Router Protocol’s Enhanced Testnet is Now Live

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The updated testnet is here!

Router Protocol team is pleased to announce the release of our enhanced testnet. Based on the audited code by Halborn Security, the newest version of testnet supports transfers and swaps between Ethereum and Polygon.

Currently, supported assets on the testnet include — ROUTE, DFYN, USDT, USDC, and DAI.

The testnet can be accessed at: https://testnet.routerprotocol.com/

You can get testnet tokens here to use testnet : https://faucet.routerprotocol.com/

Cross-Chain Transfers

A cross-chain transfer allows users to transfer assets from one chain to another. To use the cross-chain transfer facility, users only have to ensure that they select the same asset on both sides, while chains can be set according to the nature of the transfer.

Currently, cross-chain transfers between Ethereum to Polygon are time-consuming — it takes anywhere between 10 minutes to a few hours for assets to appear on either of the chains. The Router Protocol bridge will enable the same transfer to be done in less than a few minutes. This is a massive improvement on the current option.

A glimpse of the cross-chain transfer UI of USDC from Kovan to Polygon

Cross-Chain Swaps

Swapping Asset A for Asset B between different chains

Cross-Chain swaps allow you to trade asset A on one blockchain for asset B on another blockchain. For example, if you have DFYN on Polygon, you can swap it for ROUTE on Kovan.

This saves a lot of steps for those who intend to transfer assets to different chains to acquire new tokens.

While currently swapping is only allowed for whitelisted assets, we plan on expanding the offering to allow users to swap any asset by simply entering the address of the token. This would open up more use cases for our swap product. The algorithm is capable of integrating with numerous different exchanges — in this version of the testnet, we have integrated Dfyn on the Polygon side and Uniswap on the Ethereum side.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is useful for tracking users’ positions on any chain on Router Protocol and it provides a detailed history of activities performed with an overview of balances and liquidity.

The Upgrades :

1. The bug reported by ImmuneFi has been patched. A whitehat hacker in the ImmuneFi reported a bug in their latest security report which would have allowed native assets in the bridge to be drained out completely. The bug was of critical nature and the bug reporter was rewarded handsomely for reporting the same. If you are a security researcher, make sure to check out our active bug bounty program at ImmuneFi which was rewards up to $200,000 for reporting bugs.
2. Another critical bug was discovered internally while doing the integration testing of the Router Protocol bridge — the bug allowed arbitrary values to be assigned to the bridge by calling the bridge contract directly, allowing the exploiter to swap at any desired rates.
3. All contracts in Router Protocol’s smart contract directory were made to be upgradable which allows us to upgrade them using the Proxy pattern. This means that we will be able to update them without actually changing the addresses of the new contracts. This will initially add a bit of centralization to the product suite but is essential until we make sure our systems are robust and completely safe. This responsibility will later be delegated to the DAO-operated multi-sig. The Golang bridge also had to be tweaked in order to fully support upgradeable contracts.
4. The upgraded Testnet contracts also allow the transfer of native tokens like MATIC/ETH — this functionality was absent in our last testnet contracts.
5. The upgraded bridges allow fees to be charged for transfers and swaps. This enables the protocol to earn fees which we later plan on distributing back to the Router Protocol community. Our plan is to make $ROUTE the universal gas token so users can move assets seamlessly between different blockchains with just $ROUTE for gas.
6. We also developed our PathFinder algorithm which ensures that the trades are filled at the best prices for the swappers. Currently, the exchanges integrated with Router are Dfyn on the Polygon side and Uniswap on the Ethereum side. However, as our contract is scaleable, it allows us to add support for more AMMs as needed.
7. Above all, the most challenging part of the process was to get both the smart contracts and the bridge to be audited by Halborn Security, one of the top-rated security firms for blockchain applications.

Introducing our Incentivized Testnet

As part of our roll-out strategy for our upgraded testnet, we are introducing incentives to reward users for playing with the testnet and have allocated $10,000 to support this initiative.

To participate in the testnet program, it’s important to first understand the three categories of the coins we support :

1. Native Coins: ETH/MATIC
2. Stablecoins: USDC/USDT/DAI
3. Altcoins: DFYN/ROUTE

There are two types of testing involved for incentives:

A) User Experience Testing

Tasks:

i) For each of the three categories, perform a swap from both sides of the chain. For example, you can choose to perform a swap of ETH, USDC, and DFYN from the Polygon side and the same assets on the Ethereum side.

ii) For each of the three categories, perform at least 1 staking and unstaking transaction on the liquidity deposit page.

iii) Submit your feedback by filling the Google form here — https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfQBahI7z1Z-PDc2dbafymd01VoeJSWyus8kQh-rqvmCkg8Bg/viewform

Rewards for this program: $7500 to be distributed equally amongst all eligible feedback providers. For example if there are 75 valid applications, each participant will receive $100 worth of rewards.

B) Stress Testing

Tasks:

i) Perform as many swaps as you can. The top 25 wallets with the largest number of successful swaps on the testnet will be rewarded with $100 worth of tokens each. The rewards for this will be airdropped to the wallets of winners once the contest ends. No form submission is required for stress testing.

Rewards for this program: $2500 to be distributed across 25 participants with most swaps.

What comes next?

Security is key with cross-chain bridges as the numerous attacks on various bridges have shown us. This is the key reason we have chosen to undergo thorough audits from multiple parties including Halborn. We hope that over the next couple of weeks or so, users as well as community bounty-hunters (our security partner is ImmuneFi) and comissioned whitehat hackers will rigorously test Router’s XCLP framework. Once there is collective confidence from the team and the broader community that the framework is completely secure, we will roll out the first phase of the mainnet.

About Router Protocol

Router Protocol is building a suite of cross-chain liquidity infra primitives that aims to seamlessly provide bridging infrastructure between current and emerging Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain solutions.

Website: https://routerprotocol.com/

Litepaper: https://routerprotocol.com/assets/docs/Router-Litepaper.pdf

Twitter: https://twitter.com/routerprotocol

Telegram: https://t.me/routerprotocol

Telegram announcements: https://t.me/router_ann

Discord: https://discord.gg/yjM2fUUHvN