Velox Beta Has Launched!

Velox is released, the limit order functionality is working, and many of you may be wondering… what’s been the hold up? Why did Velox take so long and why is it different from what I am expecting? We’re going to go through those details and a couple more to give our community a thorough understanding of how Velox started, what’s been going on with development, and where the platform is heading in the very near future.

The Velox UI with upcoming functionality.

It started with a simple idea

Velox began as the brainchild of Hannu Kuusi in early 2020. He set up a conditional trading bot which could do some pretty awesome functions:

• Regularly execute token buys and sells on Uniswap with over 98% efficiency.
• Calculate via the mempool when a condition was met and send a buy or sell order into the forming block.
• Automatically adjust the gas price per issued transaction to ensure his trade would go through first, every time.
• Dynamically adjust the amount of tokens he sold so that his buy or sell order would not raise or lower the price beyond the initial execution threshold.
• Buy and sell a specified number of tokens based upon how the pricing of an asset shifted over a certain amount of time or blocks.

The list went on and it helped Hannu quite a bit as the current bull market began taking shape. In addition to his work on the yet unnamed trading bot, Hannu also guided aspects of the technical direction of the DEXTools platform. He worked as a minor, unnamed advisor which helped turn DEXTools into the world’s number one DEX analysis platform.

During his tenure as advisor he came into contact with two other individuals helping DEXT with community and branding management, JD and Alex. All three met during regular marketing meetings and hit it off as friends from the get go. Throughout DEXTools expansion there became evident a natural confluence of interests approaching Q4 of 2020. DEXTools would be integrating a trading bot and Hannu already had a working bot system. He spoke with JD about this situation who suggested that he, Hannu, and Alex work together to build a revolutionary trading bot system. The group put their heads together and came up with one burning question:

What if they could build a token free, non-custodial, validator-less trading bot system for anyone with a MetaMask wallet to use?

Given the token-heavy, smart contract focused direction of automatic trading at the time, this was a tall order for any limit order system, much less a trading bot platform. Completely reimagining the direction of bot trading meant that Velox had to do a handful of incredibly challenging tasks:

1. How do you store and monitor dozens of trading strategies for tens of thousands of users across thousands of tokens all at the same time?
2. How do you calculate the execution threshold and structure order submission given the highly liquid nature of AMMs?
3. How do you prioritize wallet security and minimize contract risk for a trading bot without compromising functionality, wallet access, and user experience?

All of these questions, and a dozen others came up, throughout the development phases of the bot which came to be known as Velox.

As a side note, Velox was picked for the system’s name as the word means “Velocity” in Latin. An homage to the incredibly fast nature of the bot.

Velox turned into quite the lesson

Great things in tech are often unaccomplished, not because they have never been thought of before, but because they are too complex to execute correctly. This has been one of the best lessons the development team learned during the process of assembling the Velox algorithmic trading bot.

Between initial coding difficulties, finding the right programmers and the novel challenges associated with a multi-user trading bot system, Velox has definitely had its tough moments. Most visibly, these pivots in technical direction are reflected in the iterative design changes seen between the initial UI design and the released UI.

Following the announcement of the DEXTools integration in December, the team went through a frenzy of building, managing, and testing every aspect of the system as it was being developed. The project went from a straightforward multi-conditionality, multi-DEX, trading bot to the humble yet powerful MVP which was recently released.

Velox’s restricted functionality following the MVP launch allowed us to release the platform in a timely manner while ensuring the high quality we have used to define Velox’s ethos. Our team foresaw it better to make Velox usable with the basic buy and sell bot options than wait another month to release with all integrated functionality. Our community has made it known how anxiously they are waiting for Velox so we could not disappoint.

The Velox team wants to make one thing perfectly clear for the current and prospective users of the system: All of the initially displayed functionality is going to be released in a quick and orderly manner. The roadmap as it currently stands is:

1. New DEX Integration: Sushiswap — One of the most popular DEXs on the Ethereum Blockchain.
2. New Functionality: %-change buys and sells — Execute orders based on price changes of a user defined percentage.
3. New DEX Integration: Pangolin — The most popular DEX on the Avalanche Network.
4. New Functionality: One-cancels-other (OCO) execution — Define multiple parameters for a buy and sell. Velox will only execute which ever comes first.
5. New DEX Integration: Pancake Swap — The most popular DEX on the Binance Smart Chain.
6. New Functionality: Dynamic Transaction Threshold — Velox will only buy or sell enough tokens up to or down to the execution threshold.
7. New Functionality: Multi-strategy Execution Chains — User can conditionally link multiple orders together.

Provided our community does not request unanticipated inclusions of DEXs, blockchains, or functionalities we anticipate the first improvement to appear within a few weeks. Additional features will be added on a rolling basis as they are properly connected and tested.

Due to previous exploits in other limit order and bot trading systems, we are highly conscious of how precise we must be in regards to user security. Given this development perspective, we are going to confidently and methodically release new features after we are sure they can be openly used by all DeFi traders.

We would like to give a large Thank You to the DEXTools team for their unwavering support before Velox’s release, the Velox development team for their passionate innovation throughout this process, and the growing Velox community for providing clear and beneficial advice on how we can improve this revolutionary trading system.

Moving forward, Velox will become the standard tool in every decentralized exchange traders lineup.

Join our Telegram for community discussion, F.A.Qs. and to contact the Velox Global development team.