When we launched OpenRelay last October, we called it a public Alpha. Our software was brand new and it had a lot of bugs to shake out. As a platform built on openness, we wanted to put everything out in the open while we turned it into a stable platform.

During our Alpha, we changed our storage backend a couple of times. We changed Docker management backends from Docker Swarm to Amazon ECS for stability. We had issues with our ingest pipeline falling over quietly. We had cases where trouble with our Ethereum clients would cause the entire orderbook to be marked as unfunded and delisted. You can read about those issues and how we worked through them on our Github Issues page.

Launching our Embiggen Airdrop helped us flush out a lot of other issues and build a more stable system. We put several optimizations in place and pumped 27 million orders into our order book. We also added metrics and monitoring to make sure we know when things aren’t working as intended.

Technical issues aside, OpenRelay moved from being a product of the consulting firm Note G to being its own LLC. including the original founder and two additional partners.

Today we move from Alpha to Beta. We’re confident in our software, and that we have the monitoring in place to ensure that things won’t stop working without us knowing about it. We believe we can offer a reasonably reliable service that works as advertised.

The next question is when we will move out of Beta. Today we can’t answer that with a date. For us production is a high bar. It will mean that we have the technology, processes, and staffing in place to be able to offer strong uptime guarantees to our partners. We think OpenRelay is ready to be used today, but until we can promise at least a few nines of uptime we’re going to keep wearing the beta badge.

Roadmap

We’ve still got a lot coming:

We’re working on a portal site to bring trading on OpenRelay within reach of people who don’t know what API stands for.

We’re working on some plans to help people get involved with the OpenRelay community.

We’re working out the final details on our formalized Affiliate program, to reward people who build on top of OpenRelay.

We aim to support 0x v2 on Kovan prior to the mainnet launch date.

We have several other items on our roadmap to make token trading easier for everyone.

To keep up with our updates, you can: