Let’s Sample Some Flavors: SundaeSwap Testnet Announcement!

We’re overjoyed to announce that our testnet will launch on the evening (EST) of Sunday, December 5th. The rest of this article will explore what to expect, and how to get involved!

A testnet serves a number of purposes. First and foremost, to identify any bugs that come from being used by thousands of users with fresh eyes, as opposed to developers and auditors who’ve been working on it for months. Because of this, we are expecting bugs, and are eager to hear about them. You can submit feedback and bug reports via this form.

Second, it provides an opportunity for us to provide a gentle on-ramp and training in a low-risk environment for the scoopers that the community recently selected to run the network. We’ll start with the network running on our nodes, and slowly bring the scoopers online, training them on the software we’ve built, and transitioning the protocol to being entirely run by them. (As a reminder, scoopers are the stake pool operators that help batch and process transactions on the DEX. See here for more details.)

Third, a testnet helps identify unexpected bottlenecks and inefficiencies. As we are now very close to our launch, we have to be careful to consider not just ourselves, but the ecosystem in which we exist. This is where you can help.

Cardano, being at the start of its DeFi lifecycle, has set the network parameters such as block size, CPU limit, and memory limit, conservatively. As the team at IOG has communicated recently, they intend to raise these limits slowly and carefully over time. As part of their process to raise these limits further, they first want to observe extended periods of heavy traffic in a testnet environment and monitor the fundamental performance metrics of the network.

To that end, we’ve had extensive discussions with them and agreed on this collaborative effort to generate and analyze this load. Our testnet is the perfect opportunity to put the new parameters under load so they can assess performance and further raise these limits.

Without further ado, here is how everyone in the SundaeSwap community can help and get involved:

• Once the testnet goes live, use our faucet to grab a set of play tokens
• Expect bugs, that’s what the testnet is for!
• Using Yoroi or Nami, swap these play tokens around; decide which flavor you like best and try to get as many as you can, or stay diversified and balance your portfolio carefully.
• Provide your feedback to us about your experience and what you would like to see via this form.

Finally, if you are a developer on another project, we invite you to create a pool for your project’s test tokens and play around with that experience as well!

We have been waiting for quite a long time to share this experience with you and with our scoopers. We’re excited to pass this milestone and to see what the community does with this opportunity. After the testnet has finished, we will summarize what we learned, and provide a detailed roadmap towards launch.