed on WhiteBIT. Trading, deposits, and withdrawals have all resumed. This restoration is an essential part of providing sufficient services and support to our project community, especially now as our platform is reaching a public status.

WhiteBit made a public announcement of the restoration, and our trading pair is now visible on major tracking platforms such as CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. If you intend to open a WhiteBit account, please support Hydranet by using our affiliate link when you register.

Community Support — Thank you!

Community involvement has been central to our progress. Over 70 users participated in the closed alpha testing, helping to identify and resolve issues leading up to the public launch. Thank you for all the support and dedication.

To support continued onboarding, a new Telegram faucet bot has been released to simplify the process of getting testnet funds, addressing issues with Discord access for some of our followers.

We also updated our documentation and guides to reflect the public alpha launch and began working on a broader post-alpha timeline. This includes beta launch preparations, mainnet planning, and platform features.

Stay safe!

As a final note, we would like to remind everyone to keep your funds safe at all times! Make sure you’re following best practices for self-custody of your funds. For a detailed guide on how to store your HDN safely, including tips on wallets, backup strategies, and key management, please refer to our article: Store Your HDN Securely

Stay safe, stay informed — and thank you for being part of Hydranet.