Vela Exchange: Powering A Next-Gen
Perpetual Derivatives Protocol
This case study explores how Pyth Price Feeds have empowered Vela Exchange to rapidly become one of the fastest growing and most popular perpetual DEXs on Arbitrum and Base.
Blockchains:
“By leveraging Pyth, we secured the fastest and most reliable oracle solution to underpin millions of daily trading volume.
The resulting user experience has set us apart in the perpetual trading ecosystem.”
Oracles for Perpetual Trading
Context
Speed, reliability, and performance make or break a perpetual trading ecosystem. Vela Exchange delivers a perpetual trading platform for traders to create leveraged positions against the performance of synthetic assets.
Challenge
Vela Exchange seeks to offer the most feature-rich, powerful perpetual DEX with lightning-fast execution. This vision requires a robust oracle solution. Legacy oracles are slow and are vulnerable for front and back running.
Solution
Pyth and Vela Exchange partnered to rapidly deploy a proof-of-concept. This successful integration supports the ultra-fast network requirements of Vela Exchange’s execution tools and is capable of handling thousands of users and hundreds of assets.
Blockchains:
Building A Perpetual Trading DEX
Perpetual trading in DeFi has grown exponentially, with accelerating demand for synthetic assets and leverage across chains.
Vela Exchange provides traders a platform for leveraged trading using a hybrid on-chain and off-chain architecture. This hybrid approach enables Vela Exchange to deliver the best of both worlds: fast execution, cost efficiency (cheap transactions), and advanced trading features.
This case study explores how the Pyth oracle empowered Vela Exchange to grow rapidly and provide competitively-priced, low-latency perpetual futures.
Perpetual Trading Needs High-Frequency, Reliable Data
In the realm of perpetual futures trading, retail traders face a multitude of challenges that impede their user experience. Chief among these challenges is the necessity for precise and reliable pricing information, an indispensable element for executing successful trades on decentralized exchanges.
The burgeoning DeFi industry, with its proliferation of DEX platforms and perpetual trading in ecosystems like Arbitrum and Base, have exacerbated this need. Even the smallest deviation in prices can result in substantial losses for traders.
Historically, DEXs have relied on slow oracles to provide price data for assets traded within their platforms. However, the negative impact from these oracles on the competitiveness and user experience of perpetual protocols has been a persistent issue. Price manipulation, latency issues, and limited data sources hinder the accuracy and trustworthiness of price feeds, leaving traders vulnerable to undesirable outcomes.
Pull Oracle for Low-Latency Prices
Vela Exchange's trading infrastructure utilizes Pyth Network as the backbone for its price feed aggregation to provide robust, trustworthy, sub-second price accuracy. Key to this integration is Pyth Network’s unique architecture.
Pyth introduces a Pull Oracle that excels in providing low-latency price updates and uptime during periods of volatility. Instead of regularly “pushing” price updates on-chain like most legacy oracles, Pyth allows Vela Exchange to request or “pull” a new price from the Pyth protocol when needed. This architecture brings several advantages to the Vela platform:
Infrastructure — support for industry leading tooling, akin to TradFi terminals, infinite trading trigger setups, one-click trading to streamline approvals, chart trading and analysis, and bot integrations.
Low Fees — one of the cheapest fee structures in DeFi perpetual trading.
Real-time Data — users can see sub-minute pricing changes if desired, data is close to real-time to support chart analysis and triggers.
Granularity — an on-demand oracle allowing for both faster trading / execution and improved risk management procedures against front running attacks and other exploits.
Fast Expansion — the rapid availability of Pyth Price Feeds on new chains enables deployment to newer chains like Base.
Diversity of Assets — the diverse rapid availability of new assets on Pyth allows Vela to list new markets within hours to meet shifting user demands.
Strong Early Adoption — the mainnet launch for Vela Exchange has seen close to $2B in volume traded and thousands of traders safely and securely.
Discussion
Since integrating with Pyth Price Feeds, Vela Exchange had enabled more than $7B in trading volume and 100K users onboarded between its beta and mainnet launches. Pyth Network supported Vela Exchange’s deployment on Arbitrum and Base in 2023.
Thanks to Pyth, Vela Exchange opened over 40 markets for cryptocurrency, forex, and metal pairs in less than 6 months. Access to a comprehensive suite of price feeds with high uptime and performance allows the Vela platform to provide a reliable 24/7 decentralized service.
Users can look forward to new markets rapidly launching on the platform: for example, Pyth enabled Vela to release new ARB/USD and SUI/USD markets just hours after those underlyings launched on their respective mainnets.
Pyth Network and Vela Exchange continue to collaborate on innovations such as trading infrastructure enhancements, price feed analytics, novel assets, and more.
Explore
Vela Exchange
You can visit Vela Exchange to explore what their platform offers and experience the benefits of Pyth Price Feeds firsthand.
Smart contract developers looking to build perpetual trading protocols can take inspiration from Vela Exchange’s integration with Pyth Price Feeds.