To celebrate the release of the Raindex app and deployment on Flare, we’re launching a trading strategy competition with $12,000 worth of FLR in prizes.

Whether you’re new to decentralized finance or a seasoned strategist, this competition is a platform to innovate, impact, and get inspired.

Rainlang is a new, onchain language that is the native language of DeFi. It’s designed to be far easier to write than Solidity - if you can write spreadsheet formulas you can probably learn Rainlang.

Why is this important? Raindex gives you the flexibility and power usually associated with CEX trading or running bots, whilst retaining the attributes we’re all here for - it’s trustless, permissionless and decentralised. It empowers users to craft and execute trading strategies without intermediaries. It’s also completely onchain, which means users don’t need to put their funds in someone else’s hands or put their hot wallet private keys in a bot connected to the internet.

Why Flare? Flare offers a unique trust model for the oracles on their network as the data availability and integrity is provided by the validators themselves. Raindex exposes these oracles directly to traders, without needing devs. The Flare Time Series Oracles (FTSOs) words are available in Raindex, to use in your strategies.

To enter the competition you simply need to create your strategy then deploy it on the Flare network. Entries should focus on robustness of the strategy and market adaptability to stand out in the competition.

There will also be a prize specifically for technical writing, judged by Rareskills, the leading web3 educators. Submitting for this prize will also put you in the running for a full-time technical writing job with Rareskills.

Support will be given to all entrants to learn Rainlang and get their questions answered. Best of all, you get to participate in a community dedicated to pushing the boundaries of DeFi.

How to participate​

1. Join the Raindex community Telegram to get help as you put your strategy together
2. Develop a trading strategy in Rainlang through Raindex (Mac only support for now)
3. Deploy your strategy on the Flare network and deposit assets to trade
4. Share your strategy on X or Farcaster, tagging @flarenetworks and @rainprotocol. This could be in the form of a post, screenshot, video or long form writing. If you are submitting for the technical writing prize, the best would be a blogging platform like Medium.
5. Submit your strategy and the deployed strategy’s order ID (submission form coming soon)

Prizes​

1st prize - $5000

2nd prize - $2000

Best use of Flare Time Series Oracles (FTSOs) - $2500

Best technical writing - $2500

Judging criteria​

First and second prizes will be judged on overall quality, keeping in mind the following criteria:

• Overall elegance - the strategy is well reasoned and the simplest solution to the problem
• Creativity - show off your unique thinking
• Understanding of market conditions - all strategies are not applicable to all market conditions, keep in mind what conditions your strategy is meant for
• Griefing and manipulation vulnerability - think about ways that your strategy could be griefed, manipulated or exploited

Best use of Flare Time Series Oracles (FTSOs) $2500 (Flare)​

The FTSOs are decentalized oracles secured by the Flare validators. You can pull FTSO prices into your strategy by using the FTSO words in Rainlang. This prize will be awarded to the strategy with the best use of the FTSOs.

Best technical writing $2500 (Rareskills)​

RareSkills is the leading resource for advanced blockchain education. Rainlang is a new language, so there isn’t much documentation yet. This is where you come in! The best written technical article for a strategy will win this prize, the winner will also be eligible for a writing job with RareSkills. Suggestions on how to make your writing stand out are given here: https://www.rareskills.io/post/technical-writing-checklist

Judges​

David Meister​

David is an experienced developer, long time trader and inventor of Rainlang.

Thanos​

Thanos, a DeFi analyst, leverages his extensive experience trading on-chain primitives to fortify the decentralized finance ecosystem on Flare.

Jeffrey Scholz​

Jeffrey is the founder of Rareskills, has a passion for education and is an experienced developer in his own right. The RareSkills blog has significantly influenced major projects in the web3 space.

Rainlang is a pioneering project that has created a new programming language for DeFi and a new DEX, RainDEX.

We're looking for experienced developers who share our passion for decentralization and innovation, and want the experience of being part of the early team working on one of the most unique things in DeFi.

What we’re building​

Rainlang is defi’s native language, it’s an onchain language, parsed and interpreted by smart contracts. It’s compatible with any EVM and permissionlessly extensible.

Raindex is a standalone desktop app built with Tauri, that allows anyone to write, deploy and manage token trading strategies, written in Rainlang.

Who we are​

Our team is spread across the world, from the US to India. We are founded by three Australians who are now based in the UK and Tbilisi:

• David Atkinson - long-time veteran of the Blockchain space, also a co-founder of Holo and Holochain
• David Meister - Solidity & Rust developer with a long history in product architecure, the inventor of Rainlang
• Josh Hardy - engineer & designer with a creative background in music, built many web3 product frontends including NFT marketplaces and onchain art projects

Our culture​

• All of us are driven by building things we care about.
• We take seriously the principles of pragmatism, usefulness, quality and simplicity.
• Our tools are architected to support openness, freedom and embracing of different perspectives.
• Primarily asynchronous communication, over Telegram
• Focussed on growing customers and ecosystem
• Committed to small teams of very high quality

Who We’re Looking For​

Our ideal candidates are deeply ingrained in the culture and technology of decentralized finance. This is not just a job; it’s a call to those who want to be at the forefront of financial technology innovation.

