Hello! My name is Daniel and I’m a recent hire on our Growth team. I’m really excited to tell you about all the dev updates that have happened this past month.

0x Mesh

Last month, our engineers published the architecture doc for 0x Mesh, a peer-to-peer network for sharing orders that will lower the barriers for developers wanting to access 0x liquidity. Since the spec was released, our engineers have been busy working on the implementation. Some of the technologies in 0x Mesh include LibP2P from Protocol Labs, the floodsub pub-sub transport layer, and LevelDB as a fast disk-based key-value store.

Developer Experience

As of now, all cancellations for an open orderbook implementation touch the blockchain, which can be costly. To address this issue, we added Coordinator support to @0x/contract-wrappers so that it's as easy to fill/cancel a coordinator order as it is an open orderbook order. Here are some other interesting updates from the DevEx team:

We began working on an overhaul of the developer section of our website. Stay tuned for more on this soon!

As part of our efforts to increase developer adoption, we have been working with our protocol team to create helper smart contracts that provide 0x utility methods to developers in any language. This includes AssetData encoding/decoding and 0x transaction encoding/decoding.

Protocol

On the protocol side, we have been busy refactoring and improving 0x smart contracts. First of all, we implemented “Rich Revert Reasons”. This allows us to give additional information when a 0x fill transaction unexpectedly reverts through some new ABI-encoded revert types. This will not only allow developers to create more robust applications, but it will also allow developers to debug less without having to rely on external libraries. Check out the ZEIP here.



Alongside revert reasons, we have added new signature types that allow entire orders to be passed into an order’s signature validation function. This could be used to automatically invalidate orders that are priced too far away from an on-chain price feed, for example. More information about the implementation can be found here.



Alongside what was mentioned earlier about being language-agnostic, we added a library for more easily interacting with the different asset types supported by 0x protocol. This should allow for better multi-language support within the 0x developer tool set.



Finally, we added support for two new order signature types to orders: SignatureType.OrderValidator and SignatureType.WalletOrderValidator . You can read more about it here.

Governance + Research

On the research front, we released a proposal for stake-based liquidity incentives! The team has been working on this proposal for months and is eager to receive feedback. As someone who recently joined the team, it was great to see the commitment of our researchers in “doing the right thing” by building a system that will benefit the entire ecosystem in the long-term.

Proposal for Stake-based Liquidity Incentives

If the article is a little too technical, check out this presentation by Peter Zeitz for a higher level overview. If you are interested in the topic, I suggest you dig into the AMA we hosted on our Subreddit here. We aim to include ZEIP-31 in 0x protocol v3.0 in Q3 2019.

Growth

Thanks to Francesco, our beloved 0x Instant now supports ERC-721 tokens! Not only is the integration extremely simple, but the UI is really pretty out-of-the-box.

Ecosystem

One of the ways that the 0x team supports the growth of the 0x ecosystem is through its Ecosystem Acceleration Program. You can think of the 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program as an Accelerator that offers financial, technical, product, and marketing support to jumpstart your business, open-source project, or research initiative on 0x. We’re proud to be supporting teams including:

We also want to congratulate the Hummingbot team on their launch! Hummingbot is an open-source software client that allows anyone to create and customize algorithmic trading bots for market making on decentralized exchanges. As a Hummingbot user, I can attest to how easy it is to get started market making on exchanges such as Radar Relay!



Finally, we want to give a shout out to 0x relayer Flux, the first peer-to-peer platform for derivatives on startups. Flux provides a simple and intuitive way to trade derivatives based on startup milestones, funding, and much more! Learn more here.

Community

We also had a fair amount of community engagement this month!



The Bay Area Young Venture Capitalists (BAYVC) Meetup, sponsored by Sierra Ventures, happened on April 25th at Galvanize in San Francisco. Attendees had the opportunity to network with the leaders in the DeFi space, as well as learn more about the recent trends in blockchain. This could never have been possible without Clay, Mel, and Brent!



Jason Somensatto, our Strategic Legal Council, was part of the “FS Vector” podcast, where he was asked to speak about regulation in the crypto space. You can listen more of the podcast here.



Clay was part of 2 panels:

“Wyre Talks” where he was asked to discuss what success looks like in the DeFi space in terms of democratization for both market access and creation.

“CryptoMondays”, where he discussed business development in the blockchain space.

New Faces

We are honored to have 3 new faces among us: