June was a busy month for a Bamboo Relay, as well as for the entire DeFi ecosystem.

Trading volumes on decentralized venues continued to climb and the market saw the issuance of the novel DeFi governance tokens.

Below we’d like to highlight some of the important highlights of the month that you might’ve missed.

Development Updates on Bamboo Relay Exchange

Stop-Loss Orders Powered by Chainlink

Stop-loss orders on Bamboo Relay powered by Chainlink’s Price Reference Contracts went live mid-June. This has allowed users to hedge against price volatility by automating specific actions to take when and if certain price levels are hit.

See the full article for details.

Arkane Network Wallet Integration

Support was added for Arkane Network’s cross-device blockchain wallet. Giving users further choice of wallet providers when trading on Bamboo Relay.

See the full article for details.

Hummingbot Connector Updated

The market making connector for Bamboo Relay was updated and tested for the latest release of hummingbot.

Hummingbot is software that allows users to create and run their own market making bots with custom strategies.

In practice, this means that new token projects (e.g. ICO, IEO, IDO) can now easily populate order books, publish on Bamboo Relay and syndicate to the 0x mesh network.

See the release notes for details.

Website UI Enhancements

Some minor updates were made to the website to enhance and streamline the user experience:

• Orders now require a minimum size of 0.04 ETH, this is to ensure that orders have a value that is higher than the transactional cost of filling them.
• Added Wrap and Unwrap buttons to the trading pages so that users may quickly swap between WETH and ETH.

Bamboo Market Update

Both May and June saw increased trading volumes compared to the previous months, a lot of it has been contributed by new Defi tokens such as DMG and DXD.

Additionally, website traffic was also steady with over 28,000 unique users accessing the website.

We are still working on the onboarding and user experience side in order to convert more users (28k) into active traders (900) and hope to see progress soon.

Bamboo Relay is also working on fixing pain points that prevent users from achieving their trading goals.

About Bamboo Relay

Bamboo Relay is a relayer for decentralized protocols.

Powered by premier blockchain projects such as 0x for trading and bZx for margin and lending.

Further leveraging on-chain protocols such as Chainlink to power stop-limit orders.

Proudly built upon the Ethereum blockchain, the world’s foremost smart contract platform.

Follow us on our website, twitter, medium, telegram, or discord for the latest updates and developments. For all developer and integration-related documentation please see our developer portal.

June 2020 Monthly Retrospective was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Despite recent volatility, Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) continue to maintain their long term trendlines indicating sustained growth. As a key component of DeFi, DEXs facilitate peer-to-peer non-custodial trading, lending, and borrowing of digital assets at spot prices or on margin.

To eventually rival Centralized Exchanges (CEX), DEXs must maintain these unique characteristics while at the same time providing all the familiar features that traders use today to manage their portfolios. One of those key features is stop-loss functionality, which allows traders to automate asset management functions based on the price action of assets.

To further close the gap between CEXs and DEXs, we are excited to announce that Bamboo Relay now supports stop-loss functions via integration with Chainlink’s Price Reference Contracts for high-quality price feeds. Bamboo Relay is the first 0x relayer to add stop-loss functionality and bring it to the 0x ecosystem. While the initial integration will be limited to Bamboo Relay, future integrations will allow anyone on the 0x mesh framework to utilize Chainlink for this feature.

Understanding the Importance of Stop-Loss Functionality

Bamboo Relay is a 0x relayer — a DEX with its own UI and set of functionalities that uses the 0x protocol on the backend to facilitate wallet-to-wallet trading of any ERC-20 token. The 0x protocol is a smart contract protocol and mesh network of relayers that have a common messaging layer for communication and shared liquidity.

To enhance the set of features available to users, Bamboo Relay is the first 0x relayer to add stop-loss functionality. There are two basic types of stop-loss functions:

1. Sell Stop Limit — The user informs Bamboo Relay to limit sell a set number of tokens at a specific spot price if the price drops into a range.
   Example: Put a limit sell order in for 10 ETH, which may only be executed at the spot price of $150 ETH/DAI when ETH/DAI is between $145 — $150 .
2. Buy Stop Limit — The user informs Bamboo Relay to limit buy a set number of tokens at a specific spot price if the price rises into.
   Example: Put a limit buy order in for 10 ETH, which may only be executed at the spot price of $170 ETH/DAI when ETH/DAI is between $170 — $165.

