Republic Protocol Testnet Release
Since our introduction of Republic Protocol many months ago, we have been overwhelmed with the support of our community; for it is a project’s strong community that enables it to grow and thrive. Today, we are excited to reach an important milestone for the project and announce the first release of our testnet to our community.
What’s been accomplished so far
We’ve been hard at work to bring our protocol to life. The majority of our code repos are available on Github and have amassed over 3,500 commits within the last 6 months — something we’re proud of! (If you’d like to view the code, you can view our main repository here: https://github.com/republicprotocol/republic-go).
Aside from the code, there have been significant accomplishments happening behind the scenes. Building relationships with key stakeholders and liquidity providers has been our key focus for the passed few months. Now, we will also begin to ramp up marketing efforts and opening the dialogue with existing crypto exchanges; enabling them to build on top of the protocol.
Republic Protocol has now been improved and extended as a base layer protocol powering trades. These important upgrades have enabled development of third-party dark pools and allows us to capture more volume on top of the protocol.
The long-term goal is for Republic Protocol to become the foundation upon which exchanges, institutions and individuals transact large volumes of coins and tokens within the decentralized token economy.
Testnet release details
The Republic Protocol testnet has been deployed on Ethereum’s Kovan network. RenEx, the first exchange built on Republic Protocol is available at: https://testnet.ren.exchange. This is the only domain our testnet is deployed to.
Warning: Republic Protocol is only deployed on the Kovan testnet. Anyone asking for REN/ETH/ERC20 tokens on mainnet is a scam.
Note that v1.0 of our testnet is undergoing continual improvement and feature rollouts. Please let us know your thoughts in our Telegram community (English, Korean).
How can I use the testnet?
- If you do not have Kovan ETH, obtain some via a public faucet such as: https://gitter.im/kovan-testnet/faucet or we will give out testnet tokens to those that have applied for Darknodes and are approved.
- Visit https://testnet.ren.exchange and login. Make sure your MetaMask / DApp browser is connected to the Kovan network.
- Click on the “Balances” tab to deposit your tokens into the exchange.
- Begin trading.
A public faucet will be supported by Republic Protocol in the coming weeks. The faucet will allow users to access testnet ERC20 tokens for trading on RenEx.
If you’d like to speed up the process and see what it is like to place an order, you may acquire Kovan ETH at https://gitter.im/kovan-testnet/faucet.
Tech-oriented explanation: What’s happening behind the scenes?
Much of the technology for RenEx and Republic Protocol happens in the background. It’s hard to understand the complexity of the system unless you look under the hood. For those that are interested, this is the journey of an order from placement to settlement.
- The order is split into order fragments using Shamir secret sharing.
- Each order fragment is encrypted for its destined Darknode.
- The encrypted order fragments are sent to an API.
- API submits the necessary Ethereum transactions and forwards the order fragments to the Darknodes.
- Darknodes reach consensus on the time-priority and distribution of work.
- Darknodes run a secure order matcher using multi-party computations to match orders.
- Order matches are reconstructed and submitted to an Ethereum settlement contract or atomic swap settlement layer.
What’s next?
We will continue to stress test and gather user feedback. In the next few weeks, we will be rolling out test network Darknodes slowly to those in our community who have applied via the Telegram bot (@republicprotocolbot). With a gradual rollout process, we hope to gather valuable feedback for improving and developing the next-generation decentralized dark pool protocol.
As mentioned by much of our community, we’ve been very focused on the technology. Now that testnet has launched, it is time we begin to increase our marketing efforts to bring REN, Republic Protocol and RenEx to the forefront of the wider community.
Thanks for reading and supporting. We hope you’re as excited as we are about the future of the REN ecosystem.
Until next time,
Taiyang Zhang — CEO, Republic Protocol
