June & July at Polkadex
Polkadex is heating up: Ledger integration in developer mode, Orderbook out on the public testnet, Polkadex Open Beta, and more on the June and July Polkadex Highlights.
Things at Polkadex have been heating up this summer. Between the release of Polkadex Orderbook to the public testnet (now known as Kaizen), the developer mode launch of Polkadex on Ledger devices, and the publishing of the Up Next article, Polkadexers had plenty to digest throughout the past two months. This summary of the last couple of months at Polkadex should help cover any and all the important bits you may have missed. Let’s dive in!
The Polkadex network has continued to grow during the summer with a ~9% increase in the total amount of PDEX staked through June and 14% in July, easily surpassing the 2.5 million PDEX benchmark and nearing 3 million PDEX. Staking rewards remain high at 31.4% with over 1 in 7 total PDEX currently being staked. Stake your PDEX now to take advantage of higher staking returns while the network is still growing.
The bulk of development work during the month of June centered around Polkadex Orderbook. Ultimately, the stellar Polkadex development team was able to roll out Polkadex Orderbook onto Kaizen in early July.
Since then, the Polkadex development team has been focused on fixing bugs brought forth by the community in over 200 issue reports on Github, while also adding withdrawal support and integrating ChainBridge.
Not only was July’s Orderbook testnet release the biggest Polkadex news of the summer, it also marked the start of the Polkadex Open Beta program. This program will allow all Polkadexers to get early access to products before their mainnet launch, and give them the chance to earn PDEX by testing these early access releases.
Aside from Orderbook development, our development team was also able to complete some important PolkaIDO work and make significant progress on the Polkadex Mobile App. In June, we shared a progress dashboard on Github so that the most eager Polkadexers can now track any remaining tasks left until a specific release and follow our developers’ overall progress. The dashboard currently only features remaining PolkaIDO tasks but it will integrate tasks from more products (e.g. Polkadex Orderbook) soon.
For the more future-oriented Polkadexers, we also updated the official roadmap for what is left of 2022 with adapted timelines and more details on specific launches.
“Shine bright like a diamond” — Rihanna
Polkadex has been shining bright throughout the summer so far! We started off June with Deepansh getting interviewed in a Blockchained India Founders Under Spotlight episode as part of the Initialize Metaverse virtual event. Later in June, we got together with other batch 3 parachain slot winners (Litentry, Unique Network, Origin Trail, and Bifrost) for a Twitter Spaces Q&A session.
Polkadex was also featured as the exchange operator “[taking] custody out of the equation” in a Cointelegraph article about interoperability and DeFi.
At the end of June, the Polkadex team gathered in Berlin to attend Polkadot Decoded. We had a blast getting to hang out with a lot of our partners in person and also got the opportunity to meet more awesome people working within the Polkadot ecosystem. Vivek even gave a talk to explain why Polkadex is building the next generation of exchanges using Polkadot and Substrate.
While Polkadot Decoded was a lot of fun, we enjoyed getting back into the swing of our regular AMA sessions in July, as Vivek hopped onto the Polkadex Telegram channel for a live session with many answered questions on July 6th. Later in the month, both Vivek and Deepansh went live on Twitter Spaces for another live session on July 27th to answer over a dozen questions which had been pre-submitted by Polkadexers.
In terms of coverage, check out this great video by Altcoin Buzz News mentioning the release of Polkadex Orderbook to Kaizen!
It’s been a productive couple of months on the partnership side too! In June, Polkadex graduated from Creative Destruction Lab’s 2021/2022 program. Also in June, our partners Talisman and Subwallet added support for the Polkadex network. Subwallet even added built-in PDEX staking support later in July.
We also partnered with Polkadot India to educate and recruit future Web3 developers and leaders. As part of this partnership, Polkadex engineers will run Substrate Saturday workshop sessions and act as mentors to aspiring Web3 developers. Polkadex’s own Senior Rust Engineer, Ivan Temchenko led one of those workshop sessions in July.
To round out July, we were incredibly excited to share the amazing news that Polkadex is now available on Ledger devices in developer mode. We are grateful for our partners at Zondax who have been working dilligently to get PDEX one step closer to officially launching on Ledger!
The most important community development of June and July has to be the launch of the Polkadex Open Beta program, as it is significant in a few ways. Firstly, it lets any Polkadexer test products and updates on Kaizen before they launch on the mainnet. Secondly, it allows them to contribute directly to the overall success of the project. Thirdly, the program’s incentives give participating Polkadexers the ability to earn PDEX for their contributions. This is a game-changer for the Polkadex community.
Throughout the last few months, we also ran a few giveaways resulting in lucky Polkadexers earning some PDEX rewards. One of those giveaways was a contest to find a new name for the Polkadex public testnet. That’s how we ended up with Kaizen, the new name for the Polkadex public testnet. Thank you to all Polkadex community members for all the name suggestions and congrats to JM$ for submitting the winning name!
Social channels roundup
As of the end of June, there were over 62,000 Polkadexers on Twitter, over 21,500 members across our English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, India, German and Turkish Telegram channels, 4,135 followers on Medium, 3,529 Polkadot.js accounts holding native PDEX, 3,213 members on Discord, 1,654 members in the Polkadex subreddit, 1,634 subscribers on YouTube, and 1,502 followers on LinkedIn!
As of the end of July, the Twitter follower count had increased to over 62,700, while the total Telegram members across all language groups surpassed 22,250. The number of Medium followers increased to 4,166, while the number of native PDEX holders grew by 6% to reach 3,754. There are now 3,529 Polkadexers on Discord (almost a 10% increase), 1,671 on Reddit, 1,667 on YouTube, and 1,554 on LinkedIn. Onwards and upwards!
As you can see, summer is going great so far. Stay tuned for what’s to come in August and beyond!
Website| Twitter | TG Chat | TG Announcements | Medium | Youtube | Reddit | Discord | Linkedin | Spanish community | Turkish community | Indian community | Russian community | Chinese community | German community
Bonus highlight
Another team get-together in June… This time in Berlin for Polkadot Decoded! We had a blast :)
