The first glimpse of our system is finally live on Moonbase Alpha, the testnet network for Moonbeam 🚀

The contracts and the UI are now open for everyone to look into and test our new liquidity provisioning mechanism. Just head over to beta.zircon.finance to check it out!

The beta is open for everyone, but as a token of gratitude to our early community, we are airdropping a nice little stash of DEV to those who signed up as we speak. This is the Moonbase gas token, completely equivalent to ETH or GLMR on mainnet. Getting started like this is super easy, but if you didn’t sign up before launch to get the distribution, we explain how to use the faucet below.

In the meantime, let’s take a tour of the beta, shall we?

How does it work?

The first page of the Zircon app is quite simple: just a good old AMM DEX.

We didn’t really change anything from Uniswap V2, so it should all be familiar. Just select the token you want to swap, the token you want to swap into, and set the amount. 

You have a selection of Moonbase native test tokens to use, and we aim to provide more tools to get creative with your swaps (to stress out the system) a bit later.

But if you go to Pool, that’s where all the magic happens.

With our unique Pylon system you can supply liquidity to the pools with just one token and one exposure. If you supply GLMR, you’ll only care about its own price, and if you supply USDC, you’ll again only care about its price (well, mostly inflation).

On Moonbase these tokens become DEV, ERTH, UNS MOON and other dummy tokens. That’s the power of the Pylon system, it works with literally anything.

How do you add liquidity?

In most cases you’ll just need to input the amount of tokens and hit send.

This automatically uses the Sync method we explained in our docs. Pylon simply aggregates liquidity from participants in a special reserve and sends it in the pool whenever there is a match.

More advanced options include the Async 100% and Async 50/50. These bypass the reserves and immediately supply liquidity to the underlying pool. The only difference between the Async methods is the supply method. 

With the 100% option, you send one token to receive either a Float or Anchor share. This option naturally involves slippage because it sells your liquidity against the pool. It then supplies it 50/50 to the pool but only gives you Anchor or Float shares. To avoid the slippage, you can use Async 50/50 and take care of balancing the assets yourself.

What else can you do on the Beta?

You can play around putting and removing liquidity in different ways, for example. You can try swapping and seeing what happens when the price of a token changes and how Pylon reacts. Basically, try to break the system!

Our goal now is to complete all the features required for launch and ensure that the beta has no bugs. We will release a form to submit any kind of bug and feature request, and update our PoinZ system to ensure the testers get recognition for their efforts.

Most of all we’re looking for feedback from developers and whitehat hackers. All contributions that improve the safety and reliability of the Zircon Protocol will be greatly appreciated!

Head over to beta.zircon.finance to test the beta. And don’t forget to join our Discord, follow us on Twitter and Subscribe on Substack.

Here’s a list of useful resources to get you started:

Getting DEV

If you didn’t get our initial distribution of DEV tokens, you can get some from the Moonbeam faucet.

Go to their Discord channel, search for the #moonbase-faucet channel, and type !faucet send [your ETH address]. You should then receive 5 DEV to start using the Zircon Beta.

Adding Moonbase to Metamask

Head over to Metamask settings, scroll down to Network -> Add Network.

Copy the following parameters:

Name: Moonbase

New RPC Url: https://moonbeam-alpha.api.onfinality.io/public

Chain ID: 1287

Currency Symbol: DEV

You now should have Moonbase as a selectable network, make sure to use it when connecting to our Beta.

Getting tokens other than DEV

To get some testnet tokens like ERTH, MOON etc. you can swap them from DEV on Moonbase’s Uniswap test deployment.