Announcing FluiDex: Building the first PLONK layer2 DEX on Ethereum

Dex trading, but serious

CEXs have been criticized a lot for their custody scheme. Recently, a top CEX in China ran into issues and users were not able to withdraw their funds for a month.

We believe in “Not your keys, not your coin”, and therefore want to build a better DEX for crypto trading.

Uniswap offers simple-to-use trading experience. We like the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) principle behind it. However, we believe that there still lies a more promising market in terms of serious trading. With limit/market/stoploss/FOK/IOC/AON order supports, professional traders, who are likely to manage funds of larger scale, can build their more dazzling portfolios.

Why, why, why…?

Why Ethereum

Ethereum is still the most popular public chain where tokens are traded on. People have tried building DEXs / Swaps / liquidity farmings on other platforms but none of them retain a DAU like Ethereum’s. This gives us the reason and confidence to focus on Ethereum. Cross-chain projects like Ren and Keep can take care of interoperability with assets on other chains for us.

Why layer 2

There have been DEXs built on Ethereum like EtherDelta. However they suffer from the low TPS due to Ethereum layer 1. Users will suffer from more loss when there are wild price fluctuations, if they cannot react in time. Layer 2 solutions also help save gas fees.

Why zkRollup

IDEX targets at building a high-performance DEX using rollup as their layer 2 solution as well, but makes use of optimistic rollup.

Both optimistic rollup and zk rollup compress transactions on layer 2 and thus improve TPS. Rollups also manage to avoid data availability issues in Plasma.

Unlike using validity proof in zk rollup, optimistic rollup makes use of fraud proof and requires 1~2 week challenge period. This is unlikely to be acceptable for users when withdrawing funds.

Why PLONK

Loopring shares a similar choice on zkRollup but chooses Groth16 as their proof system.

In 2019, Vitalik Buterin wrote an article explaining PLONK. PLONK is a recent developed proof system supporting universal and updateable set up. To date, PLONK is also the most performant proof system supporting this scheme.

Supporting updateable set up means that, the set up is semi-trustless: it can be considered trustless as long as at least one participant is honest. Being universal means that the set up SRS (structured reference string) can be reused for different circuits: this again further mitigate the risks introduced by multiple set-ups.

And nowadays, with optimizations, PLONK can achieve the same performance as Groth16 in some scenarios. More and more projects are actively looking into using PLONK as their proof system, including AZTEC, zkSync and Dusk.

DiversiFi shares a similar goal to serve serious traders but chooses zkSTARKs instead of zkSNARKs. The “T“ (“transparency“) in STARK means completely trustless set up. However, removing the need for SRS introduces significantly larger proof size.

Roadmap, and more coming…

We are thrilled to release a toolkit called plonkit to work with circom DSL using PLONK. We plan to release a MVP to demo in the next a few months.

We keep in our mind that we want to build a professional and secure trading platform, and our future features include:

• massive migrations to aggregate orders arross DEXs and hence offer better liquidity;
• delegated orders for quant use; and
• derivatives…

Stay tuned!