Journey to Zeta’s Alpha
Going into the Solana Season Hackathon, the Zeta team had a clear objective — to build and launch a binary options platform on devnet. We managed to scrape something together in three weeks. Our intention behind this was to make a statement — we are a team that believes in delivering products to our customers and our community FAST. The reality is that this means the products we initially ship will not be perfect, but we are okay with that.
This is how we got around Solana Public Rate limits in our first release.
We value producing products quickly, and we have intentionally chosen fast paced product development because it is the most effective way to navigate this new industry. Often software projects are developed in a blackbox and in the DeFi space. This is also true given the risk of hacks and other vulnerabilities that put user capital at risk. The development lifecycle in DeFi usually looks something like this: a team will build in isolation for several months, the code will be released on devnet, while the code is being user tested on devnet, the team will get an audit to ensure there are no vulnerabilities and then launch on mainnet. The problem with this approach is that we are still often stuck in a blackbox for far too long. At Zeta, we wanted to get out of this blackbox, and stay out.
Our first release was rolled out to around 50 users, this wasn’t by design, it was a constraint. The code that we wrote in 3 weeks was not scalable beyond 50 users — we actually did the math and given the rate limits on Solana’s public RPC our app would crash if we had any more users. On one hand 50 users doesn’t sound like a lot, but more importantly it was still an opportunity to let the community and other stakeholders into what Zeta is building. We aim to build a product that caters to the users and to ensure that we gather and invest in user feedback. Users told us what was broken, what wasn’t intuitive and what could be improved. With this information, we received insight into user experience and focused on iterating to improve this.
The awesome feedback we received from our alpha testers.
With this, while Zeta has silently been rolling out continuous upgrades to our Alpha users over the past month, we are now ready to roll out our Alpha to the broader community to invite even more feedback. We’ve made some huge improvements to our UI, made the app more mobile responsive and added in new features such as your recent trades and close position buttons. By rolling out our product to more users we will continue to improve. If you would like to contact us to share feedback or to discuss new ideas visit us at the Zeta Discord and post your thoughts and feelings in the Feedback channel.
Zeta release 1 vs Zeta now.