The overarching idea is the creation of conditional trading functions based on the price action of an asset. Users can hedge against price volatility by automating specific actions to take if certain price levels are hit. The main advantage is that the user can assure certain asset management strategies are executed without having to constantly be at their computer monitoring the market.

Stop-Loss Order Liquidations

In order for stop-loss orders to be executed in a manner that is not dependent on a single party, Bamboo Relay has developed a liquidator bot.

When creating stop-loss orders users specify a price and a trigger price, the difference between these two values is the premium offered up to liquidators. This premium acts as an incentive for liquidators to match the stop-loss orders and execute trades.
Liquidators pay for the gas and transaction costs for doing so and in return collect a small value from the difference between the stop-order price and the market price of the asset.

Using Chainlink Oracles To Trigger Stop-Loss Functions

To implement stop-loss functions, Bamboo Relay needs reliable data feeds that inform the smart contract when a specific trading pair hits the designated price. The price feed will automatically trigger the execution of the smart contract’s stop-loss function.

Since stop-loss functions are automated trading strategies of user’s funds, having access to accurate price feeds is essential. Obtaining a truly accurate price isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. It requires the aggregation of prices from all trading exchanges engaging in price discovery, both centralized and decentralized, and consistently weighting them based on their current liquidity. Additionally, there must be a secure oracle mechanism to deliver the price data to the smart contract on-time without fear of manipulation.

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that acts as a gateway for getting off-chain market data onto the blockchain so smart contracts can consume it. Chainlink’s Price Reference Contracts consist of 30 DeFi price feeds currently live on the Ethereum mainnet. They are secured by decentralized oracle networks made up of 7 to 21 independent, security reviewed, and Sybil resistant node operators. Each node operator sources market data from a high-quality data aggregator, such as Kaiko, Coingecko or BraveNewCoin. All Reference Contract updates reflect an aggregation of at least seven different data providers and trigger based on price deviations (e.g. every 1% change in price) and linear time updates (at least every 2 hours).

Integrating Chainlink’s oracle design allows Bamboo Relay to source highly accurate price feeds when triggering stop-loss functions. These price feeds provide extensive market coverage to the price discovery happening throughout the entire market as opposed to only one or a few exchanges. Since Chainlink’s Price Reference Contracts utilize decentralization at both the oracle and data level, there is no central point of failure in the delivery or sourcing of price data to the smart contract. The Price Reference Contracts store these prices on-chain, which allows Bamboo Relay to quickly read them for price references at little costs to the end users.

DEXs are set to revolutionize the way financial economies exchange assets. With the help of Chainlink, Bamboo Relay is one step closer to making that a reality by adding key functionality to allow users better management of their assets without sacrificing security.

“We’re thrilled to integrate Chainlink’s world-class oracle technology to bring stop loss-functionality to 0x users — an essential tool for successfully managing assets. Chainlink ensures that all stop-loss orders are triggered by highly accurate data from a secure oracle mechanism, bringing the highest level of security and reliability to Bamboo Relay. Through this integration, the 0x ecosystem is better positioned as a viable alternative to centralized exchanges; traders now have access to the same set of tools available on CEXs, yet receive the added benefits of user control of their assets.” — Joshua Richardson, Founder of Bamboo Relay

Supported assets

The initial release of stop-loss functionality supports orders on the following token pairs:

• WETH/DAI
• WETH/USDC
• LINK/WETH
• MKR/WETH
• BAT/WETH
• ZRX/WETH

About Bamboo Relay

Bamboo Relay is a relayer for decentralized protocols.

Powered by premier blockchain projects such as 0x for trading and bZx for margin and lending.

Further leveraging on-chain protocols such as Chainlink to power stop-limit orders.

