Introducing the New Sovryn Web App

You’ve seen the design preview series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). You’ve played around on testnet. The anticipation has been building. And now the time has finally arrived:

‍The new Sovryn web app is now live on mainnet!

You can check it out here: https://sovryn.app

But before you go, let’s recap all of the cool new features in this release.

After nearly a year in private early access testing, Zero is now fully open to the public. Borrow BTC-backed stablecoins at 0% interest by depositing BTC as collateral in a line of credit. The only cost to borrow is a one-time origination fee, which is added to your debt balance. At 0% interest, debt can be repaid at any time with no required payment schedule or due dates. Just maintain a sufficient collateral ratio to avoid liquidation or redemptions as market conditions fluctuate.

Looking to earn a profit on your stablecoin savings? Want to buy the BTC dip? Deposit funds into the stability pool for the opportunity to earn up to nearly 10% profit in BTC on every liquidation. Turn on notifications to receive an alert and cash out your BTC rewards to lock in your profit, then rinse and repeat.

Read more about how Zero works, including its benefits and risks, in the Sovryn Wiki.

With the approval of SIP-0054, Zero now has a native Mynt integration that enables users to do everything that they can do with Zero’s native stablecoin ZUSD with Mynt’s DLLR stablecoin as well. Borrow or repay, deposit or withdraw, all in a single transaction using DLLR. SIP-0054 turns Mynt into an extension of the Zero protocol so that users can seamlessly transact with DLLR.

Learn more about Mynt and DLLR in our post “Launching the Sovryn Dollar”.‍

Key to this convenient single-transaction user experience when using DLLR with Zero is the use of EIP-2612, a standard that enables users to sign a permit message offchain and bundle it with their onchain transfer transaction. With DLLR’s EIP-2612 support, gone are the days of having to sign and broadcast an approval transaction, wait for one confirmation, then sign and broadcast a second transaction and wait for another confirmation, just to complete a single transfer.

Note: Transactions that use EIP-2612 — specifically, repaying debt with DLLR, closing a line of credit with DLLR, and depositing to the stability pool with DLLR — currently do not work if you are using a Ledger wallet, either via direct hardware wallet connection or software wallet interface. Users can still perform these transactions by using the Convert page to first convert DLLR to ZUSD, then perform the intended action using ZUSD.‍

The new web app also has an easy-to-use interface for interacting directly with the Mynt aggregator, enabling DOC and ZUSD holders to convert their BTC-backed stablecoins into DLLR and vice versa. This gives holders of these stablecoins maximum flexibility in terms of which stablecoin they want to hold and how they want to participate in the BTC-backed stablecoin economy.

The Sovryn community is big on self-custody and security. This is why we regularly promote the use of hardware wallets. In the new web app, we knew there was more we could do to go the extra mile and give hardware wallets truly first-class treatment.

The simplest step we took was to make hardware wallets the first wallet option users see when they click the button to get started. We know that for users who already own a hardware wallet, directly connecting a hardware wallet is the easiest and fastest way to get started with Sovryn. Now there are even fewer buttons to click to get started with a supported hardware wallet.

Beyond the simple gesture of putting hardware wallets at the top of the list of wallet options, we have invested in our transaction confirmation modal to accommodate the unique needs of hardware wallet users. Unlike software wallet interfaces such as browser wallet extensions, hardware wallets do not offer any way for users to directly choose their own gas settings. Hardware wallets instead rely on whatever application the device is using as an interface to provide the user with a way to modify these settings. Many applications don’t think this far ahead, instead setting whatever the developer believes is a reasonable default, leaving users to cross their fingers and hope the transaction succeeds. 

We knew we could do better than to rely completely on defaults. So we put gas limit and gas price settings directly in the transaction confirmation modal under an “advanced settings” menu. It’s out of the way for anyone who doesn’t need it but right there and easy to change for anyone who does. We have still put in the research to set reasonable defaults that aren’t too high and aren’t too low so that transactions should succeed on the first try every time without requiring an exorbitant gas budget. But if you do want to change your gas settings for any reason, now you have that option.

