Apr 30, 2021
Review of the Velox Beta Launch
As the Velox beta has been publicly released for a few weeks now, the team thought it pertinent to openly discuss the successes and challenges we’ve found throughout our community beta testing. These include addressing failed transactions, UI hick-ups, and the massive effort the entire development team is making to efficiently deploy improvements. Before we start, the Velox Global team would like to thank our users for constructively testing, critiquing, and encouraging the Velox team in their continued efforts at improving this revolutionary platform.
Prior to the public release of Velox we recognized that, while we were confident in our understanding of the systems operability, there were undoubtedly going to be unforeseen bugs which pop up. This is a natural occurrence when thousands of users across the globe access a brand new platform. That being said, the initial launch far exceeded our expectations in terms of completion success and usability. There were zero major failures, zero transaction errors which could not be addressed, and the overarching reception of Velox was highly positive. This is not to say all transactions succeeded, but absolutely none were irrevocably lost. Fundamentally we found that Velox’s initial release helped promote the success of our users therefore making the beta launch an overall success!
As the platform picked-up, however, we found system adjustments which needed to be made in order to improve Velox’s performance. Let’s dive into a couple of these adjustments so that you have a good understanding of what Velox has been doing and how it will improve in the very near future:
- Dynamic Transaction Threshold — Following the initial announcement of Velox in December, there was a little-recognized feature on the UI called the Dynamic Transaction Threshold (DTT). This is a feature that allows a person to enter a buy or sell position and instructs Velox to only buy or sell up/down to the user defined level. For example, if you enter a buy strategy for a V-token at $10 or less / token and the price drops to $9.25, Velox will buy enough tokens to raise the price of the V-token to $10/token and then wait for the price to fall again below $10/token to purchase the rest. This feature comes in handy in LPs which have super low liquidity so that your buy order does not raise your average token price to $13/token, for example. This feature will have far reaching implications on blockchain networks which have negligible transaction fees. The initial Velox release featured a beta-version of the DTT which would halt a transaction if the buy/sell moved the resultant token price beyond what the user had entered. This is manageable for highly liquid pairs, but resulted in a large amount of failed transactions on newly seeded or low liquidity pools. We have removed the DTT-beta, are adjusting feature parameterizations, and will be adding a checkbox for users to opt into a refined version of this tool.
Front Running Bots — A critically defining feature of Velox, which is presently undergoing finalization, is the dynamic gas price sourcing and adjustment tool. This feature is what allows Velox to not only calculate the price of gas necessary for a transaction to execute first, but also adjust gas mid-order submission. By doing so, Velox can proactively mitigate the impact of front running bots on DEX traders. We’ve found that, while efficient, the beta version of the gas price adjustment tool was limited in its precision and deployment efficacy. As a result, orders were failing at a rate higher than anticipated. This feature is in its final stages of improvement and we expect the perfected mempool gas price estimation and gas price adjustments to be released this May. This will greatly improve overall transaction completion rates.
- Token Allowance Requirements — We have had a minority of customers who have not been happy with allowances on Velox and have not understood what function it serves in addition to why we set it up as such. Velox primarily requires allowances for two major reasons: as a user-facing security feature and to allow 24/7, non-custodial transactions. Many platforms request unlimited access to a token they interact with in a certain wallet. Even though this is easily instituted, it opens up the wallet to limitless smart contract exploits for every token they have approved. In order to better protect our users we require they approve a certain amount of tokens to be accessible by Velox at any given time. In addition, if allowances were not built into the Velox system, Velox would have to take custody of tokens through a supplementary smart contract or have access to a users private keys to guarantee order issuance. Since security and privacy is foundational to our design ethos, we found signing a gas-free strategy allowance as the best option for being able to execute orders on behalf of our users.
- Wrapping Ethereum — wETH (wrapped ethereum) requirements have been confusing for traders as they need to allow a minimum of 1 wETH to begin trading in addition to gas fees. A large number of initial failed transactions blamed on Velox were simply the result of traders using wETH and not leaving enough for their following transactions. Some users did not also understand this and thought they needed to possess all the tokens they approved. As a means of limiting allowance confusion moving forward, we will be displaying expanded wETH approval calculations for new users rather than just a 1 wETH minimum.
Limit and Market Orders — Users have been inadvertently setting market orders when they meant to issue limit orders and vice-versa. This is a result of switching the order of the trading pairs but not flipping the greater than/less than logic in the drop down menu. Moving forward we will link pair switching to switching the trade logic. We will also be adding a confirmation page which clearly summarizes the order as it’s being entered so users have another look at the strategy they issue through Velox.
- Order Retrying — Currently within the Velox beta, we’ve halted any failed transaction from automatically retrying. This was done to prevent mis-issued trades or failed transactions from re-spending WETH in the event there was an error in the system. Now that the bugs are being worked out, we will open up automatic order retrying on strategies that do not execute due to failures outside of Velox’s control. Traders can enter how many times they want a limit order retried in the event of an execution failure. Velox will only charge an execution fee on a successful trade and the only additional costs will be supplementary gas fees. More information on failed transaction management will be provided in a coming article.
- Failed Transaction Communication — We’ve realized that, while it is beneficial to communicate that a transaction did not succeed, it is far more useful for our users to know why it did not go through. This way they can see if there are alterations to their parameters that need made or if something was simply a result of blockchain/DEX limitations. The Velox system will begin recording, indexing, and error-logging all failed transactions in addition to providing users with a short explanation of what went wrong. The above mentioned article will have a deeper explanation of why something did not go through and what can be done to lessen the chances of that occurrence in the future.
These changes are just a few of the overall improvements being made to the Velox Algorithmic Trading Bot platform. In addition to execution consistency alterations, we are working on the UI and have already finalized multiple, new DEX smart contracts which will be implemented following these aforementioned improvements. That is not to mention the additional functionalities like %-change and OCO orders which are being developed for beta testing. When it is all said and done, we are very happy with the community response towards Velox and overjoyed at how much work our team has been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. As we have said throughout this entire process, Velox will become a standard tool in every DEX traders arsenal, so thank you for helping us reach that goal even sooner.
