Polkastarter First Pools Sold Out In Less than 30 Seconds

4 min readDec 15, 2020

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We could not be happier with the community participation on the very first on-chain day of our MVP platform. Both our first two fixed swap token pools on Polkastarter sold out in less than 30 seconds. Our website survived having 10,000+ users simultaneously accessing our Ethereum dapp. Our servers managed to hold all throughout the usage peak period. Most importantly, our technology stack was able to help a great project, SpiderDAO, get closer to realizing its dreams by helping them to raise $200,000 almost instantly!

We want to thank every participant for supporting us during our MVP launch, and also our tech team who worked tirelessly over the last months to ship an attractive product as per our roadmap. We began this Polkastarter journey by saying we would deliver a minimum viable product by the end of the year, and we did it with two weeks to spare.

Minimum Viable Product In Beta

Despite these successes, we also understand that Polkastarter is a product in beta that launched just a few hours before the SpiderDAO pools were made available. With a new product like this platform, even though we have comprehensively tested it for weeks on testnet and had the FixedSwap contract audited, we have to expect that there will be unforeseen issues. The whole purpose of this period of limited rollout of the platform is to stress test the whole environment. Our experience today was to be expected. Here’s what we have found out so far.

Addressing Minor Issues

In our analysis of the sale, we concluded that some users were able to find a workaround for the max buy limit. Having said this, in the end, and fortunately, it was not a big difference and hundreds of users were able to participate in the pools.

In summary, 84 people were able to participate in the exclusive pool for Polkastarter Token ($POLS) holders and 113 on the public one. Combined, these pools were able to raise 340 ETH virtually instantly.

How The Workaround Worked And How We Fixed It

Some users were able to go directly to the smart contract and bypass the limits that we had set on the front end. We have now implemented a simple fix so that the contribution limits are now set on-chain.

This particular workaround should not be available for the next sale on our platform, which is planned to occur in two days. Again, Polkastarter is a platform in beta. We are using this launch week to stress test the platform. We intend to iterate upon the MVP with every launch until it is robust as possible.

Next Chapter: Polkadot Migration

Looking back on our first successful day, we can confirm that some parts of this process do not really depend on us. We were not able to avoid the network delays and gas wars of the Ethereum mainnet. But that’s exactly why we chose to eventually host the Polkastarter platform on Polkadot in the first place. That preference is literally in our name.

We believe that our plan to move our smart contracts into the Polkadot ecosystem via Moonbeam (link) is going to solve many of the complications we experienced today, with the added advantage of interoperability. So stay tuned for more Polkadot-related announcements in early 2021.

About Polkastarter

Polkastarter is a permissionless DEX built for cross-chain token pools and auctions, enabling projects to raise capital on a decentralized and interoperable environment based on Polkadot.

With Polkastarter, decentralized projects will be able to raise and exchange capital cheap and fast. Users will be able to participate in a secure and compliant environment and to use assets that go way beyond the current ERC20 standard.

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