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Overview

Abstract​

Clober presents a new algorithm for order book DEX “LOBSTER - Limit Order Book with Segment Tree for Efficient oRder-matching” that enables on-chain order matching and settlement on decentralized smart contract platforms. With Clober, market participants can place limit and market orders in a fully decentralized, trustless way at a manageable cost.

DEX 2.0 - On-chain Order Book DEX​

The emergence of AMM and the dawn of DeFi​

Exchanging between assets is the most foundational component of financial activities. In the early days of Ethereum, many projects were trying to build decentralized financial applications. However, before we had the means to exchange assets effectively in a decentralized way, their adoption was limited since any financial activities accompanying swaps between assets had to rely on centralized infrastructures. When Uniswap launched in 2019, it introduced a new way of efficiently providing liquidity for swaps between assets in a low-throughput execution environment. It opened up a new era for the blockchain industry called “DeFi.”

AMM enabled us to swap arbitrary sets of assets in a decentralized way - which means that it is non-custodial, trustless, and permissionless. Leveraging this infrastructure, many protocols such as DeFi protocols or DAOs could mint their governance token and provide liquidity to build a community, raise capital, incentivize contributors, etc. Also, a certain form of AMM specialized for swaps between low-volatility pairs - called a “Stable Swap” - was introduced, significantly contributing to the growth of the decentralized stablecoins by reducing their volatility.

Limitations of AMM-centric DeFi ecosystem​

However, as the DeFi ecosystem grew, the pitfalls of AMMs emerged. The fundamental limitation of AMMs is that users cannot place limit orders on them. This means that market makers have no control over the price range on which to provide liquidity or the margin they take from providing liquidity - i.e., the bid-ask spread.

For example, for high-volatility pairs, the risk of ‘Impermanent Loss’ might exceed the expected revenue from liquidity providing. Under a traditional order book environment, market makers would have increased the bid-ask spread to offset the volatility risk. However, this is not possible on AMM protocols. This is why many DeFi protocols provide massive inflation rewards to the liquidity providers in their governance tokens, which impose strong sell pressure and eventually make them all look like a bunch of decentralized Ponzi schemes.

Stable swaps handle liquidity quite efficiently when all things are good, but when a poorly designed stablecoin starts to depeg, it creates severe losses for those who supplied the liquidity.

The future of DEX beyond AMMs​

For more sophisticated DeFi protocols to emerge and expand the territory of the decentralized economy, there must be an on-chain order book infrastructure as their backbone, which enables a generalized form of exchange between assets with a high degree of freedom.

In the case of Solana, powered by its high throughput, an on-chain order book DEX called “Serum” has already secured its dominant place in the ecosystem, becoming a necessary infrastructure that most DeFi protocols integrate with. Solana’s had-been leading perpetual swap protocol “Mango Market” wouldn’t have had-been so successful without an order book infrastructure like Serum.

For another example, the dydx protocol has become the most successful decentralized perpetual futures platform by leveraging the order book system - although it's off-chain. Many alternative on-chain perpetual futures protocols utilize AMMs as their exchange infrastructure, but most are far from successful.

It is undeniable that order book DEXs will eventually replace AMMs sooner or later as smart contract platforms scale and gas costs are reduced. With the emergence of the on-chain order book DEX, a new era of DeFi will open.

Why on-chain​

Off-chain order books require centralized operators to run the matching engine off-chain. This means that all kinds of centralization risks apply to them. For example, if the operators get sanctioned by a government authority, the platform might not be able to be further maintained, or its users’ assets might get censored. Also, a malicious operator - or a hacker who compromised the operator's security - can censor or manipulate users’ trading activities.

In addition, one of the most important merits of DeFi is its composability. Each DeFi protocol can leverage other DeFi protocols as its infrastructure, which creates a strong network effect between protocols. For example, one may combine a lending protocol with a DEX to create a margin trading platform. A DEX aggregator can aggregate multiple on-chain DEX protocols to provide large liquidity with no liquidity of its own. An open maker order on an on-chain order book can be considered a stand-alone asset that can be utilized in other protocols - e.g., borrowing USDC against a sell order on the order book. Conversely, off-chain or app-chain-based DEX protocols cannot provide such properties. Smart contracts cannot call off-chain functions. Positions on off-chain DEX protocols cannot be utilized in on-chain protocols.

In short, off-chain order books are inferior regarding trustlessness, censorship resistance, and interoperability; therefore, they cannot replace AMM DEXs.

Why it is difficult to build an on-chain order book​

Under the typical implementation of order books, each taker order will process the settlement of an arbitrary number of counterparty orders matched with itself. This means that the computation cost of a taker order increases proportionately to the number of maker orders it is matched with. Because there’s no limit on this number, the gas cost of a taker order can grow very high - even exceeding the block gas limit, in which case the transaction will fail even though there are enough counterparty orders to match it. This is why Serum, a leading order book DEX protocol on Solana, has a parameter to limit the number of matching orders in its taker order interface.

Clober’s solution​

We wanted to remove the linear overhead of taker orders. To do so, instead of processing all the matching orders, taker orders only keep track of the “Total Claimable Amount,” which is the sum of taken orders at each price point. We then let makers manually claim the proceed of their filled orders by comparing their order's “Claim Range” with the “Total Claimable Amount.” “Claim Range” is an interval representing the position of a maker order in the order queue at its price point. If the “Total Claimable Amount” is bigger or in between an order’s “Claim Range,” the order is fully or partially claimable.

The non-trivial part of this implementation is keeping all of the Claim Ranges up to date. For example, if my Claim Range is [10, 13] and an order with Claim Range [8, 10] is canceled, my order would need to be updated to [8, 11], and all orders behind mine would also need to be updated. If a canceling transaction had to process all the range updates, it would be too expensive and possible to fail. We can overcome this by adopting a segment tree data structure.

A segment tree is a data structure that stores a list of numeric values, which enables efficient “range queries” - calculations on the partial sum of its subarrays. The complexities of the segment tree's insertion, deletion, and range query are all logarithmic. Leveraging the segment tree, we can keep track of the Claim Ranges of maker orders at each price point with low gas costs.

Based on this architecture, along with some additional optimizations, we were able to reduce the gas cost of both maker and taker orders, similar to that of a transaction on Uniswap.