I think the journey behind Kanaswap needs to be shared for multiple reasons. The most important reason being the kind of hard work that goes behind the scenes for coming up with a strong idea and a product built over time. Secondly, for others to understand why we did certain things the way we did. Thirdly, to give back some lessons to the community which would help others to pick up and use it during their journey of building strong products in the Solana and blockchain industry, in general.
We, as a team, have been working on Ethereum for the past 4 years. So, our knowledge of the blockchain technology and industry was good. But we had spent all this time building products and projects as a service for other clients and never a product for ourselves. We were a bootstrapped company and so the risks involved in building a product and failing, either right at the development stage or after the product had gone live and failed to get traction, was something that was too hard and too big for us to take. So we decided to bide our time. We waited for the time to be right, for the blockchain technologies, the opportunity, our technical knowledge and other factors to align before we embarked on this journey.
After a long wait of 2–3 years, the right time seemed to arrive in August 2021. Our guys were primed in terms of technical knowhow and along came Solana which was a refreshing network in the blockchain space that was dominated by Ethereum till then. With Ethereum getting crowded, with high transaction fees, low speeds and huge crowd of developers, Solana seemed to provide us with an ideal opportunity to seize the moment and build something big.
The biggest challenge with Solana was of course the technology. The way smart contracts were done was totally different from Ethereum and the tech stack used for Solana programming, Rust, was something very new for us. It was as though we were starting from scratch. We had hoped to use our knowledge of Ethereum and had expected that experience to give us a big advantage over the others but all that came to nought as we had to learn most of the related items from scratch. But we were not disheartened as we love to learn and so we began our journey of learning rust, the anchor framework (that was introduced shortly) and the new architecrure of Solana.
In this learning journey, we were helped by the enthusiastic group over at Solana and it was clear that we were welcome into the ecosystem and it was also clear how welcome we, as developers, were into the Solana group. They helped us a great deal in our journey and things would not have been half as easy without their support. A Big Thanks To Solana and their team of developers!
The initial plan was very simple, to build a DEX and then move on to other products and features. The reason why we chose to start simple was to ensure that we understood what we were doing and understand how Solana works so that it will prepare us for the bigger challenges ahead of us. We were very clear that we would not copy any of the existing code that was out there. The choice was between copying the existing code out there, tweaking them and getting to market within a month or spend a lot of time coding and learning, doing things from scratch and getting to market over a period of 4–5 months. We chose the latter approach as we believe strongly in quality and we felt that by taking the time to learn, the future products in our suite would follow soon though the initial DEX would take time to get to market.
This was, in a sense, crazy as most of the developers, like the traders, are in a FOMO stage and so they want to get to market as soon as possible while we chose to go the other way. We wanted to build a solid suite of products, from scratch, with proper security and code audits and bring in some of the practices that were well-established in the Ethereum ecosystem. We felt that this would help the whole Solana ecosystem to also grow as well. Forking existing code was avoided by us and we built things in a slow and steady manner. The Solana development community grew and it formed best practices and frameworks along the way and the fact that we chose not to fork old code helped us to build all our products and features using the latest advancements in the Solana ecosystem. We also learnt a lot along the way about how Solana works on the surface and as a protocol.
Initially, we tried to hire new devs to speed up the development process but it turned out to be a frustrating experience. Solana was new and so it was almost impossible to get rust developers who were well versed with Solana and most of the rust devs that we met did not view blockchain very highly and hence refused to work. The search was futile and a waste of time and at one stage we realised that it would be better for us to unlearn Ethereum and Solidity and learn Rust and Solana rather than trying to get in experienced developers. So we chose to learn everything ourselves which only extended the product build time and also placed a lot of pressure, financiall and emotionally, on a bootstrapped company like ours. Seeing many products take off while we continued to work hard on our own, wasn’t a very pleasant experience and it was difficult to shut off all the developments that were happening around us and ignore the thought that we may be too late. But we still stuck at it and after months of painstaking work and learning, we can now confidently say that we are ready to zoom ahead as over the last 4–5 months, our knowledge of Solana has increased exponentially and we are now fully ready to tackle all our challenges and prepare a big suite of products that has never before been built on Solana or any other blockchain for that matter.
Our first set of products, including a DEX and wallet, are on the way and they would set the base for our future suite of products which would build on this base and would be very different from any of the products that have been built before.
