Initial launch – Advanced Perpetual Exchange

On the 5th April 2021, trade.apex.win was launched in closed beta. 18 traders were invited and whitelisted to access our platform.

In that time period, 94 advanced orders (87 limit orders, 7 stop orders) have been created.

69 of these orders have been successfully executed.

We are grateful for the feedback from our dear apes and will outline our initial observations and next steps:

The website

At apex, we want our apes to have the best trading experience. As such, we are committed to responding to feedback from our users.

Users have been able to deploy their smart wallets using the interface.
The current flow of needing to push the “approve” button separately from submitting orders is currently confusing and not what users are familiar with. We will incorporate the approval with the creation of the advanced order (the user still needs to submit two transactions, but this should be more clear)
The gas price defaults to 20 gwei. With current xDAI gas prices, we should default this to 1 gwei and allow the user to change this if they desire.
The gas limit can be unreliable. Often users are submitting transactions where metamask submits with a massive gas limit (often in the region of 50 million). This causes an issue where the transactions never get sent to the blockchain as this limit is above the block gas limit. It is possible to avoid this issue by manually setting the gas limit for each transaction. After doing some further research into the cause, we have found a solution (see node issues below)
The interface displays orders even after they have expired. This has been fixed.

The smart contracts

The smart contracts have been deployed onto xDAI network and are currently working as intended. We are currently in the process of awaiting security audit. More on this soon

The keeper bots

The keeper bots have been successful in accomplishing their goal of executing orders when their conditions are met. However – the bots have not been running with 100% uptime. As such, there have been some orders which have been executed later than expected. This could potentially result in some orders not being executed.

Bot uptime is crucial for traders to be confident that their orders will be executed as expected. We have therefore re-written the code for the keeper bot to prioritise uptime.

Node issues

In order to interact with a blockchain, a web app needs to connect to a node. The node is how you can get data from the blockchain, and also how you can submit transactions. The xDAI development node (kindly provided by the xDAI team) can sometimes be overwhelmed by the number of users interacting with it. This can have a number of adverse effects for our apes:

Gas estimation – the estimated gas for a transaction is calculated by sending a ‘dummy’ transaction to the node. An incorrect value supplied by the node will result in errors in sending transactions.
Dropped transaction – the user can submit a transaction which never gets mined. Unfortunately, our interface will still display the transaction as sent and so the transaction appears to be stuck.
Keeper bot disconnection – the keeper bots make a websocket connection with the node. When the node misbehaves, this breaks the connection and this stops the keeper bot from operating.

In order to tackle this, we have purchased our own xDAI node using quicknode and we will see if this is sufficient to solve the node issues. We are hopeful that this node will be able to withstand the demands. If there are further issues, then we will need to revisit this.

If you’d like to sign up for access to the platform, we will be inviting more users shortly. Please sign up on our main page: https://www.apex.win/

We welcome any ideas for improvement. After all, this platform has been built by apes, for apes. Please reach out to us on Discord: