Basilisk LBP Testnet Update
Product Overview - Current Status - Weekly Dev Updates
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We are happy to share with you that Snek is confidently continuing on its course towards shipping the first Kusama-native LBP for fair token distribution, largely unaffected by the overall grim mood caused by the turbulent market conditions recently.
The ever growing team at Basilisk has had both a busy and exciting start of 2022. While the LBP testnet is still not ready, there is noticeable progress in scoping and delivering the remaining frontend work, which remains the main bottleneck.
We understand that many of you would like to know the answer to the question Wen LBP?, however experience has proven time and again that providing accurate timelines in the dynamic field of blockchain is a nearly impossible task, and being unable to keep up with the deadlines only leads to frustration that can culminate in a toxic environment which negatively affects everybody.
We have thought about how we can compensate for this inherent shortcoming of our field. Instead of providing uncertain timelines, we decided a better way would be to keep the community updated by providing regular updates on the development progress as we move closer to the Basilisk LBP Testnet.
This post sets the foundation for the upcoming dev updates by providing a comprehensive overview of the product which we are building under the label “LBP Testnet”.
After describing all different components, it gives an estimate of the current status per component which reflects the progress made on every major task. Finally, we present the mechanism of weekly dev updates in which we will share the progress towards LBP Testnet on a regular basis.
LBP Testnet - Product Overview
The LBP testnet consists of 3 components: Infrastructure, Runtime and Frontend. All future status updates will be separated into one of these categories to provide a more clear overview of the progress made on each battlefield.
The Infrastructure part allows us to easily spin up our testnet which includes a relay chain (Kusama), several onboarded parachains (Basilisk, Karura, Moonriver), as well as the indexer and processor needed for aggregating the necessary data for the LBP UI. All users participating in the testnet can use this infrastructure to interact with the LBP during one or more test runs with faucet tokens. We have built our infra using Kubernetes, which is a state of the art technology that quickly allows us to spin up the infrastructure after pushing any new changes to the code.
The Runtime part consists of the Substrate pallets (modules) which will be plugged into the Basilisk runtime to facilitate the specified functionality. This includes the LBP pallet, but also an XYK pallet, a Liquidity Mining pallet, and an Exchange pallet which will provide order batching for lower slippage in the future. Having these multiple pallets ready allows us to transition the two BSX LBP pools into regular XYK pools with incentives for liquidity mining after the end of the LBP event.
Apart from the pallets mentioned above, the Runtime work involves the implementation of cross-chain messaging (using Kusama’s XCM via HRMP) which will facilitate the introduction of stablecoins into one of the LBP pools. Besides a KSM pool we were initially planning to launch a parallel pool with kUSD. However, due to liquidity restraints with regards to kUSD, we were forced to look for alternatives.
The good news is that the recent advancements made by Moonriver in XCM could allow us to bring an ERC-20 into the LBP (e.g. DAI), which is something that we are currently closely researching. Being able to reach into the deep liquidity of the Ethereum ecosystem for the purposes of liquidity bootstrapping in Kusama is an exciting outlook which makes us feel super bullish.
The final component of the LBP Testnet is the Frontend. The frontend work itself can be subdivided into several branches: middleware, data processing layer and presentational layer. The middleware is a complex web of technologies that allow us to collect and aggregate on-chain data for the purposes of the functionality supported by the UI (e.g. price information). This includes combining historical data with live data extracted from the last blocks. Shoutout to Subsquid for providing a powerful framework which greatly helped our middleware efforts.
The data processing layer handles all communication between the UI and the Basilisk RPC nodes. This involves actions such as active account selection, balances overview, spot price and handling buy orders to the pool. Finally, the presentational layer includes all visual components which are used to display information to users - this is what people usually refer to as “UI” in a strict sense, including the design.
LBP Testnet - Current Status
Infrastructure
Kusama Relay Chain - 100%
Basilisk Parachain - 100%
Statemine Parachain - 100%
Processor and Indexer - 100%
Monitoring and Alerts - 80%
Moonriver Testnet Integration - 20%
Runtime
LBP pallet - 100%
XYK pallet - 100%
Exchange pallet (V1) - 100%
Liquidity Mining pallet - 80%
XCM with Moonriver (ERC-20 stablecoins) - 30%
Frontend
Middleware (processor and indexer) - 100%
Data processing layer - 40%
Presentational layer - 10%
As you can see from the overview above, there are 2 areas which will require a big amount of our attention before we can launch the LBP Testnet. The first area is the integration of XCMP with Moonriver which could possibly provide us with a way to bridge an ERC-20 stablecoin into the LBP. The amount of work required for this integration is not so big, however there are some inherent uncertainties as we navigate the bleeding edge of technology.
The second area in which we are lagging behind is the presentational layer of the Frontend. While we have been able to onboard sufficient frontend muscle for the engineering part (TypeScript / React), it has taken us long before we could find some help with the UI/UX design. The remaining TODOs with regards to the presentational layer are very work-intensive, however the uncertainties there are negligible, as compared to the Runtime part.
Weekly Community Updates
Starting from next week, we will post regular updates at the end of every week on the development progress made towards the LBP Testnet.
The updates will be posted in #weekly-dev-updates on Basilisk Discord.
Thanksss for your kind patience,
Snek.
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Thanks for this update!