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Introduction
Hi anons, Exa here — engineering lead at Exponent and chief technical fox. I’m excited to tell you guys about Exponent’s alpha release, what it means for our project, and how you can get involved 🥽
Why Alpha Release, Anon?
A Quick Primer on Software Release Cycles
In software engineering, software may be released in developmental stages as shown below. As users test out the software and provide feedback in each stage, the subsequent release will contain software and bug fixes which will help improve upon functionality and the user experience (UX). This is done to mitigate any issues that may break the software.
In Exponent’s case, before we enable our product to be used by everyone, it’s best to incrementally test out the application first, to ensure everything works as expected. This is especially important for mission-critical software such as DeFi where the code that we ship is immutable and holds real value. We have our smart contract going through audit at the moment, but there are classes of issues that can only get discovered when real users are present.
Aside from bugs 🐛, UX and feedback are extremely important to us. It’s our chance to continually improve upon the UX and iterate upon future versions of the product.
So What Does Our Alpha Release Look Like?
Our engineers have been hard at work shipping an internal testnet environment; a private EVM network that simulates real mainnet blocks and transactions 🛠️ so that you can try out the application without spending real ETH. We’re now opening this environment up so that you guys can try out the app in a setting as close to the Ethereum mainnet as possible.
In the meantime, our engineers will be on standby to ensure the application works as expected and quick to respond and help out if you run into any issues. Think of this as a dress rehearsal before the real show begins 👀
How you can get involved
Here are the steps and the things you can expect in the upcoming week:
- If you haven’t already, join our Discord with this link 👉 https://discord.gg/43jv3UKUeK
- We will start collecting Discord Handles and MetaMask Addresses so we can dispense some ETH and WETH for you to play around with on our testnet application. Signup here: https://forms.gle/8FGjb5NJzHxqZfGa6
- After we have collected the first set of addresses and Discord Handles, we will share the URL to our application with a set of instructions on how you can connect your MetaMask with our environment 🔌
Oh, I almost forgot! Users who we have verified to have interacted with our testnet will receive a POAP ✨, the very first set of community POAPs on Exponent.
That’s all for now folks! Keep your 👀 and 👂 out for updates, community events. and other news in the next few weeks.
— EXA
