“If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” — Ratan Tata.

We are proud to announce the addition of two rockstars to the Polkadex hall of fame.

Sonja Prstec is a well-known lawyer in the world of open blockchains, someone who is on a mission to make the world borderless through her ideology that goes far beyond the ethos of the nation-state we see today. She has served as the legal counsel for web3 and will now advise Polkadex on the legal and regulatory framework in the European Union.

We are excited to announce that Sherman Lee and Alex N join the Polkadex board of advisors. Lee has been in touch with the team for close to 9 months, having known the Polkadex team from the time they were focused on Pebble consensus protocol. This distributed consensus algorithm helps to scale transaction throughput to more than 20,000 TPS, which the Polkadex team will integrate into their product based on the 2022 roadmap.

“Polkadex solves the problem of front running using a combination of feeless transactions and an intelligent application of machine learning, which got me excited!” says Lee, the founder of Ravenprotocol. This distributed AI network helps to process deep learning algorithms with chunks of data. …

We are happy to announce that Mr. Matthias Hafner from Cryptecon.org joins the Polkadex board of advisors. We believe that his knowledge in building Economic models and simulations in decentralized networks will add great value to our intellectual capital.

In the upcoming testnet v3.0 release update planned for late January; we will be demonstrating the Fluid Switch Protocol that will showcase how multiple AMMs interact with the orderbook. Mr. Hafner will help us creating simulated economic models with a mathematical proof of our algorithms.

It gives us immense pleasure to announce the release of Polkadex testnet v1.0 With this, we are proud to say that we are the first Order book based DEX to release the testnet on the Polkadot Ecosystem.

You may access it here: https://testnet.polkadex.trade

We are simulating trades from one of the largest centralized exchanges, processing about 20–30 trades per second on average for BTC/USDT. The order book is fully decentralized on-chain with a 2 second block time. 👊

In this release, the public cannot submit trades as it is a private testnet release to find the stability of Polkadex nodes. There will be frequent restarts of the testnet by our development team. The next release of our testnet will enable the public to run a node, check the blocks, and submit trades. …

DeFi rave has triggered the 2020 bull run for Crypto industry. Wherever you look, you see people trying to make AMM based DEXes. The success of Uniswap has probably made investors queuing up to invest in projects focused on liquidity mining and swap protocols. However, may we ask this question? Is this the final shape and form of Decentralized exchanges of the future?

To answer these questions, we need to go back two years into the crypto sphere — a world chocked by scalability issues with Ethereum. Smart contracts couldn’t scale to the level demanded by killer apps waiting to see the daylight to this very day. Blockchain evangelists and smart contract gurus foresaw a world run on intelligent contracts on the blockchain, but simply the “real estate” didn’t have the power to support their vision. …

One of the common problems with Decentralized exchanges is front-running. Wikipedia defines this as,

“Front running, also known as tailgating, is the prohibited practise of entering into an equity (stock) trade, option, futures contract, derivative, or security-based swap to capitalize on advance, nonpublic knowledge of a large (“block”) pending transaction that will influence the price of the underlying security.”

In DEX world, front-running happens a little differently, and rather than working on nonpublic information, you get to work with publicly available orderbook, slipping in the order at the very last minute — though technically at the very last second.

This problem does not happen in a centralized exchange because the only people who know the incoming list of orders are the owners themselves. In the case of DEX running on a blockchain, this is public data, and anyone can go through the broadcasted orders in smart contract. It takes a while for these orders to get confirmed in the blockchain. The trader exploits this situation because the orderbook is tightly coupled with the gas fees for executing the transaction. By setting a higher fee for his transaction, the trader makes a profitable trade ahead of others in the queue. …