sam.rise@sam_battenally
I'm asked about points a lot.
There’s a reason why we haven’t launched an incentive program yet. We are the first to build a fully onchain EVM orderbook that can actually compete in performance with centralised exchanges. I have deep conviction that atomic composability and fully programmable books will be a game changer, and is potentially the missing link holding onchain spot back.
However, with any new innovation there comes challenges and risks, and many of those are unknown unknowns. We are realistic about this. We aspire to build a world-class venue, but that will take time. Much to the frustration of our growth team, I’ve been adamant that we cannot launch an incentives program until we’ve reached some very important product milestones. If we’re fuelling the engine, it must perform.
Milestone 1: Core features live and stable
Onchain reduce-only GTC was a particularly curly one, but we got it live and it’s been in use for over 4 weeks. We launched with TPSL, and we had some early stability issues. Thanks to improving liquidity, latency and adding retries, TPSL is much more stables. Netted-margining is the last key core feature I had on my list. This allows for better capital efficicency when quote both sized of a book. This is will go live this week.
Milestone 2: Listing engine
Listing in an operational art form. The goal we set: the top 10 crypto assets and our first RWA listings. RWAs are the direction we want to focus, and the first listing is the hardest, particularly given we’re bootstrapping liquidity in-house. I’m excited to share, RWAs will be live on RISEx this week!
Milestone 3: Public XLP vault and quality liquidity
Early on we made the tough decision to bootstrap liquidity on the venue ourselves. At the end of the day, liquidity is the product, it’s too crucial not to have control of it’s quality. Prior to launch, the XLP vault and our market making talents had yet to be publicly tested. Being the dominant maker of a venue is an interesting challenge, typically when market making capital preservation is the undeniable priority, uptime is secondary. However, when the exchange user experience is the top priority, uptime is extremely important and wicks should be considered critical failures.
After a lot of work, I’m happy to share the 99.9% uptime target we set has been met comfortably and we have our eyes set on 99.99%.
As for depth, this will continue to improve over time. The targets we set for points are: $100k 1bps, $300k 2.5bps and $600k 5bps. Our order replacement rate has already been pretty good, so with this traders can comfortably load up a 10-20 BTC positions with a few orders. Today we’re about halfway there, but we will reach it by the end of the week. Consider this the MVP to hit our stride for growth, however, we have every intention to grow to world class liquidity levels.
Commencing
In summary, we are on track to hit all our core milestones this week. Additionally, in less than 3 months we’ve processed $2.9B in volume, secure $13M in TVL, the venue holds >$17M in open interest and the XLP vault has yielded over 50% APY. The team and I are happy with where the core features are, and we’re ready to kick off growth and shift our product focus to the features that will make RISEx unique, namely EVM Spot, AutoYield and Permissionless Portfolio Margin.
Points are here, we’re ready.
Week 1 begins Monday the 20th, 00:00 UTC. All activity up until the 20th will be eligible for retroactive points.
More details coming.
