Interview with the WingRiders team

[Cardanians] Can you introduce the project and its history?

[Riders] WingRiders is an Automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX) on top of the Cardano eUTxO model on the main chain. The project is powered by VacuumLabs, one of the most widely respected developers in the Cardano space from its inception.

WingRiders’ aim is to be an infrastructure element of the whole Cardano ecosystem. Wide and very easy integration into any wallet or Dapp. Accessible via many platforms, supporting connectors, and HW wallets.

Fully decentralized and trustless supporting the swaps between Cardano native tokens. Plans exceed the AMM, L1, and Cardano itself. More information at wingriders.com

Currently, WingRiders are already LIVE on Testnet. With the example of a seamless first of many integrations to a wallet. This first wallet is a new product from Adalite called NuFi (being used already on main-net) Swapping & liquidity pools are fully functional. Mainnet Launch: Q1 2022.

[Cardanians] How many people are in your team and what is their background?

[Riders] Many with a 4y development background in Cardano and up 20y experience in their professional fields, with a track record of big names in crypto and NASDAQ blue chips, the tech team has PhDs and etc.

[Cardanians] We noticed that WingRiders is already running on the Cardano test-net. How long have you been working on the project and when do you plan to launch on the main-net?

[Riders] Since late summer. August. Mainnet in Q1 2022

[Cardanians] Are you in any contact with the IOG? Do you know how to contact them in case of need?

[Riders] IOHK is our anchor investor via cFund. Yes, we are collaborating on various topics for 4 years.

[Cardanians] The launch of SundaeSwap caused a significant load on the network. The solution is rather on the IOG side. Are you worried about this?

[Riders] We are taking congestion very seriously and we are in intensive discussions with them on potential solutions. On our side, we are dedicated to a tremendous optimization of our smart contract to get the maximum out of the overall chain throughput.

[Cardanians] What do you think of Cardano as a smart contract platform? Why are you building on Cardano and not on another chain?

[Riders] Cardano offers a very different approach to smart contracts compared to other mainstream smart contract platforms. We know Cardano architecture very well, which gives us a competitive advantage as well. We are a trusted brand when it comes to building on Cardano. All these little things added to our decision to build on Cardano.

[Cardanians] What were the biggest difficulties you encountered in building DEX on Cardano?

[Riders] Most issues we faced were mostly initial growing pains of a new platform. There is limited documentation, examples, and tooling available to build. These things will disappear as more dApps teams start releasing tools and open-source code.

[Cardanians] What are the advantages of your DEX architecture?

[Riders] We are aiming to be an infrastructure piece. Our architecture allows us to be very flexible and modular. This allows us to integrate either directly into wallets (like we did for NuFi), but we are also easily able to integrate with wallets that support the dApp connector (coming soon).

[Cardanians] Some teams thought they could copy a model from an existing Ethereum DEX and be done with it. Then they found out it wasn’t going to be that easy and had to redo their original design. Was that the case for you?

[Riders] We first did research and found out even before writing a single line of code or design document that the Ethereum model of interacting with a single liquidity pool would not be straightforward. For us, the model that made sense the most from UX and complexity perspective was the batching model. Since then, it has become the standard way to interact with a single piece of data on Cardano.

[Cardanians] Every exchange needs to get asset prices from somewhere with 100% reliability. Where will WingRiders get them from?

[Riders] In an AMM model the exchange rate is defined by the ratio of the tokens in the pool. In the presence of arbitrage, the pool’s exchange rate should converge to the market rate.

[Cardanians] People debate the differences between the accounting model used by Ethereum and the eUTxO model used by Cardano. Both approaches are different and have their advantages. Is the eUTxO model suitable for DEX?

[Riders] The eUTxO model is an excellent fit for order-book type DEXes. AMM DEXes on the other hand bring users a more friendly experience but are more challenging to get right on the technical side. Turns out borrowing some design elements like escrows from the order-book model does make it feasible to do also AMM DEXes. This is where our development strengths come in handy.

[Cardanians] When smart contracts were launched on Cardano, a lot of people were talking about the concurrency issue. What do you think about it? How did you deal with it?

[Riders] We identified the issue around the bottleneck to interact with a single piece of information on the blockchain very early. This is usually what people refer to when talking about concurrency. There are multiple solutions to it, each with its own tradeoffs. Back at the start, we opted to go with a batching model as it offered the best trade-offs when it comes to user experience, security, and scalability.

[Cardanians] How scalable will WingRiders be on the Cardano main-net?

[Riders] The bottleneck will be the Cardano blockchain and resource limits. (block size, memory execution units). There is a huge difference in scalability when the blockchain is congested and when it’s not. We aim not to be the reason for the congestion and have been focusing on optimizing our code and batching solution to minimize the load on the network.

Plutus as the smart contract platform is still in its early days. There are several CIP improvements in the works (e.g. reference scripts) aimed for the next Cardano release, that should drastically improve dApp scalability down the line. These will be essential as more and more dApps will be launched. The developer community needs to be educated as well about writing smart contracts that use fewer resources. The tooling needs to improve here as well. Even very simple contracts that follow the “intended” way to write code, could use more resources than a heavy and large dApp like WingRiders DEX.

[Cardanians] What are the biggest challenges ahead of you?

[Riders] Many as for the whole ecosystem.

[Cardanians] What is your plan regarding decentralized governance? What will users be able to decide?

[Riders] Will be shared publicly, but not yet.

[Cardanians] Will WingRiders be DEX only, or will the services extend to something else?

[Riders] For the first year just a DEX.

[Cardanians] What is your token listing strategy?

[Riders] TBD but DEX and CEX.

[Cardanians] Do you have a plan to ensure high liquidity?

[Riders] Yes details will be shared later.

[Cardanians] Do you have any strong partnerships with other projects?

[Riders] Yes, not yet announced besides NuFi.

Please read more on the following link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cardano-based-dex-wingriders-secures-114838928.html

[Cardanians] How are you related to Nu.Fi wallet?

[Riders] Partnership.

[Cardanians] Why should people be interested in and possibly purchase tokens of your DEX? What benefits will it bring them?

[Riders] Participate in a DAO lead DEX.

[Cardanians] Can you elaborate more about tokenomics?

[Riders] Stay tuned for our updates and blogs. See light paper for the basic split.

[Cardanians] Is there anything you would like to say to your or Cardano fans?

[Riders] Be ready for an eventful year.

Source: Interview with the WingRiders team