The first month of the year is behind us and Hydranet have already had exciting progress this January. The first successful arbitrage swap has been made between the Hydranet DEX and WhiteBit CEX! The SSUI made progress and fresh HDX Tokenomics have been released! This and more will be covered in this monthly update.

DEX Updates

The month of Dexember saw a major milestone in the development of the Hydranet DEX, namely the release of Atlas! Since then, development has continued without interruption and this month’s big breakthrough is named Vortex. Briefly about Vortex: Vortex is a bot in the Hydranet DEX that includes arbitrage trading strategies and market maker strategies. Users of the Hydranet DEX can use Vortex and its market maker strategies to provide liquidity to the orderbook. This is a vital feature to secure trade availability on the DEX. Simultaneously, Vortex will perform arbitrage trading against various connected Centralized Exchanges (CEX). The arbitrage trading ensures that the price of the different market pairs on the Hydranet DEX reflects the currently available price on the connected CEXs.

So what’s the big breakthrough? Except continued development of the market maker strategies, the Hydranet DEX team successfully made the first arbitrage trade against the Whitebit CEX on testnet! This is an important step for the liquidity on the Hydranet DEX once we hit mainnet.

The Simple Swap User Interface (SSUI) also made progress this month. A lot of hours have been spent on debugging and improving the complete simple swap logic, as well the UI. The closed beta testers received an updated, but yet experimental, version of the Hydranet DEX to test the SSUI. This has given the DEX team more valuable data to continue their work on this simple feature.

Currently, the Hydranet team is busy with ironing out what the last steps are before Phoenix can become a reality. Continued improvements of the UX/UI, taker-pays-maker functionality, Connext fee refunds, watchtower functionalities, and protection against malicious acts, are some of the activities in the development pipeline. We can rest assured that the Hydranet team is working tirelessly on these issues, and more!

Team, DAO, and transparency

The team saw governance changes during January and as of now the team is formally divided into a DEX team and a DAO multi-sig team. The DEX team focuses solely on the development of the Hydranet DEX and is overseen by the DAO multi-sig team. The multi-sig team have helped in marketing, organization, media creation, tokenomics, planning, testing, and game theory and will continue to do so going forward. This team structure is believed to increase productivity on all fronts in the Hydranet project.

Following the new team structure was a DAO community vote to swear in the DAO multi-sig representatives for a year forward. The community vote resulted in a close to unanimously positive response. We say congratulations to the entire Hydranet community! It’s a pleasure to have Walleye, Beljora, Argon, Mcfinity, and OneDev as our community representatives.

The multi-sig team was quick to action when they at the end of January presented the first report of the previous month’s achievements and expenses. This initiative will continue and take place the first week of each month as a means to keep up the transparency between the team and the community.

Tokenomics

The first version of the Hydranet Tokenomics was released mid January as a result of hundreds of hours of research and business modelling, not to mention the very important and appreciated feedback provided by the community, following the Tokenomics Survey. You can find the new tokenomics published on the website here.

The new version focuses on the stability and longevity of Hydranet! Some noteworthy implementations are:

• A new, passive, profit sharing model supported by the DEX trading fees, to all HDX holders by indirect price appreciation. This means that holders of HDX will benefit from each and every trade made on the DEX. The Hydranet DAO is built by the community, for the community. Thus we will always strive to reward and incentivize the community to keep on building the disruptive technology that is Hydranet.
• An adjusted taker-pays-maker model to decrease the imbalance between takers and makers. The risk with the previous model was that the incentives to place a maker order were so great that no one would place taker orders. The results would have been orderbooks with deep liquidity and almost no trading volume. The new model is believed to solve this issue!
• The adjusted taker-pays-maker model also means that more funds from the Hydranet DEX can stream into the HDX strategic liquidity pool to support the community even more!

A snapshot vote was initiated at the end of January to have the Hydranet DAO decide on the new tokenomics. If you seek more information about the tokenomics, check out the FAQ channel in the Hydranet Discord.

Marketing and Website

The marketing side saw youtube ads initiated for the UK, Australia, Germany and Turkey. These ads are continuously being monitored closely to maximise every spent dollar! The marketing side also started preparing promotional videos with professional voice-overs in German and Turkish, so stay tuned for this!

The website saw multiple new educational articles added to the Hydranet blog. These are not only good for community educational purposes, but also important for recognition in search engines. Check them out if you haven’t already! Many articles also exist in Turkish versions thanks to our diligent community members Alperen and Phys_io.

You can find the newly published articles here:

• HDX Staking and Metamask Guide
• What is the Vortex Bot?
• What is an Arbitrage Bot?
• What is a DEX?
• Off-Chain vs On-Chain DEX

And lastly, if you haven’t already read the Yearly Recap for Hydranet 2022 it’s available here! Also, don’t forget to listen to the recent episodes of off-chain talks, available on the Hydranet website!

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