Proudly built upon the Ethereum blockchain, the world’s foremost smart contract platform.

Follow us on our website, twitter, medium, telegram or discord for the latest updates and developments. For all developer and integration related documentation please see our developer portal.

About Chainlink

If you’re a developer and want to connect your smart contract to existing data and infrastructure outside the underlying blockchain, reach out to Chainlink here. They can help you quickly and securely launch your data-enabled application or Chainlink Price Reference Data Contract on mainnet today. You can also visit the developer documentation or join the technical discussion on Discord. Learn more by visiting the Chainlink website or following them on Twitter or Reddit.

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments. It is well known for providing highly secure and reliable oracles to large enterprises (Google, Oracle, and SWIFT) and leading smart contract development teams such as Polkadot/Substrate, Synthetix, Loopring, Aave, OpenLaw, Etherisc, Conflux, and many others.

Bamboo Relay Integrates Chainlink Oracles for Stop-Loss Order Functionalities was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we are pleased to announce that 0x version 3 is live on Bamboo Relay.

Important Note: As apart of the upgrade all outstanding version 2 orders have been cancelled.
Users that would like to trade still should create new orders to replace them.

Version 3 of the 0x protocol brings about a number of changes and features that aim to increase the liquidity of the protocol and incentivize key stakeholders.

Staking and Protocol Fees

One of the more exciting features of 0x v3 is the addition of staking pools for ZRX tokens.

Market makers are able to create staking pools, which then pay out a portion of the collected fees to users that stake alongside them.

To pay for this each 0x order now attracts a protocol fee for filling them, with the fees being redistributed back to the staking pools.

We expect the 0x staking interface to launch later this month to make it easier to setup and join pools.

Liquidity Bridges

Another highly anticipated feature of version 3 is the addition of liquidity bridges.

These allow for the subsumption of other on-chain liquidity sources in the 0x protocol.
For existing trading protocols such as Kyber, Oasis or Uniswap it is now possible to specify these as 0x orders and fill them seamlessly.

We expect to integrate these sources of liquidity into our order books in the coming weeks — and will keep the community updated once this is in place.

Relayer Fees

One last change worth pointing out is that v3 supports collection of relay fees in any token — instead of only in ZRX.

Effectively this means that a percentage can be charged against order for the maker and/or taker side.

Starting February 1, 2020 Bamboo Relay will be charging 0.1% maker and 0.2% taker fees on all orders originating from the website.
Orders originating via API will have no maker fees.

To keep track of these details see the fees page on the website for the latest information.

These are just a few of the changes, to see a more detailed list — and explanations — be sure to checkout the latest 0x update.

API Changes

If you currently use the Bamboo Relay APIs, please take note that these have had some minor changes made to bring them in line with v3.

You can find all of the documentation in our API section of the site.

Hummingbot

For users currently using the Bamboo Relay connector for hummingbot, be aware that the connector wont function until our v3 changes are completed.

It’s expected that this process will take 1–2 weeks at most.

Website Updates

There have been a few minor improvements to the website UI as well in this update.

The trading page now has a ‘Change’ tab that follows the page down — this allows for swapping to a different pair without having to scroll back up to the top.

Additionally the Buy and Sell order lists have been swapped so that they align below the buy and sell forms as they are filled out.
The layout of these can be changed back via the settings page if desired.

Lastly a ‘Hide empty’ option has been added to filter out order books that are completely empty.

Finally, we would like to thank the entire 0x team for the amazing effort put towards delivering the new version of the protocol — and we look forward to making full use of its capabilities in the coming months!

Follow us on our website, twitter, medium, telegram or discord for the latest updates and developments

Bamboo Relay is a 0x and bZx relayer — trade, lend or borrow ERC20 tokens trustlessly from your own wallet.

0x v3 — Bamboo Relay Upgrade was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hummingbot Coordinator Support

We are pleased to announce that the latest release of hummingbot (0.12.1) now supports the creation and filling of coordinated orders on Bamboo Relay.

