Pad Digest #4: April Development Update
It’s a new month, and what better way to start the month than the launch of a revamped landing page for PAD.FI! Not only does this website prioritize user convenience and responsiveness, but it also provides a streamlined connection to our comprehensive product portfolio. Moreover, the new web page is lightweight and effortless to use.
But did we spend the whole month just getting a (rejigged) website up and running?
Of course not, Anon. Here, get comfy as we dive into our dev update.
DEX Aggregator Update
Our DEX Aggregator backend became fully operational in April and has undergone extensive testing to enhance its ability to retrieve and execute trades across the integrated DEXs. Our primary focus has been identifying arbitrage opportunities when swapping multiple liquidity pools.
The preliminary results on swapping assets through the aggregator have been encouraging, with stablecoins proving more beneficial for swaps. using this knowledge to expand the feature to other assets, confident that it will continue to be advantageous for our users. However, there is still room for improvement in the execution layer to ensure faster response to computations from the pathfinding and routing logic, before the data becomes outdated.
Decentralisation Update
It’s time to address the elephant in the room — the DAO. Admittedly, we prioritised building out other infrastructures and features over setting up an on-chain environment for community engagement and contribution. However, this approach was aimed at developing a valuable ecosystem for the community to contribute to — or the foundation for such.
Having laid down the technical foundations for its implementation and the manpower requirements on both DEX aggregator and another upcoming DeFi feature lessening, we’re pleased to announce that the DAO is live.
The Road to Decentralisation
Decentralisation is the backbone of the blockchain ecosystem. It’s what gives us the ability to trust and verify transactions in a way never possible. But decentralisation is not a one-way street. It’s a two-way street with an extra lane for DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations).
DAOs are the only way to ensure that a system is truly decentralized and is being utilised by those who need it the most. When you have a DAO, you have a network that is completely run by its users, meaning it’s controlled by everyone who uses it. With a user base that often cut across different specialisations, professions, experiences, and accessibility levels, DAOs can fast-track ecosystem growth and provide maximum value for the entire community by tapping into the crowd’s wisdom.
However, the process of decentralization does not occur in a single moment. There has been no blockchain network that was 100% decentralized at first launch, this is because the core of any blockchain network is fundamentally made up of a group of entities working together to enforce the protocol’s rules. This group will always start out small initially. As the network evolves and grows, more entities join, enhancing its resilience and decentralising control. This process often involves multiple stages, with each stage pushing development toward greater decentralization and making the system more secure.
As with any complex product, blockchain development is inherently risky regardless of size or scope due to the technology’s immutability. When a blockchain product is live on the mainnet, flaws can result in catastrophic failure and devastating financial losses. Minimising this risk requires teams to be able to identify and test vulnerabilities and stagger releases for features that further decentralise the product so that networks can harden with each release.
DAOs are no different, and could be argued that they are an extension of the network nodes. The infamous DAO Hack and recent Governance Takeover Attacks are constant reminders of the need for careful planning and having a system for mitigating disruptions by gradually vesting control over time from a smaller group to the entire ecosystem. Or a Progressive DAO, if you will.
The Progressive DAO
A Progressive DAO emphasizes ecosystem security and liveliness by gradually expanding its functions and oversight in order to effectively protect long-term community health.
A Progressive DAO is an ecosystem that evolves over time as it learns how to govern itself. It starts with a simple set of rules but gradually expands those rules over time to become more complex as it learns how to best serve disparate interests on an immutable technology and a rapidly evolving landscape.
A Progressive DAO is not only self-governing but also capable of adapting and improving its governance over time. Technically, this has been the framework for every successful DAO out there, so we’re not reinventing the wheel here either. Rather, we prefer to call our spades by their given name.
At launch, the PAD DAO will be supervised by a steering committee whose primary mandate is the safe implementation of proposals as voted on by the community. This committee does not own or govern the protocol, rather it serves the community as the executor of their will and advisor
Joining The PAD DAO
The DAO has two key infrastructures for governance:
- A Governance Forum for peer discussion and review of proposed changes to the protocol
- A Voting Portal
All proposals must first be posted on the forum to ensure that the community has a chance to weigh in and serves as a barometer for measuring the community sentiment towards it. This is known as a soft vote. Not every proposal will be readily accepted in its initial stage either due to the quality of the proposal, feasibility or being out of the scope of the project. Some may need input from the community or modifications. Hence, there is a need for a place to review and provide feedback before voting on it.
For the first release of the DAO infrastructure, voting will be via the popular Snapshot vote signalling tool. We opted for this tool due to its flexibility, simplicity, and zero gas fee. To vote on proposals, users must first stake their PAD tokens on the Staking Dashboard and use the iPAD token received to vote on proposals.
See you in our next issue
Pad.fi Links
Website: https://pad.fi/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pad_finance
Discord: https://discord.gg/wUzSSUFkc9
Telegram: https://t.me/nearpad
