Orbex

Orbex

Over the past year, DeFi trading has advanced remarkably—from early centralized exchanges (CEXs) that offered deep liquidity and fast execution at the cost of user custody, to automated market maker (AMM)-based decentralized exchanges like Uniswap that enabled permissionless, non‑custodial trading but suffered from slippage and limited order types; this evolved through perpetual DEXs such as dYdX, which brought derivatives and leverage on‑chain, culminating in platforms like Hyperliquid, a fully on‑chain perpetual and spot DEX built on its own high‑performance Layer 1 blockchain with a custom HyperBFT consensus algorithm.

Such design preserves decentralization and minimizes consensus latency. The motivation behind such design is due to mimic as best as possible a user experience that is similar the most to centralized exchange, while it is so, it is important to note that eventually the blocks will have to included and verified by Polkadot’s relay chain, thus the block would eventually be backed by a truly decentralized chain. Such architecture benefits from the both of the worlds - fast initial consensus with a strong finalities guarantee followed by Polkadots consensus properties.

What it does

An on-chain orderbook is a decentralized, marketplace that records all buy and sell orders directly on the blockchain, ensuring full transparency and trustless execution. Instead of relying on a centralized exchange to match trades, the orderbook stores bids and asks as on-chain data, updates them through transactions, and matches orders using deterministic logic defined in the contract. This guarantees censorship-resistance, verifiable state transitions, and composability with other protocols, while removing the need for off-chain intermediaries.

How we built it

With user experience in mind, we leveraged a low-latency solo-chain. The system design includes 4 main components:

Solo Chain
Indexer
Database
Frontend

Challenges we ran into

Storage management and real-timeness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The project. We believe that it is the future of DeFi.

What we learned

Not much :(

Why Polkadot?

Polkadot is the most scalable, secure, and resilient blockchain platform—designed for builders pushing boundaries and users who demand true ownership. Engineered for mass adoption, Polkadot brings Web3 to the world.

Polkadot gives you everything you need to build, participate, or lead in Web3. Polkadot gives builders the tools and community to turn bold ideas into real-world impact—powering everything from AI, DeFi, to Security.

By leveraging NPos staking protocol, relay chain consensus protocol, Elastic Scaling, Basti Blocks (fast blocks <500ms), high availability and interoperability out of the box, Polkadot is a perfect fit for high speed, highly available DeFi application.