SundaeSwap Mainnet Launch Causes Network Congestion on Cardano

The Cardano community and the rest of the crypto industry were excited when smart contracts were enabled on the network following its Alonzo upgrade last year. However, there have been some minor issues since then.

SundaeSwap Goes Live on Cardano

Four months later, the first Cardano-based decentralized app (dApp), SundaeSwap, launched its mainnet on January 20 after a series of private and public testing.

The decentralized exchange (DEX) allows users to trade, stake, and lend tokens on the platform, with traders paying little fees and liquidity providers earning returns on their deposits.

Failed Transactions Frustrate Users

However, barely five minutes after staking went live, users who had initially been excited to join the DEX became frustrated with several platform errors and many failed transactions caused by network congestion.

As more users submitted their complaints on SundaeSwap’s Discord server, the platform’s CEO Mateen Motavaf posted at exactly 10:07 pm UTC:

“IF YOUR ORDER IS ON-CHAIN, IT WILL BE PROCESSED ORDERS ARE FAILING DUE TO CONGESTION, PLEASE BE PATIENT.”

To further address other issues, SundaeSwap hosted an AMA session on Twitter Spaces around 1 am UTC on Friday, January 21.

Seeing as there are thousands of pending orders on the platform, one user asked what effect the highly anticipated Cardano node upgrade would have on SundaeSwap.

In response, the project’s CTO Matt Ho said, “Once the change happens on the 25th, we expect greater than a 2X throughput increase from strictly the memory bump by itself as additional protocol parameters become available.”

Several other users pointed out other areas of concern, including one who noticed that an order was filled on the SundaeSwap platform even before it was launched on the website.

However, Ho replied, “There were so many things to deal with, we didn’t believe maybe, to our naivete, that someone would have constructed a transaction by hand ahead of time.”

Not a Surprise

While the network congestion on the SundaeSwap platform might come as a surprise to many, the project’s core team is not.

The team announced before SundaeSwap’s official mainnet launch that transactions could take hours or even days to be fulfilled depending on the overall load of the network.

The blog post read, “To be as transparent as we can, we want to inform you all that while orders may take days to process, everybody’s orders will be processed fairly and in the order they were received and executable.”