Liqwid V2 Mainnet Launch

Good day Liqwid community,

After over 7 months of diligent work from the core team, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Liqwid V2, a complete Liqwid dApp and full-stack overhaul, delivering superior engineering innovations and unrivaled transaction speeds to Cardano DeFi users worldwide.

With V2, we built upon Liqwid’s leading position in Cardano lending by implementing very much needed full-stack improvements, including:

·       A full rewrite of the entire app and everything that exists behind it (i.e. “the backend”), with a smooth user experience (UX) being the absolute number one focus, paired with performance and developer experience being second most important - better developer experience implies faster development and facilitated quality assurance.

·       A complete overhaul of the infrastructure, with security, speed and accessibility as our primary goals, allowing everything built within and for Liqwid to go two steps further than ever before.

·       The creation of a powerful public API, which will permit third parties to tap into Liqwid market data and transactions without ever needing to go through the UI.

·       And last but not least, the addition of supply and borrow caps, essential on-chain risk mitigation features that have been broadly put in use to secure the protocol and its users since November 2023. More information on these can be found here.

Some of the tech behind Liqwid V2

The scope for the V2 launch englobes the implementation and deployment of several in-house services, namely:

1. The Liqwid infrastructure has undergone a significant shift in technology, moving from a more primitive system to a robust Kubernetes setup. This transition ensures minimal downtime, service redundancy, self-healing capabilities, and reliable fallback procedures. Additionally, our new observability stack enables quicker issue detection for our team.

2. Aqueduct is Liqwid’s custom in-house Cardano chain indexer, responsible for providing V2’s downstream components with highly reliable, efficient, and fast data. Building on an event-driven design, it heavily relies on TxPipe’s Oura, enabling the entire Liqwid tech-stack to operate in real-time. Additionally, Aqueduct handles the provisioning of historical data, upon which we’ll be developing several exciting features.

3. Tap represents Liqwid’s latest project, a sophisticated transaction-building library and user-friendly SDK designed to interact with Aqueduct data. All queries and transactions initiated by the app and API are routed through Tap.

4. The Liqwid API now offers third parties the possibility to build Liqwid transactions and query Liqwid market data directly. This API serves as a fundamental integration layer for Liqwid ecosystem partners, enabling the development of advanced features such as leveraged trades (e.g., supply -> borrow -> swap, repeat). Notable enhancements include the capability to request Liqwid transaction building, encompassing main market actions (supply, withdraw, create loan, modify loan) at the time of writing. Additionally, the API demonstrates significantly improved performance across all queries and endpoints it manages.

5. The renewed Liqwid app has received a major redesign, emphasizing quality, usability, and user experience. Significant enhancements were made, including:

·       Integration with CIP-30 wallets: Significantly reduces wallet-dApp related errors for users.

·       Modify loan: A feature that combines “Modify collaterals”, “Partial repay”, “Total repay”, and “borrow more” in one single menu, streamlining user actions with just a single click.

·       Multi-currency support: Users can now choose from within a number of different currencies to express the values on the app in, including EUR, USD, CHF, GBP, AUD, and others.

·       Sliders:  They empower users to dynamically adjust loan input amounts, enhancing flexibility.

·       Filters and search bars: Enhancing user experience with dynamic navigation options.

All the new services and changes enable users to execute Liqwid transactions at unprecedented speeds, revolutionizing their DeFi experience on the Cardano blockchain forever. The “Loans” and “Markets” pages have already been updated, with the remaining sections set to be updated throughout 2024. To begin using the V2 app, simply click here.

Upcoming Work and Future Plans

We have an extensive roadmap of improvements and innovative quality-of-life features aimed at continuously enhancing the overall user experience. These plans include:

1.     Oracle price feed safety mechanisms: Implementing additional safety measures for oracle price feeds, such as checking against an internal price aggregator built using a statistical model that accounts for outliers. In case of divergence, alerts and related control processes will be activated.

2.     Enhanced user reporting: Introducing comprehensive data reporting features, including details such as:

·       Past and current supplies and withdrawals in each market, along with accrued interest between each supply.

·       Past and current loans in each market, along with the accrued interest on each active loan.

·       Past and current LQ stakes, along with real yield and staking rewards earned on staked LQ.

·       Additionally, various analytics and risk metrics will be provided to facilitate better personal risk management.

3.     Multilingual support: Expanding language options beyond English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish (currently incomplete) to accommodate users from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

4.     Direct borrowing: Allowing users to create and modify loans without the prerequisite of holding qTokens in their wallets, streamlining the user experience and minimizing clicks.

5.     Application interoperability: Enabling interoperability with other Cardano projects and dApps, facilitating features such as leveraged trades directly within the Liqwid V2 app.

6.     Agora features: Incorporating all Agora features present in V1, with a focus on improving speed and user error reporting. Our aim with V2 is to proactively detect errors before they occur, providing users with clear human-readable feedback and minimizing the need for troubleshooting.

7.     Notifications and risk alerts: Implementing an alert system to promptly communicate with users in the event of a low health factor, among other risk scenarios. Utilizing a system like ADAMail would enable real-time notifications for enhanced risk management. Additionally, this system empowers the protocol to directly inform users about ongoing governance votes and other important updates.

Conclusion

With the launch of Liqwid V2, we are not just introducing an upgraded app; we are unveiling a vision for democratizing access to decentralized finance. Our goal is to make navigating the complexities of blockchain technology as effortless as driving a car, catering to both seasoned users and those new to the space.

Just as a car needs to be fast, secure, comfortable, and equipped with essential road information, we aim to provide these essential features for our users. Beyond the inherent value of our lending product and liquidity provision, we are prioritizing user experience by offering intuitive interfaces, comprehensive dashboards, detailed reporting, risk metrics, and real-time alerts in multiple languages.

In embracing the car metaphor, we recognize that safety is paramount. Similar to how a car features ABS for added security, our enhanced controls over oracles ensure the integrity and reliability of our protocol.

Ultimately, Liqwid V2 represents more than just a technological upgrade; it embodies our commitment to making decentralized finance accessible, secure, and user-friendly for everyone. We are driving towards a future where managing personal finances on the Cardano blockchain is as seamless as cruising down the open road.