Shimmer Integrations Update

The Soonaverse is and always will be a place to test the boundaries of new, innovative, decentralized technologies. Each new market cycle brings paradigm shifting concepts into the industry whether its PoW, PoS, Tokenization, DID, DAOs, DeFi, etc. Every new adaptation rockets through the industry creating opportunity in its wake. We pride ourselves in our ability to match the incredible velocity of change that is emblematic of the crypto industry. We designed our entire platform to have the modularity necessary to adapt quickly to these ever changing conditions. SOON has to be NOW for us to succeed.

When creating the very first version of the Soonaverse, we made important strategic decisions to guarantee our product was reliable, a joy to use, and put satisfied users in the center of the experience. Our developers opted for a hybrid approach leveraging a centralized/decentralized infrastructure that could swap out centralized components as decentralized alternatives became available through the work of the IOTA Foundation, all without impacting the user interface for our members (https://web3.soonaverse.com). We also chose to focus on IOTA’s L1, because of its fundamental superiority to competing protocols.

Today, we’re proud to announce that we have continued down our “Path to Decentralization” through the completed infrastructure and integration with the Shimmer testnet in our testing environment.

This article will outline why the Soonaverse believes the heart of IOTA and Shimmer innovation will happen on the base layer (L1) and expand on some of these new features.

Please note that all of the improvements mentioned in this article will only be live in our wen.soonverse.com testing environment and connected with the Shimmer testnet. Do not use this environment unless you are familiar with how the systems work and the risks associated with them.

The Full Power of Shimmer

As the only IOTA Solutions Partner and Exchange & Financial Services Partners, we collaborate with the IF constantly. It was through this collaborative relationship which began in May, we were able to build the complete infrastructure and integration with Shimmer in our test environment. We built significant tooling to support seamless growth and fast delivery. This has been crucial for us and took us some time. We now have fully automated testing after every commit. This allows us to now to simply add functionality through this scalable integration.

After implementing, we feel more confident than ever that the power of the Shimmer L1 is being underestimated. We see a competitive advantage in building on the base layer where we can leverage all the current features while also staying on the cutting edge of new ideas and output types that can improve current modules and even evolve into completely new modules to bring truly novel experiences to users of the Soonaverse. We are currently researching how we might be able to deliver staking and voting for native tokens on L1 using outputs. Imagine bridging these amazing L1 functions into L2 through the numerous services modules that are about launch.

What We’ve Finished

The main thing we did was introduce the concept of networks. You’ll be able to go to wen.soonverse.com and validate 3 different types of addresses in your user profile. These include IOTA, ATOI (IOTA testnet), and RMS (Shimmer testnet). This concept of different networks is a key element moving forward. While we’ll have 3 networks enabled in this test environment, our main soonaverse.com production environment will only have the IOTA and Shimmer networks. Once the new version of wen.soonverse.com is released this weekend, people will be able to start testing out the ATOI/RMS token exchange to see what it’s like to trade tokens across networks on the L1. This will become the foundation of how people will be able to trade IOTAs for SMRs and vice versa.

This concept of networks is only part of the story. We’ve also focused heavily on tokens with these Shimmer integrations. Here are a few new components that will be enabled:

Cross Network Trading

People can buy SMR with their IOTA or buy IOTA with their SMR. We simply match those bids and asks across the networks. The functionality hasn’t changed too much from how the system currently works, except now trades can be executed across completely separate networks since they’re fully integrated into our platform.

Token Minting

We now allow anyone to create a token without our approval on the platform. Once a user creates their token, they can mint it on Shimmer by sending a small amount of SMR (to write to the network), we create the token on the Shimmer network, and then send all the new native tokens to their wallet. If they are airdropping tokens before minting then the Soonaverse will hold those tokens for them for users to claim through a simple UI.