We look for the following attributes:

• Professional Experience: You have a proven track record of developing applications or tools that are currently in production. Your experience demonstrates your ability to handle full lifecycle software development and deployment.
• Adaptability to Growth: You are comfortable and capable of managing and embracing the rapid growth in Total Value Locked (TVL) and trading volume.
• Commitment to Quality: You are dedicated to creating high-quality, well-tested, financial-grade code. Your work reflects your meticulous attention to detail and your commitment to security and reliability.
• Passion for Decentralization: You are not only a developer but also an active user of DeFi platforms. Your personal and professional finances reflect your deep interest and belief in DeFi's potential and practices.
• Self-Motivation and Work Ethic: You are self-driven and diligent, qualities that are essential in a remote and highly autonomous work environment.
• Practical Engagement: Before considering a position with us, you MUST deploy at least one trading strategy on Raindex. Engage with our tutorial videos, follow the steps, and assess whether this is the future you want to help build.

How We Work​

Our approach is centered around creating secure, reliable, and efficient software for decentralized finance. Here's how we ensure our standards and practices meet the challenges of the industry:

• Robust Testing Protocols: Since our software handles real money onchain and operates without admin controls, it is crucial to have rigorous testing. We implement extensive testing protocols including unit testing, fuzzing, benchmarking, and simulation within our CI infrastructure to mitigate risks from bugs and security vulnerabilities.
• Development Philosophy: The structure of our code is significantly influenced by our commitment to testing. Writing tests is not an afterthought but a fundamental aspect of our coding process. This approach ensures that our code is not only functional but also adaptable and secure. Our team members are expected to have a thorough understanding of testable code design from their professional experience.
• Design and Problem Solving: For larger projects, we prepare detailed design documents and specifications that identify key constraints and discuss potential solutions. This process helps us tackle complex problems systematically and allows for transparent and informed decision-making. Our engineers are skilled in articulating their choices and trade-offs, facilitating high-level collaboration and problem-solving.

Roles​

Role: Rust developer​

Location: Remote Job type: Full time

We are looking for experienced Rust developers who want to help create Rainlang tooling and applications.

Responsibilities​

• Generic Rust crates for tooling for Rain interpreters, metadata and the orderbook
• Modelling and data analysis for onchain orders
• Rust backend for our Raindex Tauri app
• Other standalone binaries such as the arbitrage bot

You'll have experience working with concurrency in Rust as a lot of what we are doing is fairly compute intensive but parallelisable. Bonus points if you have worked with Foundry, as we are using it as a crate for various tasks such as forking blockchains locally for fuzzing/simulations in the DEX.

Role: Front end developer​

Location: Remote Job type: Full time

We are looking for front end developers who have good experience with Typescript and front end frameworks, ideally Svelte.

Responsibilities​

• Front end for the Raindex Tauri app
• Other front end integrations for Raindex (Farcaster frame)
• Web front ends for Rain and other ecosystem projects

You'll have experience with front end web3 frameworks like wagmi, as well as the idiosyncrasies of dealing with DeFi front ends (transaction updates, decimals handling for token amounts, etc).

How to apply​

Send your resume to [email protected]

Today we’re excited to share the first release of our open source desktop app for our Rainlang powered DEX protocol, imaginatively named Raindex.

Raindex allows anyone to write, deploy and manage perpetual token trading strategies, written in Rainlang, on any EVM network.

We’ve also created an extension to Rainlang, available only on the Flare network, that allows any strategy writer to use the Flare Time Series Oracles (FTSOs) directly within their strategies.

The culmination of three years of dedicated development, the Raindex app gives you the flexibility and power usually associated with CEX trading or running bots, whilst retaining the attributes we’re all here for - it’s trustless, permissionless and decentralised. It empowers users to craft and execute Rainlang strategies without intermediaries, blending the best of both worlds.

How does this look in practice?

1. Express what you want by writing a strategy in Rainlang
2. Deposit your tokens into vaults and deploy your order
3. Sit back and relax - fillers compete for your order flow

This is a totally new kind of DEX, where traders can move past "one size fits all" AMM curves and be given total freedom in how they express their trades. It’s also completely onchain, which means users don’t need to put their funds in someone else’s hands or put their hot wallet private keys in a bot connected to the internet.

This is a community launch, so for now the contracts are unaudited. Use at your own risk and as always, please DYOR.

The app​

What can you do with the app?

