Vela Exchange: Ending 2023 Strong

London, UK, October 11th, 2023, BTCWire

The Vela Exchange vision was always to be the next home of DeFi.

This means not just having a ‘CEX-like’ experience but to be a place where the next wave of users can trade and not even realize they are on a self-custody driven exchange — because the experience is just THAT good.

With this vision comes the next phase of Vela Exchange. Q4 of this year brings upon strengthened infrastructure, an upgrade to core trading mechanics / fees to ensure synthetic price feed based perpetual trading is highly competitive with CEXs, and preparation for the next version of Vela coming up Q1 of 2024.

Building the Future of DEX Infrastructure

What has set Vela Exchange apart from all DEX competitors is our willingness to invest into core infrastructure and stay ahead of our competition. While we have seen quite a few DEXs become inspired by our marketing and tech, it is incredibly important to keep innovating — the market does not wait.

Over the past quarter, Vela Exchange has seen several major upgrades, including but not limited to:

• Chart trading enhancements, allowing for sophistication to operate directly from Trading View visualizations beyond any other DEX
• Social Trading, an early foundation complete with analytics to track friends, competitors, and learn from the Vela Exchange market
• 1 CT, empowering users to rapidly operate without cumbersome chain approvals
• Bot platform integrations, equipping traders with automated trading via bot partners including Astrabit or via Vela Exchange APIs for the technically savvy.

Over the next months, we expect to make some significant changes to infrastructure to better support traders. These improvements come from both enterprise standards and many conversations with real Vela Exchange users.

Social trading infrastructure will be one of the main areas of focus, with an entire layer of usability to allow chat, copy trade, competitions, and achievements to connect traders to a degree not found on any DEX on ANY chain. This layer will connect current social features to brand new features and will include social incentives that utilize the $VELA token.

1-click trading and the experience it brings is an amazing technical feat, but we believe there is still more to be done. Our team is currently working on prototypes to abstract the wallet connection and management process further, and have several partners to bring this POC to reality.

Core automation for risk and fees will also be a major focus. While there is basic automation and logic for OI, funding / borrow rates, etc, we will be adding on more sophisticated intelligence to make sure traders receive the most competitive rates possible while mitigating the possibility of front-running, market manipulation, and other attacks.

Fees have been a common discussion point for traders in the DEX space, especially due to seemingly low fees offered by CEXs. A reminder for traders: While CEXs on paper have cheaper fees, remember that there are no on-chain mechanisms to verify things like spread or slippage on centralized entities. Because of the transparency of decentralized exchanges like Vela Exchange, you can track exactly why and how much fees are impacting your trades.

However, this doesn’t mean DEXs can’t do better for traders.

Vela Exchange has already lowered spreads by over 50% on many assets, and will be testing reduced fees on select assets starting in October.

These changes will go through a short promotional period and are subject to change as more data comes in — but be assured that we will be working hard to make sure our trading community has an edge on Vela Exchange.

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We will also be reducing the amount of $VELA (and/or $esVELA) tokens required to receive discounted trading tiers, illustrated by the matrix below. These changes will go live in Q4, and are part of expansive discussions and proposals to enhance the utility of $VELA tokens.

Our contributors believe that next-level transparency and fairness will be the standard to directly compete with centralized exchanges and will continue reviewing all mechanisms to ensure we stay ahead of the market.

2024 and Beyond

The New Year brings new possibilities, and core contributors are busy working with community leaders and partners to finalize plans for 2024.

One of the focuses for 2024 will be improving and extending the utility of the $VELA token in concert with new features and upgrades to current features.

While discussions are still in the proposal stage, a few themes are top of mind:

• Real yield and balancing $USDC rewards with buybacks
• Spot market integration and extending $VELA rewards to this new functionality
• Layering in $VELA and $esVELA requirements to ‘purchase’ advanced features including but not limited to automation, participation in gated competitions, analytics, etc
• Adding in token rewards for participation within in-app social features

We encourage our community to provide any feedback or recommendations on utility. Our product process heavily involves trader / liquidity provider conversations and we can’t wait to formalize more of what 2024 brings.

The close of the year will bring some very interesting developments both for DeFi and Vela Exchange, and we believe working methodically to keep building in challenging times will prove to be the most effective strategy to come out as a market leader in the perpetual trading and overall DEX space.

To all of our supporters — thank you.