SundaeSwap: The first DEX on Cardano mainnet launches

Cardano, a blockchain network which as of last year, started supporting smart contract capabilities, has seen its first decentralized app (DApp), SundaeSwap, launch on its ecosystem.

SundaeSwap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and token-staking platform. Its mainnet launch on Thursday marked a milestone in the Cardano ecosystem as the platform is the first DApp to utilize its smart contracts.

As a result of excitement for the SundaeSwap launch, the price of Cardano’s native token, ADA, rallied over 50% in the past week leading up to the launch of SundaeSwap, as the community-driven ecosystem bided the price northward.

What you should know

Trading on the DEX started at 10:45 pm Nigerian on Thursday. However, It took less than two minutes for users on the project’s Discord server to begin complaining about failed transactions and network congestion.

SundaeSwap CEO, Mateen Motavaf posted a message in bold font and all caps trying to address the volume of complaints on the server. He stated, “IF YOUR ORDER IS ON-CHAIN, IT WILL BE PROCESSED ORDERS ARE FAILING DUE TO CONGESTION, PLEASE BE PATIENT.”

The SundaeSwap team hosted a Twitter Spaces AMA to further address any issues that traders were having with the platform. In light of the tremendous backlog of orders holding up swaps, or “scoops” as they’re called on SundaeSwap, one user asked what the expected effect of an upcoming Cardano node upgrade would have. Chief technical officer Matt Ho answered stating, “Once the change happens on the 25th, we expect greater than a 2X throughput increase from strictly the memory bump by itself as additional protocol parameters become available.”

Another user noticed that an order was filled on the DEX before it was launched on the website. A tech-savvy trader can bypass the website user interface and execute trades directly on the underlying smart contracts for any DEX. Ho responded that “there were so many things to deal with, we didn’t believe maybe, to our naivete, that someone would have constructed a transaction by hand ahead of time.”

As of today, users were still complaining of failed transactions and orders pending 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 chain, ~1600 of them within slippage tolerance).”

The Cardano blockchain introduced smart contracts to the platform following the Alonzo hard fork last September. Within one week, over 2,000 smart contracts were deployed on the blockchain with a timelock without becoming operational.

The SUNDAE token is currently trading 67 cents as of the time of this writing.