Kwenta's ethos has always been to foster financial equality by offering a reliable platform for traders. While this has always been a core value, recent events in the crypto space have highlighted the need to continue decentralizing everything possible as quickly as reasonable. With this release, Kwenta hits a major milestone in its effort for an advanced decentralized deployment outlined in KIP-22.
How web2 works and what does IPFS change?
Before discussing how IPFS functions, it helps to appreciate how we currently access web content. Let's say you wish to download a picture off the web. By doing that, you instruct the computer exactly where to look for the picture. The IP address, or domain name in this instance, indicates the location of the image. This is called "location-based" addressing; you tell the computer where to get the data. You won't obtain the image if that site isn't reachable (the server might be down, for instance).
Although it's likely that someone else has already downloaded the image and still has a copy of it, your computer won't be able to get a copy from them. IPFS switches from "location-based" to "content-based" addressing to overcome this issue. You merely need to state "what" you want rather than "where" to find it.
How does IPFS work?
Every file has a distinct hash, similar to a fingerprint. Regardless of who owns the file with this hash, you query the network when you want to download a specific file, and the IPFS network will retrieve it from one of many hosts. Now you might think: hold on a minute, how do I know that that person hasn’t tampered with the file? Because the hash you used to request the file allows you to check that the contents are correct. You ask for a file with a specific hash, and when you get the file, you check to see if the hash matches.
Let’s talk about hosting. Is our application truly decentralized?
Smart contracts on EVM-compatible chains are more or less decentralized. How about user interfaces, particularly the Kwenta frontend? As of this release, we introduce Fleek to build and deploy Kwenta, which takes care of deploying our frontend to IPFS. Going forward, traders looking to use Kwenta should default to the kwenta.eth.limo domain as this will slowly be transitioned to being the main domain, while kwenta.io will slowly be phased out.
Kwenta has an ENS domain name, kwenta.eth, which is linked to the IPFS InterPlanetary Name System (IPNS) address in the ENS record. With hosting from IPFS and decentralized naming through ENS, the Kwenta frontend is truly decentralized. The ENS domain can be reached through eth.limo, which is a decentralized alternative to eth.link, and represents another significant step toward true decentralization.
For the time being, kwenta.io will continue to be maintained to ensure that users can continue to access a quick & responsive UI during the transition.
Is decentralized data storage a thing?
Currently, the Kwenta subgraph is hosted on The Graph's hosted service, which is a centralized service. The fantastic news is that The Graph is becoming progressively more decentralized and anticipates offering a fully decentralized service by next year.
How does the deployment work:
Fleek will automatically deploy any new release from the Kwenta GitHub repository. For each new release, a unique cryptographic hash will be created. Core contributors then can suggest this new hash to the Elite Council*. The sitting Elite Council will need to reach a quorum (currently 2/6 as of KIP-22) in order to sign a transaction to update the ENS record which points to the new and DAO-endorsed IPFS version of Kwenta.
* Note in the early stages of decentralized deployment, the adminDAO will be responsible for updating the Kwenta ENS record until an official handover happens, putting the Elite Council in charge of this.
As you can see, Kwenta is more or less as decentralized as it can be these days. Current progress is excellent, and overall it’s impressive how far a dApp can be decentralized, but there’s still is work to be done on the path to full decentralization.
Other changes included in this release:
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Enable dragging and resizing on profit calculator
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Add past prices to state
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Bug: Fix rates
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Add the default modal back
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Apply dark theme to landing page (decentralized deployment)
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Fix swap conversion error
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Fix pin
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Hotfix: Market filter
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remove unused hooks
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Fix mobile position card
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