Weeks before opening OneSwap to the public, we did something deliberate.
We invited a small group of testers waitlist sign-ups, Canton-native users, DeFi power users, and a handful of curious newcomers into a private beta. We gave them access codes, a Telegram group, and a single instruction: tell us what's broken. Tell us what's confusing. Tell us what you wish existed.
Over 30,000 USDCx in volume moved through the protocol during that beta, across two activated pools - CC/USDCx and CC/CBTC. A 2× Diamond multiplier ran the entire time for early testers. (Diamonds are OneSwap's reward system: users earn 1 Diamond for every $1 swapped on the platform.)
What followed was three weeks of the most useful product feedback we've ever received. This is what we learned.
Fees are the conversation
Within hours of the beta opening, the same question surfaced from multiple testers, in roughly the same words.
"Is this going to be the same network fee for every trade? It will be too high for small swaps, don't you think?" -Captain Snowboy
"I just tried to swap 15 CC and the fees are high. I think that's one thing to work on." Abdull
For some testers, the math kept them out of the product entirely. Dominic told us plainly:
"Personally, I haven't executed a swap yet the current wallet and gas fees have kept me on the sidelines for now. However, I've been closely following the feedback from other users."
That's the most useful kind of feedback. A user who watches without swapping is telling us something important about the gap between intent and action.
Canton's settlement model is unlike most chains DeFi users are used to. Fees behave more like a near-fixed settlement cost than a percentage of trade size which means they feel proportionate on a large swap and disproportionate on a small one. That math is real, and our testers felt it immediately.
We're working on this. Some of the solution is protocol-level optimization; some of it is interface-level.
Wallet choice is a UX decision, not a technical one
Canton has multiple wallets Console, Loop, and others and we underestimated how much that choice would shape a tester's first experience.
Console offered the smoothest swap flow. "Swap with Console is simple and smooth," one tester (BIGIG) reported after his first successful trade. But Console is also harder to access for new users invite-gated, with longer onboarding. However, good synergy with the team fast tracked access to the wallet for our beta testers with a customised oneswap/console link
Loop is more accessible, especially for users coming in from mobile, but the trade-off shows up in fees and in the signing flow. A few testers hit timeouts and signing loops trying to authenticate.
We hadn't expected wallet choice to matter this much. It taught us that "which wallet do I use?" is one of the first questions a new user has to answer and we owe them a clearer recommendation. Our onboarding now leads with that guidance rather than presenting the wallets as equivalent options.
When things broke, the team showed up
Things broke. They always do. What mattered was what happened next.
Magnetccd put it well:
"I think everything went smoothly. I only failed a few times because I set the slippage at 0.5%, but I was able to overcome that by setting the slippage to 1%. I also got stuck in the pool party once or twice, but they were refunded safely."
SamNexus said something similar:
"My experience with OneSwap has been hitch-free… from swift response to complaints of other users, I see a team dedicated to the growth and development of the project and community."
The lesson isn't that we built something perfect. We didn't. It's that the team showing up in Telegram within minutes refunding stuck swaps, walking users through fixes, asking follow-up questions turned out to be a product feature in its own right. We're not scaling out of that posture. Direct contact with users stays part of how OneSwap operates.
Onboarding is where users decide whether to come back
Watching new testers enter the beta, we noticed how many small frictions clustered at the very beginning: not recognizing that "5N LOOP" referred to Canton Loop, signing flows opening in unexpected tabs, codes appearing invalid after a moment of hesitation, browsers that don't support wallet extensions.
None of these were dealbreakers. All of them happened before the user ever made a swap which meant they shaped first impressions disproportionately.
A lot of what we shipped during beta was invisible improvement work in this zone: clearer prompts, better error states, more forgiving timeouts, plain-language explanations of which wallet does what. None of it is glamorous. All of it matters.
What testers loved
The criticism was loud which is exactly what we asked for. But the praise was instructive too.
Once testers got through onboarding, they liked the swap itself. The flow is short. The interface is quiet. There's not much to learn. Magnetccd's slippage workaround set to 1% instead of the default 0.5% became unofficial group wisdom, passed from tester to tester.
The leaderboard became its own engagement loop. Testers competed for placement, congratulated each other when names appeared, and started using "OG" as shorthand for the earliest users.
"I'd wish to surpass you on that leaderboard though. I want to be an OG myself." -SamNexus
The fun summary came from Jove:
"My experience at OneSwap was wonderful drinking coffee at night and swapping every 30 minutes."
That's the bar we're holding ourselves to at launch: a product worth coming back to at 2 a.m.
What changes at Monday's launch
Beta didn't change our roadmap. It changed our priorities within it.
Onboarding is sharper, and wallet guidance is clearer. Fee optimization is an active workstream, not a future one. The leaderboard stays, and so does direct team contact in Telegram. Tester feedback is now a permanent input into product decisions not a phase that ended with the beta.
On Monday, May 25, OneSwap opens to the public. The Diamond multiplier window will reward the earliest swappers the sooner you swap, the more your early volume counts. The product will keep changing in response to what we hear, just like it did in beta.
Thank you
To the testers who showed up early, broke things, told us about it, and came back the next day to break more things Captain Snowboy, SamNexus, Web3 Hunter, Kiraa, Zorow, Abdull, BIGIG, EMMYBLAQ, Magnetccd, Dominic, Jove, and everyone in the beta Telegram thank you. You shaped this product. The version going live is your version. We will continue to build a top notch product on Canton
Every beta tester will be recognized as a Founding Swapper on the OneSwap leaderboard at launch, in acknowledgment of the work you put in. Your aliases stay at the top, where they belong.
If you want to be part of what comes next, Monday is the day. OneSwap opens to everyone.