Cardano, a blockchain network that since last year has begun to support the functionalities of smart contracts, has seen its first decentralized application (DApp), SundaeSwap, launch on its ecosystem.
SundaeSwap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and token platform-staking. Its mainnet launch on Thursday marked a milestone in the Cardano ecosystem, as the platform is the first DApp to use its smart contracts.
As a result of the excitement over the launch of SundaeSwap, the quotation Cardano's native token, ADA, rose more than 50% in the past week before the launch of SundaeSwap, as the community-driven ecosystem offered the price northward.
What you should know
Trading on the DEX began at 22:45 Nigerian on Thursday. However, it took less than two minutes for users on the project's Discord server to start complaining about failed transactions and network congestion.
SundaeSwap CEO Mateen Motavaf posted a bold, all-caps message trying to address the volume of complaints on the server. He stated: "IF YOUR ORDER IS IN PROGRESS, IT WILL BE PROCESSED. Orders are failing due to congestion, BE PATIENT."
The SundaeSwap team hosted a Twitter Spaces AMA to further address any issues traders were having with the platform. In light of the huge backlog of swap-blocking orders, or "scoops" as they are called on SundaeSwap, one user asked what would be the expected effect of an upcoming Cardano node update. Chief engineer Matt Ho responded by stating, "Once the change takes place on the 25th, we expect more than 2X increase in throughput from the memory bump alone, as additional protocol parameters become available."
An expanding network
Another user noticed that an order was filled out on the DEX before it was launched on the website. A tech-savvy trader can bypass the website UI and trade directly on the underlying smart contracts for any DEX. Ho replied that "there were so many things to deal with, perhaps we didn't believe, through our naivety, that someone would build a transaction by hand ahead of time."
To this day, users were still complaining of failed transactions and pending orders for over four hours. Chief Investment Officer Pi Lanningham responded on Discord stating, "Orders will continue to be processed (currently around 2500 orders per hour; currently ~ 11k orders on the chain, ~ 1600 of which are within the slip tolerance)."
The Cardano blockchain introduced smart contracts to the platform after Alonzo's hard fork last September. In one week, over 2.000 smart contracts were deployed on the blockchain with a timelock without becoming operational. The SUNDAE token is currently trading at 67 cents at the time of writing this article.