This means that hummingbot users can now algorithmically place and soft-cancel orders for free on Bamboo Relay.

0x has an excellent rundown of coordinators in their recent post highlighting the features of coordinators as well as the potential cost savings.

In an effort to maintain maximum compatibility with other exchanges and relays we have flipped the DAI/USDC/TUSD stable coin pairs over.
So it’s now possible to directly compare prices and run arbitrage where the opportunities exist across markets.

For more information on the Bamboo Relay hummingbot connector please see the docs, or reach out to us on discord or telegram.

0x Mesh

We have successfully deployed and upgraded our backend infrastructure to use the 0x Mesh network.

0x Mesh is a peer-to-peer communication network for the 0x ecosystem that handles broadcasting and maintaining orders at a truly global scale.

We have already seen the earliest fruits of this labour with a huge drop in the number of RPC requests executed per day, from ~2.1 million down to ~200k calls.

Alchemy Blockchain Infrastructure

We would like to take a moment to highlight our blockchain services provider Alchemy.

While the aforementioned savings in RPC calls now gives us plenty of room to grow again, Alchemy has been instrumental in helping us scale during this period.

Countless hours have been saved due to issues that require engineers being awoken in the night.
Some real examples include: restarting crashed nodes, server disk space full and corrupted blockchain databases. Recovering from these issues took up to 5 hours in some cases and often during unfavourable hours.

Since working with Alchemy we have had zero down time on blockchain infrastructure and no longer had to call on engineers to initiate disaster recovery.

Alchemy powers some of the biggest names in the Ethereum ecosystem, and in our eyes is the only serious solution for mission critical dApps and websites.

PS. For those already using Alchemy, we have written a Subprovider that emulates the Enhanced API for local testnets such as Ganache.

Design Sneak Peak

Having learnt many lessons over the last year and evaluated the shortcomings in the current interface, we have embarked on a website upgrade.

This refreshed look should inject some flavoured punch into the site as well as address many of the concerns with the current design.

We expect that this will be ready in the next few weeks — so keep a look out (or drop us a line if you’d like to test out the new interface!)

Follow us on our website, twitter, medium, telegram or discord for the latest updates and developments

Bamboo Relay is a 0x and bZx relayer — trade, lend or borrow any ERC20 token trustlessly from your own wallet.

August Development Update was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

0x Coordinator

Bamboo Relay is excited to announce our main net implementation of the 0x coordinator model.

In the existing open order book model the only way traders are able to cancel their orders is to make an on-chain transaction.
This action costs gas and opens them up to the risk that their order may get filled in the meantime.

Additionally it’s possible for trades to be front-run or to have collisions with other users attempting to fill the same order (see Front-running, Griefing and the Perils of Virtual Settlement).

The 0x coordinator model extends the open order book model and adds an additional layer of verification to orders in the form of a coordination server and smart contract extension.

As an off-chain component the coordinator server is able to record soft cancels as well as fills for orders.

The record of soft cancels means the server wont authorize any fills for orders that have been cancelled off-chain.

While it is possible to also prevent front-running or trade collisions with the coordinator, it opens it up for taker griefing (requesting but not submitting orders).
Bamboo Relay will be monitoring how orders get filled with the coordinator and if this becomes a problem we will look at implementing this feature.

Mini-FAQ

What does this mean for users?
Users should not see much difference when trading through the website.
By default they will be able to take advantage of soft cancelling orders.

What does this mean for makers?
Makers are able to take on less risk, as they can soft cancels their orders without having to go on-chain and pay gas.
Additionally this should mean that makers are able to aggressively price their orders closer to the market and also use longer expiration times.

Do I have to use it?
When creating new orders this will always remain an optional feature.
Users are able to toggle this option on and off from their settings page.

Similarly API Users aren’t required to use the coordinator address when submitting orders and can continue to use the address for the 0x exchange contract instead.

For existing orders that were created to use the coordinator, users will need to interact with the coordinator server in order to fill these.

What about multiple orders with different coordinators?
The 0x coordinator contract has been written in such a way that it is possible to fill multiple orders at the same time that use different coordinators.

