Alpin emphasized that hyperscaling a decentralized exchange (DEX) entails achieving fast, cheap, and high-throughput operations. Specifically, he defined 'fast' as completing transactions in 250 milliseconds or less—a target that, while ambitious, he believes can be surpassed. 'Cheap' refers to ensuring minimal or no costs for virtually all operations, especially during times of high load. 'High throughput' involves designing systems capable of executing tens of thousands of trades per second, with a vision to exceed even these figures.
2. Importance of Minimizing Onchain Footprint
Alpin articulated the necessity of reducing the onchain footprint of exchanges to enhance efficiency. He pointed out that the consensus mechanism represents a significant cost center in the crypto ecosystem, limiting throughput significantly. By examining cases such as DYDX, he illustrated how offloading limit orders to validators could drastically improve performance—suggesting a potential increase of up to 100 times in throughput by avoiding unnecessary consensus on the majority of orders, which often remain unfilled.
3. Strengthen Trader Guarantees
To enhance trader guarantees, Alpin proposed a novel mechanism that allows multiple validators to contribute to block creation, counteracting the control a proposer has over transactions. This approach is intended to mitigate risks, such as the potential for a proposer to censor orders or execute them at unfavorable prices. He underlined that by ensuring more participants in the block-building process, the system could uphold better integrity for traders—creating a more reliable trading environment.
4. Introduce Privacy for Enhanced Security
Alpin advocated for the incorporation of privacy measures to protect transactions from censorship. He stated that even a minor consensus requirement can lead to vulnerabilities if a proposer can overlook a validator’s vote. To address this, he introduced a privacy mechanism that encrypts votes, thus obscuring them from the proposer—ensuring that censorship is more challenging. This ability to mask votes, he argued, is crucial for maintaining the integrity and performance of the trading system.
5. Design a Trusted Execution Environment
In his roadmap, Alpin mentioned enhancing performance by utilizing a trusted execution environment (TEE). By efficiently managing the process of vote encryption and decryption within this secure environment, the transaction delays typically associated with these processes can be significantly minimized. He proposed that in case TEE fails, the mechanism should default to a threshold encrypted system, maintaining robustness and performance under all scenarios.
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