seasons: what's next?

gm gardeners, 👨‍🌾

As we near the end of Season 2, we want to reflect on the first two seasons, discuss the approach we took, and how this will influence the future of the seasons program.

Seasons so far

The seasons program serves as a gateway for new users to enter the walled garden. As the project evolves, the program will shape according to the changing needs.

Seasons 1 and 2 came at a stage where the imperative was to make the product robust, test development pipelines, and streamline support processes. So, these seasons were designed as point based games to incentivise repeated actions and workflows on Garden that were in need of stress testing.

Season 1 was the first large scale test of the front-end components, filler mechanism, and the underlying atomic swap contracts. The gradual and exponential growth of users/volume created the perfect environment for testing. It helped us identify a major bottleneck in our system, the filler was only able to facilitate 10 orders per block. As you'd expect this caused throughput delays during high traffic further throttled by unpredictable Bitcoin block times that could take up to an hour sometimes. Fixing this led to a key innovation for Garden in the form of order batching using the replace-by-fee transaction policy, which meant that you can batch any number of orders in a single block.

We tested this and a revamped filler mechanism during Season 2 and we're happy to share that we have experienced ZERO downtime on the filler side. Garden crossed $650 M lifetime volume today and has experienced ZERO security incidents during this time. That is to say that the current version of the product is stable and robust.

Evolution from season 3

The next season will be launched when the next big update is made to the application. Season 3 will not be points based and will use the more straightforward approach of instant $SEED rewards on trades using payment channels. This change is warranted for two reasons, Garden is at a stage of growth where that kind of gamification is no longer necessary, secondly, as circulating supply is limited, the one-time airdrops can cause a significant supply shock to the token as opposed to a gradual release.

There are no changes to the token distribution, which means 65.4% of the total supply will still be equitably allocated to the community.

Timeline after season 2

Season 2 will end on February 21st at 12:00 PM UTC. Staking will go live in the coming weeks after the completion of audit from Trail of Bits and incorporation of any feedback from their side. We will announce the release date of the feature after the audit is completed. We are very excited for staking as it introduces new pathways to utilise your SEED and is the first step in nourishing the walled garden.

The Season 2 airdrop date will be determined after the community vote in the townhall. Coming to Season 3, we will be reinvigorating the rewards program with a fresh experience and importantly something that creates more value for the Garden and the gardeners in it. We have already laid the foundations for it and we can’t wait to share it with you.

About Garden

Garden is the fastest way to swap BTC and WBTC, providing a 10x improvement over existing options. It is decentralized, trustless, audited and not a real garden.

Join our garden townhall to chat with other gardeners about soil acidity and trimming bushes.