What’s next
After covering our backstory in a first article, and the brief intro of what we did so far with Arcadia Finance, it’s now time to uncover what’s next.
In the coming 8 weeks, we have 4 main goals:
- Growing the team and onboarding new hires
- Gas optimizations
- Security reviews and external audits
- Prepare our launch on testnet
Growing the Team
Earlier this month, our first hire, Simon, joined the team. Simon is a full-stack web3 wizard and a longtime friend of Arcadia. He’s worked with us before on some of our earlier side projects (including some ETH Online hackathons). He has been in DeFi for a long time, and more recently has built a name for himself in the NFT space. DentedFeels’ mint page (https://twitter.com/DentedFeelsNFT) was his creation, for example. The three of us worked together on the Interleave’s Genesis contract and mint page (https://twitter.com/interleaveCC).
Zeki will also be joining our team in the coming month. He brings extensive experience in developing ML applications as well as data and risk models. Zeki has been a leading force in the growth of DAO Brussels and Developer DAO. He likes to play around on Dune too.
We’re fortunate and humbled to be able to work with such talented engineers.
Gas Optimizations
Creating a protocol that is as gas efficient as possible, is a core tenet of Arcadia’s dev principles. Gasgolfing has become a fully fledged discipline within our team. t11s would be proud (and thanks for the inspirational posts). Currently Arcadia Finance is sitting at a gas usage of only 1/3rd as compared to MakerDAO when opening and interacting with a vault. And that’s with a multi-collateral vault!
Although we’ve made great progress in gas usage, there’s still room for improvement to make Arcadia’s protocol the most gas-efficient protocol out there. Thanks to Foundry we have been (and still are) able to deeply inspect every function call in our protocol and optimize it as much as possible without compromising on security and usability. We’ll be sharing weekly stats on our progress of making Arcadia more gas efficient.
Security reviews and external audits
In the past, Thomas and I have done our fair share of smart contract audits. Not only as consultants and advisors for other DeFi protocols, but also for ourselves. Early on we got in the habit of performing contract audits ourselves before opening positions in any DeFi protocol.
We have built Arcadia smart contracts to be robust and secure — no untested scenarios. There is simply no room for taking risks when building infrastructure that will hold and manage other people’s funds.
There are some tools out there that helped us understand in much more detail the state of our contracts. We’re sharing them here so that other protocol builders can benefit too (and avoid spending time searching for this stuff):
Security audits are also a key component of our protocol’s security roadmap. In our opinion, the real benefit of an external security audit is the fresh pair of eyes on the code. Tunnel vision is a killer. Arcadia Finance is a comprehensive DeFi protocol (26 smart contracts at the moment, totaling >5k lines of Solidity code not taking into account external imports) and thus will benefit from an extensive security audit by one or more external parties. We have been contacting a few companies that provide these services. If you’re reading this and have recommendations on smart contract auditors, feel free to hit us up at dev@arcadia.finance or give us a shout on the Discord!
Launch on testnet
We will phase our launch, and plan to do an initial launch on Ethereum testnet. The goal of our testnet launch is the following:
- Focus on detecting and understanding security issues, unexpected contract/protocol states and unexpected behavior.
- Attract a group of enthusiast testers providing feedback to the team (especially in terms of UX).
- Showcase a majority of the functionalities that will be released on mainnet.
- Improve protocol documentation for end-users, arbitrageurs, and developers.
For our testnet launch, we have been devising a paper trading competition using test assets (ERC20’s, NFTs, Uniswap v2 & v3 positions, etc) with actual mainnet price feeds. Bears can short ETH, bulls can go long assets on leverage. All participants will be rewarded. We encourage all participants to try to exploit our protocol. The more information we can get out of it, the better.
We aim to launch our protocol on testnet by late June/early July. We’ll be (hopefully) presenting Arcadia Finance on EthCC as a speaker later this year too. We hope to see you there.
