Author: Matthew Roberts (matthew@roberts.pm)
Date: July 1, 2017
Whitepaper: 0x white paper v1.pdf
The 0x Project is an attempt to introduce a decentralized exchange protocol for ERC-20 tokens in the Ethereum world. The exchange focuses on building a system that can be used to incentivize users to run servers that will serve as order books to match orders within the system.
The 0x Project defines a peer-to-peer network of order book servers who are incentived to provide the service by receiving fees when a user elects to use their provided match.
This design presents multiple issues.
To progate open orders, the protocol specifies a broadcast algorithm where peers submit an order across the entire network. This routing algorithm is necessary to ensure that every order book server has the same amount of liquidity but it means that the protocol cannot scale to high transaction volumes.
0x doesn’t define enforcible matching. It is possible to submit an order across the network that is filled by multiple people (partially or in full) before a user has had chance to fill it themselves.
Since orders are filled asynchronously, order servers have no way to stay up to date with matches except to watch transactions confirm on the blockchain. This creates a race condition where users race to fill an order, wasting resources across the network and consuming unnecessary Ether as fees in the form of rejected on-chain transactions.
A standard limit-based order book works by sorting all the sell orders from lowest to highest and all the buy orders from highest to lowest. The sell orders can then be put next to the buy orders to tell traders the bid-ask spread - a measure of the difference between the lowest price a seller is willing to sell at and the highest price a buyer is willing to buy at.
The bid-ask spread is useful because it can be used to ensure traders get access to accurate pricing information, knowledge of liquidity, and so fourth. But pricing information in 0x cannot be determined because matching is unenforcible. A person may indicate to a matching server they are after a certain trade but there is no part of the protocol that determines whether they go through with it.
This means that pricing cannot be determined since all open orders in the order book cannot be matched. Another consequence of this is that traders can never be ensured that they will get the best possible price for an order because they cannot be guaranteed to match against the tip of the order book.
0x defines an incentive system where matching servers are rewarded a fee from a user if they use a match that it provides. The issue is that for this to occur the matching server needs to store all broadcast orders and it has no way to guarantee that a match that it offers up will end up being used by a trader.
The consequence of this means that there is no way to ensure that a match server in 0x will be paid for their service. The protocol does not define any incentives for the cost of bandwidth, disk space, and so fourth which provides a poor reason to run the software.
The 0x token doesn’t make sense in this context.
Use a single server for matching. To keep the system decentralized, the server could be selected via a random lottery protocol. You could define an incentive system that requires a bond to participate in the lottery. Winning the lottery would entitle a user to act as a matching server which is then used by everyone else in the network.
Use 3 of 3 multi-sig in the virtual swap transactions. The three signatures defined are the bidder, the asker, and the matcher. The asker provides a signature to the match server to open the order. The match server offers up a match to a bidder and locks the match for N minutes. The bidder signs the match locking it in. The match server provides the final signature and the bidder publishes the match to the contract which checks whether the deposits are correct and all signatures have been provided.
To ensure that a matching server has the resources necessary to provide a high quality of service to the network, a system could be devised to audit its bandwidth which could also be part of the lottery protocol random selection. Based on these numbers, matching could be shared between as many servers as necessary, who would each have a guaranteed stake in the reward for providing matching.
Decentralization is preserved because anyone can participate to be an order book provider. Sybil attacks are mitgated by requiring a large bond. For more information look at the design in the TruthCoin white paper since it deals with similar problems.
Scalability is improved because flooded orders are no longer required. Orders are instead submitted directly to public servers that everyone agrees to use.
Because matching is now enforcible and a single matching server is in control at any given time, the matching server is guaranteed that it gets paid for providing its service. The chances of a single matching server DoSing the network could be reduced by having a redundant server with a shared reward system.
In a full DDoS, users could vote to change the server responsible for matching. This random lottery protocol would define the validity of the matching signatures within the exchange contract code.
Enforcible matching allows the order book to be sorted and organized more efficiently, thereby guaranteeing traders get the best price with accurate pricing information. The idea allows for efficient syncing:
Since orders are sorted it means the most valuable orders can be synced first when moving the order book to a new matching server. This means that the entire order book doesn’t need to be moved all at once for a new matching server to have initially useful information.
This design ensures that the order book is synced, and it may be possible to create a provable chain of trades on top of this where moving the order book to another server is provable and unlocks all the fees earned by the previous matching server.
This could be accomplished quite easily if the server builds onto a hashed chain of orders and signs every new open order as a new link in the chain. Breaks in the chain are provable, the state easily stamped, lying would be provable on chain since any user could refute a link or refute the depth of the chain.
This design avoids race conditions because matching is enforcible and multiple people aren’t racing to fill the same order. Consideration of DDoS attacks, cryptographically provable order book syncing with atomic incentives, and proof-of-bandwidth need more work but I offer these suggestions for open consideration.