Token Claiming

If you mint 1,000 new native tokens, but 500 of those tokens have already been airdropped to 10 separate members, then when minting happens on Shimmer it will actually only send 500 tokens to the guardian who created the token and the Soonaverse will hold the remaining 500 tokens to allow each of those members to claim their tokens. The process is very similar to the current claim process. The user goes to their member profile, selects the token, clicks claim, sends a small amount of SMR, and then the Soonaverse sends the newly claimed native tokens to their wallet. That SMR that was sent is then automatically sent back to the member as a storage deposit.

Token Trading

We are amending the process for minted tokens. The buying of tokens is still the same even though there’s a completely revamped token trading UI. You send the base token of the network that the native token was minted on (so SMR in a lot of new cases) for the price you want to buy it at. And then the sellers will now, instead of the Soonaverse keeping track of their tokens, will be able to send the native token to the Soonaverse (since they are now in the full control of the user), and then it will get matched with a buy. Tokens will be in your control, through the wallet of your choice.

Note: Creating and trading tokens on wen.soonaverse.com will be different from our production environment. On wen.soonaverse.com, anybody will be able to create and list tokens. For the Soonaverse mainnet, project owner(s) who create tokens to be listed on the exchange will be required to go through our KYC process and tokens must be minted through our LaunchPad to be available for trade.

Soonaverse Tangle Infrastructure

Our Soonaverse infrastructure has been running the new Stardust Hornet nodes for several weeks as we prepare for shimmernet launch. The new Hornet nodes support a docker-based configuration which allows easier scaling and a standard configuration across all our infrastructure. The new INX plugin architecture that Hornet supports also allows our nodes to be more efficient in integrating with the Tangle and allows future enhancements to be added seamlessly.

Additional Features

In our last blog post we outlined a number of new features and improvements, but those didn’t end up going live since we were in the middle of such a major overhaul. These will now be reflected in the wen.soonaverse.com environment once it goes live. These changes include:

• Refactor payment processing to support multiple networks
• Added concept of networks across the protocol
• Enter XP for award by XP per badge instead of total XP for award
• NFT History includes amount and space name
• Mobile trading UI improvements
• Revamped sonaverse-lib to fully support all protocol’s functions
• Fix Arabic translation
• Fix visualization issues on reputation chart axis within the member profile
• Enable proposal donut chart on proposal lists
• Missing transactions in my profile. It now shows transactions for sold NFTs/Tokens
• Fixed CSV transaction export. It didn’t work in some scenarios
• Minor enhancement into the launchpad functionality
• Fix cooldown end check
• Ask order requires minimum amount of 1Mi
• Token trading, improved contrast in dark mode
• Various fixes into airdrop functionality
• Fixed distribution Export CSV that cased multiple downloads in some browser
• Fixed amount decimals visualization on token bids/asks
• Added Cancel sale option on token launchpad
• Added new Sale setup options (no cooldown, ability to end at 100%)
• Improve re-try wallet transactions to avoid conflicts on Tangle
• New translations updates

On top of all that, our development team has been hard at work completely redesigning the token trading page. This will also be ready in the wen test environment. It’s important to mention that this is a test environment, a working test version if you will. We’ll spend the next several weeks iterating and improving the product. So far we’ve cleaned up the order book, added spread info, added a trade history section, added different rounding to decimals, and created a separate tab for open bids and asks. It’s almost a completely different page and will feel very different (in a good way). And as always, we’ll continue to improve.

Moving Forward

We’re still working on NFT minting and trading on the Shimmer testnet and things are progressing nicely. That will hopefully be released in the next few weeks. We made the decision to focus on nailing down everything that has to do with tokens and making sure it works really well since it looked like wallets would be integrating them first. Fortunately now that we have the Shimmer infrastructure built into the Soonaverse, working on NFTs will be a much faster process.

As always, we want to thank our awesome community. This represents a major milestone in our and the IOTA Foundation’s in introducing groundbreaking new technology through Stardust and Shimmer, and our collective journey towards decentralization. Our goal is to be the UI for all of the IOTA networks, every release, every innovation, we will work tirelessly to create a reliable, and joyful product experience to represent and reflect what we all know in our hearts, that IOTA is a once in a lifetime technology that can change the world. Now, LFGO!