As of today you can use the app to:

• Write, save and load strategies via the .rain file format
• Run monte carlo modelling and produce charts
• Deploy your strategies
• Deposit and withdraw into your vaults
• Get real-time updates on your strategies’ progress

There’s a few layers of the stack that have come together to make this happen:

• Rainlang, a new smart contract language that is itself parsed and interpreted onchain by smart contracts
• The Raindex smart contracts and protocol - this includes everything onchain as well as the fillers who actually execute orders
• Finally, the Raindex app - a fully self-hosted way to write Rainlang and interact with the protocol with no intermediaries

We see Rainlang and Raindex going far and wide, but it’s early days and therefore our first users are early adopters. For now, what does a Raindex user look like?

• They aren’t afraid of a learning curve and enjoy taking responsibility for their onchain activities if it means more security and utility
• They are inherently creative, and they’ll think of ideas for this that we haven’t
• They want to run trading or market making strategies over time, but don’t want to run any infra or bots of their own
• They value decentralisation and want to do all of the above trustlessly and non-custodially
• They join us in Telegram to share experiences so we can all learn and improve Rain together

What is Rainlang?​

Rainlang is the native language of DeFi. If you can write an Excel formula, we think you can learn to write Rainlang.

Rainlang is:

• Parsed & interpreted onchain (by a smart contract)
• Permissionlessly extensible (add your own words to the language)
• Immutable (none of the contracts are upgradable or have admin keys)

using-words-from flare-sub-parser

/* ensure that the cooldown time has elapsed since the last trade */
:ensure(
  greater-than-or-equal-to(
    block-timestamp()
    int-add(get("last-traded") 43200) /* 12 hrs in seconds */
  )
),

/* getting a quote from the Flare FTSO */
max-output: 100e18,
price: ftso-current-price-pair(‘USD’ ‘WFLR’ 3600),

:set("last-traded" block-timestamp());

The above Raindex order buys $100 worth of WFLR every 12 hours, at the current price returned by the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO). If you don’t think you could’ve written it yourself, at the very least you can probably understand it and maybe even tweak it to suit your purposes.

What other kinds of strategies can you run? Pretty much anything you can imagine… That said, we have a few ideas:

• Other flavours of Dollar cost averaging (DCA):
• Stop loss
• Dutch orders
• Portfolio rebalancing
• Market making and liquidity management
• Trend tracking trading strategies

Flare deployment and the Flare Time Series Oracles (FTSOs)​

As you may have noticed in the example above, we’re using the Flare FTSOs to make sure our order is always offering the up-to-date market price for FLR. This is a subparser available only on Flare and an example of new words can be added to Rainlang, totally permissionlessly. We’ll be further extending this subparser with new words for EMAs, bringing even more power to those writing strategies with Raindex.

Why is this cool? Flare offers a unique trust model for the oracles on their network as the data availability and integrity is provided by the validators themselves. Raindex exposes these oracles directly to traders, without needing devs.

The Flare FTSO words are not only available in Raindex, but anywhere Rainlang is being used. Anybody building DeFi products with Rainlang can use these words.

Getting started​

If you’d like to get started, check out our first videos, where you can learn how to deploy your first strategy.

If you need support or have any questions, @thedavidmeister, @dcatki or @highonhopium are always in the community Telegram group.

Today we merged the standalone version of the interpreter which ships as a mere interface from the perspective of the calling contract. New words added and significant changes to Flow usage and security model.

I've been working on converting all the interpreter work into an interface that can support standalone interpreter contracts. This will bring several benefits:

• Upgradeability by using newer interpreters in old contracts
• Smaller code size for contracts that use interpreters
• Ability to provide more opcodes in the interpreter contract
• Ability to support third party interpreters that match the interface

Let’s start with something basic. The first game currency we want to build has just a max supply. We could write that without even using the expression engine.

Introduction​

Josh has been working on a brainscan v0.0 where we we show an expression, written into a simple contract, in this case ERC20 emissions which is powered by the Rain interpreter.

The expression is written in Rain script, a spreadsheet like expression writer. A simulation runs real time to tell you the rules for the wallet connected to the site and the expression is deployable using the Deploy Emissions ERC20 button when ready.

I don't think it is immediately clear at all what it means or why it is good to have a "rain interpreter".

The EVM already has general purpose set of opcodes for smart contracts, why do we want to reinvent that wheel?

How is a Rain interpreter different to the myriad of languages like solidity, vyper, etc. that are high level, battle tested and compile to the EVM?

How can this possibly be gas efficient, useful, secure, etc.?

Everything that Rain can possibly do could be coded in Solidity (the Rain interpreter itself is Solidity) so what's the point?

As the Flow contracts progress through the QA process and test coverage improves, we can start to talk about things to do with Flow.

Yes there's all the marketplace, escrow, sale, mint type stuff you'd expect.

Maybe we can do something a little different and fun too?

One of the ongoing experiments we've been working on in our collective is a Rain-powered asset designer and marketplace. At the moment it's a "game designer" but in reality this could be applied to any kind of marketplace-as-gamified-economy.

Due to popular demand, I've recorded a demo of how you could use the Game Designer POC to quickly create a system of game assets, where the economy itself could be considered a game.