Preproduction Testnet (Preprod 🚀 )
The Optim Team would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has interacted with the Preview Testnet Liquidity Bond application since launch a few weeks ago. We’ve had more than a thousand individual users that interact with the system both issuing and buying bonds.
This activity resulted in about two hundred feedback forms received from users wanting to share their experience, thoughts and suggestions with the team. This has been tremendously helpful for our developers to find and fix bugs and implement improvements that enhance the overall user experience. We cannot overstate how much we appreciate the support we’ve received from the Cardano community in this endeavor.
With that being said, the next step in our journey to Mainnet Launch is to deploy the Liquidity Bonds application on the Preproduction testnet network.
A common question is “what is the difference between the two networks”, so we thought we’d share some context and highlight why we need to test the application on both testnets.
Preproduction Testnet Features 👇
The main difference is the global network parameters, with Preproduction testnet accurately modeling the actual Cardano mainnet ledger.
The Preview testnet uses a 30 minute epoch period, compared to the five day period used on mainnet. This is to speed up the iterative nature of development, allowing teams to test core functionality over longer network timeframes. This is the reason why Preview testnet bonds would reach maturity in 36 hours (as opposed to a whole year for the entire 72 epochs), thus allowing the full interaction with all aspects of a bond within a couple of days time.
In comparison, the Preproduction testnet mirrors the exact same network parameters as mainnet, allowing developers to test out applications one last time in the same environment they will be deploying on mainnet. Accordingly, our Preprod application will use five day epochs, but we have decreased the time to maturity to 10 days instead of a full year in order to allow testing of all parts of the application.
Similarly, we’ve increased the size of the bonds from 1,000 ADA to 1M ADA as it will be in its final live iteration. Given that one can only get 10,000 testnet ADA from the faucet daily, this will take at least a hundred users to fill up an entire bond. With the support we’ve already seen on the Preview testnet this shouldn’t be an issue and we expect it will take a few days to fill a bond and launch it.
The guide we wrote for the Preview testnet can still be used to interact with the Preprod testnet, with the only change being to point your wallet to the Preproduction network instead.
That guide can be found at the following link: https://optim-labs.medium.com/testnet-guide-b4cba6c452d0
We once again want to thank the community for the huge amount of support we’ve received thus far and can’t wait to see you all on mainnet next month!