In the same vein it’s possible to fill coordinated and uncoordinated orders in the same transaction.

Developers
To begin integrating today be sure to check out our Standard Coordinator API documentation.

If you are looking to integrate or would like to ask further questions — don’t hesitate to reach out to us on one of our social media channels or email.

For further discussions around the implementation and trade offs associated with the coordinator model be sure to checkout the 0x forum discussion.

0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program

In addition to this, Bamboo Relay is proud to announce our acceptance into the 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Program.

The mission of the Ecosystem Acceleration Program is to accelerate the growth of promising projects that are building on the 0x Protocol.

The EAP supports a wide variety of teams from early-stage projects pursuing new niches to teams building open-source infrastructure that benefit the entire 0x ecosystem.

We are honoured to have been accepted into this program, and are looking forward to continuing to build upon the core trading experience as well as take part in initiatives that help grow the entire 0x network.

Keeping in line with our latest updates, we continue to look forward to sharing future progress in the coming months.

Follow us on our website, twitter, medium, telegram or discord for the latest updates and developments

Bamboo Relay is a 0x and bZx relayer — trade, lend or borrow any ERC20 token trustlessly from your own wallet.

0x Coordinator Model + EAP Acceptance was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is our pleasure today to announce that the latest release of hummingbot 0.7.0 now supports Bamboo Relay.

Hummingbot is open-source trading software developed by CoinAlpha, Inc. that allows users to run a local client that implements market-making trading strategies for cryptocurrencies.

Now market makers, traders and enthusiasts can spin up a hummingbot client to provide liquidity to any number of the token pairs (300+) we support on Bamboo Relay.

Not your cup of tea, or you looking to outsource your own market activities? Reach out to us and we will do our best to get you started!

If you already have your own market making bots or programs be sure to check out our 0x SRA and REST APIs (Radar Relay-compatible) for the best way to start integrating.

Follow us on our website, twitter, medium, telegram or discord for the latest updates and developments

Bamboo Relay is a 0x and bZx relayer — trade, lend or borrow any ERC20 token trustlessly from your own wallet.

Bamboo Relay Hummingbot Support was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While it has been some time since Bamboo Relay has written an update, we have been hard at work adding features and improvements.

We would like to take a moment to share and highlight some of these with the community.

Wallet Integrations

Bamboo Relay is pleased to announce we have added enhanced support for wallets across the board and hope to offer the most inclusive trading experience for users.

Dedicated support has been for the following mobile wallets:

• imToken
• TrustWallet
• AlphaWallet
• Coinbase Wallet
• Opera
• Cipher

Additionally we now support the following providers:

Bitski
Say goodbye to clunky browser extensions, hardware wallets and dApp browsers. Bitski allows you to interact with the new world of blockchain, with just an email and password.

Portis
Portis completely transforms how you use blockchain applications. All you need is an email and password to explore this exciting new space.

Fortmatic
Formatic allow users interact with dApps through a beautiful user experience from any browser or device.

All three of these options empower users to interact with their favourite dApps — and now Bamboo Relay — without having to install any additional extensions or wallet software.

WalletConnect

Finally we have added support for WalletConnect (v1).
WalletConnect is an open protocol for connecting desktop dApps to mobile Wallets using end-to-end encryption by scanning a QR code.

You can try this out today by using a mobile wallet such as TrustWallet, that supports scanning WalletConnect QR codes.

The flow for this entire process is very nice —simply link your wallet with the website via QR code, perform actions such as trading and simply confirm these on your linked wallet.

CarbonUSD Fiat On Ramp

Bamboo Relay is proud to announce we have partnered with Carbon.

CarbonUSD is a price-stable cryptocurrency that is one-to-one backed with USD.

Users can purchase and redeem CUSD fiat-backed tokens on Bamboo Relay, where they can now trade CUSD against WETH and DAI.

Users may also use the embedded Carbon widget directly from the website to onboard from their bank accounts into their wallets.