If you don’t have a hardware wallet yet, or prefer to use a hardware wallet through a software wallet interface, that’s perfectly fine too. The new web app supports every Rootstock-compatible Web3 wallet out of the box and can even pair with browser or mobile wallets using the open standard WalletConnect.

After you have connected a wallet, you can get started by using the BTC funding option. This will provide a simple step-by-step flow for transferring BTC from bitcoin to Rootstock. Behind the scenes, this is using FastBTC — Sovryn’s home-grown federated swap protocol — to quickly make the conversion between mainchain BTC and Rootstock BTC. Whenever you’re ready to bring your BTC back home to the bitcoin mainchain, you can go out the same way you came in and send your BTC back again.

In late 2021, Sovryn developers made the decision to invest in a long-term effort to migrate our custom backend systems over to The Graph, an emerging standard to indexing, serving, and querying historical blockchain data. In August 2022, we completed this migration for the majority of backend services serving the Sovryn Alpha web app and both Sovryn users and developers have been very happy with the results.

When we started building the new Sovryn web app, we started from a “Graph-first” approach to transaction histories, building the backend exclusively using The Graph. This has enabled us to easily and efficiently build complete history tables encompassing every transaction the user can perform in the application. There are even events captured in the history table for transactions that the user does not initiate themselves, such as liquidations and redemptions related to their line of credit. This should make it easy for you to understand what is happening with your line of credit. 

Additionally, we have added a button to export each history table as a CSV file, which can then be imported and used for accounting and recordkeeping in any spreadsheet software.

In May 2022 we launched limit orders for Spot and Margin trading in Sovryn Alpha. Along with the limit orders feature we released the first version of our email notification service, allowing users to sign up to receive an email every time an important event happens with their order or position, such as a fill, margin call, or liquidation. We have built on this prior work and extended the email notification service to work with Zero so you can receive an email whenever a relevant event occurs, such as a liquidation, or a condition is met, such as the system going into recovery mode.

Timely notifications are an important part of risk management when using a leveraged financial product such as Zero. Recognizing this, we have put messages throughout the user journey inviting users to opt-in to email notifications, including a message right after the user opens a line of credit. Additionally, email notification settings can be managed on the Settings modal, accessible from the account menu at any time.

One of the most common requests we have received is for Sovryn to be made more usable on mobile devices. So with the design and development of the new web app, we have made mobile compatibility a top priority. The web app renders nicely on mobile browsers and can be used with mobile wallets, so you can manage your line of credit and check your transaction history on the go.

Need help with something while using the new web app? Click the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner of the app to open the chat widget and ask a question or request to speak to a live agent. Sovryn support team members are standing by to help you resolve your issue or take your feedback.

Interested in self-serve support options? Check out the Sovryn Wiki, where we have just about all the documentation you could want to read about the new web app and the systems working behind the scenes to deliver all of the powerful functionality you have just been introduced to.

Want to dig into the code behind the web app? Like everything we offer, the source code of the new Sovryn web app is open-source and can be found on GitHub. Have an idea for a new feature or spotted a bug that needs fixing? Check out the contributor guidelines to learn how you can jump in and help. You can even host an independent copy of the frontend to support the decentralization of Sovryn.

If you still have questions, feedback, or want to contribute to the Sovryn open source project, we invite you to join the Sovryn community, introduce yourself, and share your ideas. Visit the new Sovryn community portal to join your preferred community channel. Let us know what you think after you have had a chance to try the new Sovryn web app!

If you still have questions, feedback, or want to contribute to the Sovryn open source project, we invite you to join the Sovryn community, introduce yourself, and share your ideas. Visit the new Sovryn community portal to join your preferred community channel. Let us know what you think after you have had a chance to try the new Sovryn web app!