The Cryptonomist interviewed Ross Middleton, CEO of DeversiFi, a decentralized exchange that was born about 1 year ago from a “fork” of Bitfinex.
With Middleton we spoke about the development of DeFi, ETH 2.0. and Ethereum scalability and more.
Has your DEX hybrid model with zk-STARKS encountered any problems so far?
Everything has worked very well so far. We ran a significant stress testing program prior to the launch where we simulated 300k matched trades, therefore we are confident in the system’s ability to handle 9000 TPS at scale
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Over the last week, we stress tested the new DeversiFi with hundreds of thousands of orders from 200 ‘fake’ traders to try to break the system and its supporting services… pic.twitter.com/yGvrAJ2FPH
— rhino.fi (@rhinofi) June 2, 2020
What parameters do you take into consideration when listing a token?
DeversiFi is catering for professional traders, therefore we list the large ERC20 tokens that are likely to be traded by large traders. We are currently focusing on ensuring incredible liquidy for ETH/USDt and wBTC/USDt
Do you foresee an auto-listing system in order to be decentralized in that respect too?
DeversiFi, when it was known as Ethfinex, was one of the first exchanges to utilise the Kleros Token Registry to curate token projects and conduct due diligence on tokens prior to allowing the community to vote on them to be added to the exchange. We hope to return to a similar process
The platform has a second layer to manage an impressive number of TPS, how will it be affected by ETH 2?
ETH 2.0 will not impact the TPS on DeversiFi, but may bring down gas costs, which may in turn allow DeversiFi to settle more batches and improve withdrawals times from the L2 exchange smart contracts.
All transactions are off-chain and then uploaded to the blockchain, could this lead to data loss?
In the disaster scenario where both DeversiFi and StarkWare were to go offline, traders can ask members of the Data Availability Committee to publish proofs of the DeversiFi account balances to the Ethereum blockchain, allowing traders to withdraw from the exchange. This protects against loss of funds. You can read more about the DAC here.
Although the platform may be privacy ready, does it still have to comply with the laws and regulations of the various countries?
Yes, DeversiFi fully complies with the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. DeversiFi does not serve USA residents, is for crypto-to-crypto trading only and does not take custody of user’s funds.
How is the governance token evolving to participate in the necDAO?
NEC token holders can stake their tokens into the necDAO to have a say in the control of 17k ETH and make suggestions regarding the running of the DeversiFi exchange.
What do you think about the recent phenomenon of exchanges underestimating or overestimating their trading volumes?
It unfortunately is a well documented problem with some centralised exchanges.
Do you think that ETH 2 is the best solution to scale this blockchain, despite the timing?
Eth 2.0’s combination of staking and sharding is a very good approach to scaling the underlying blockchain. As the main Ethereum blockchain scales, so will the amount of on-chain transactions, and therefore I expect that there will always be some sort of congestion during peak times.
Therefore it is still vital that transactions are taken off the main Ethereum blockchain by Layer Two approaches such as what DeversiFi is implementing with StarkWare zero-knowledge STARK technology
What do you think about DeFi and platforms like RealT that allow the management of real assets?
I have not heard about RealIT unfortunately, but platforms such as Melon are trying to reshape the traditional fund management space. Connecting asset management platforms up to DeversiFi will be incredibly powerful, as traders can always maintain control of their funds, whilst access deep & high-speed liquidity
Does DeFi depend too much on DAI and MakerDAO?
I think DAI and MakerDAO are great, but to scale we need more DeFi platforms to add less-decentralised assets such as wBTC and USDt as there is demand from traders.
Which is the most promising DeFi blockchain besides Ethereum?
I think that Polkadot and Cosmos are very interesting