Site Enhancements

Batching

One of the single greatest improvements that has been made in this area is the batching of transactions and smart contract calls.

What this practically means is that you no longer have to approve tokens, wrap Ether and place orders in 3 separate steps.

Instead users are presented with a multi-stage popup and can complete all of this in a single flow

This flow applies in all cases where a user may need to perform multiple actions in single task, such as signing, approving, wrapping Ether or submitting transactions.

Forwarder

We now leverage the 0x Forwarding contract to further improve quality of life for users.

If a user has Ether — but it is not wrapped — in their wallet, they no longer need to wrap before taking a buy order.

The forwarder contract wraps Ether on a users-behalf and so shaves off time required to trade for first time users.

Quality of Life Improvements

• All tokens should now have associated descriptions, images, and website and social links
• Transactions now show estimated time (in seconds) to completion
• All amount and total fields should should only show the numeric keyboard on Android and iOS.
  Focusing these fields will now set the keyboard position to the first significant digit.
• New loans will now automatically calculate a default (toggleable) APR interest rate.
• For tokens that have had no trades in the past 24 hours, their prices will be back filled via CoinGecko.

Future Updates

In the coming weeks we have some further updates in the pipeline that we believe will further enhance the trading experience for all users.

We are excited for these changes and look forward to sharing these with you once they are ready.

As always we remain committed to the vision of a single globally connected market and continue to iterate towards this end goal.

Follow us on our website, twitter, medium, telegram or discord for the latest updates and developments

Bamboo Relay is a 0x and bZx relayer — trade, lend or borrow any ERC20 token trustlessly from your own wallet.

Bamboo Relay — 2019 Update was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We would also like to thank all of the beta testers for helping us during this time and continue to welcome any additional feedback.

Some notable improvements include

Reserve Orders

Bamboo Relay will now show quotes for selected pairs that have orders available from other decentralized exchanges.
This includes EtherDelta / ForkDelta, Bancor and Kyber.

You can see these clearly labelled within the UI as marked with an ‘R’ for reserve.

The contract code for this is available at https://etherscan.io/address/0xa003e894327de1f5d0fd13cdd56600bffef9a017#code

This contract requires payment in ETH not WETH, as all reserves require payment in Ether.
The contract takes a flat fee of 0.1% for all transactions and is accounted for in the price quoted.

Currently these Reserve Orders are limited to the Sell book — i.e. you can only buy tokens using Ether.

Relaying orders from ERC dEX and Radar Relay

Bamboo Relay is committed to the long term development of the 0x ecosystem and aims to support the 0x global liquidity pool.

We are now relaying orders from ERC dEX and Radar Relay across pairs we support.

Additionally orders made via Bamboo Relay will now be also available on ERC dEX and their Aqueduct API.

We look forward to future relayers coming online and harnessing the network effect of order sharing.

Roadmap

Bamboo Relay is committed to the long term success of 0x and related protocols.

As such our development roadmap is looking forward to integrating complimentary trading protocols for

• Margin trading and lending
• Derivatives contracts
• Dark pools

We look forward to announcing some partnerships in these areas in the coming weeks.

Finally, our philosophy is that while the Ethereum ecosystem has given rise to some fantastic protocols and projects, much of these offerings remain fragmented.

We believe that the community is best served by taking the very best building-blocks and creating a platform that leverages all of these in one place.

June Development Update was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are proud to announce Bamboo Relay — an ERC20 relayer built upon the 0x protocol.

Bamboo Relay implements the open order book matching model, and is pleased to support the use of the ZRX token.

Features include:

- Trade directly from your Ledger Wallet
- Night and day mode for the UI
- Trollbox
- The ability to trade any ERC20 compatible token
- Standard Relayer API endpoints
- Free trades during the beta

Additionally testing is available across Ropsten, Rinkeby and Kovan testnets.

We hope you enjoy using our relay, and look forward to sharing our roadmap in future posts.

If you have any feedback, please do not hesitate to reach out to us dex@bamboorelay.com

Announcing Bamboo Relay was originally published in Bamboo Relay on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.