We shipped a new site!

Two weeks ago, I posted this:

Yesterday we went live with metadao.fi, which solves the “snappiest” part of the equation and may help with the easiest-to-understand part as well.

By the numbers:

• Before, price charts took ~5 seconds to display. Now they take ~0.2 seconds.
• Before, the trade page took ~0.7 seconds to load. Now it takes ~0.35 seconds.
• Before, transactions were taking up to 30 seconds to land. Now they should be landing within 3 seconds.

For the visual learners -

Charts went from not being loaded 6 seconds in…

To being there 200 milliseconds after you load the page:

This is important because speed and snappyness are the cornerstone of a good trading experience. As a trader, I want to feel like I’m in control when I’m trading. And part of feeling like I’m in control is seeing my interface respond quickly when I tell it what to do.

While it’s harder to quantify, we think the new UI is simpler. Many have told us to “make it more like Polymarket” -

So that’s what we’ve done:

There’s a reason aside from speed and UX that I’m excited about the new interface, though: complexity.

We hacked together the legacy UI from an office in Kuala Lumpur as we raced to ship the product before running out of the $250,000 that Colosseum invested in the DAO.

A grainy picture of our KL office, with me not pictured ofc ;P

We succeeded at shipping, but “hacked together” is the operative phrase. The codebase became messy and complicated. While not a problem in of itself (the codebase, after all, isn’t the product), this made it hard to add new stuff. KPI-based markets, which should have taken 2 weeks to ship, took ~2 months.

Thankfully, that’s all solved now. The codebase is now 10x simpler (literally, we went from 56,000 lines of code to 5,000 lines of code), which should make it easier for us to iterate on the product quickly and work on things we’re excited about, like a launchpad for futarchies:

So yeah, that’s it! We still have some features to port over to the new site, so the old one can be accessed at legacy.metadao.fi in the interim. And as always, feedback is hugely appreciated.