The Evolution of Econia

Econia was first introduced in “Setting the Stage for Econia: Markets, Computers, and Global Economics,” when Econia Labs laid out its vision as well as some of the performance unlocks made possible by building on Aptos. With Econia’s v1 devnet release came a follow-up post “Introducing Econia’s Atomic Matching Engine: A Breakthrough in On-Chain Trading,” which went into further technical detail about the innovative way that Econia settles trades. With spot trading support made possible by the world’s first on-chain atomic matching engine, Econia v1 offered a base layer for other protocols to start building on top of, and the developer community began to take off.

Developers provided feedback on Econia’s open-source repository, Econia Labs incorporated their feature requests, and then came Econia v2, announced alongside the post “Custodian Capabilities and Standalone Swaps: How Econia v2 Takes DeFi Composability to the Next Level”. Made possible by the Move programming language, custodian capabilities allow developers to build margin trading on top of Econia or to integrate with cross-chain intermediaries, and standalone swaps enable users to trade on Econia without having to open up the kind of market-based account required for placing limit orders.

Now comes v3, which adds support for generic assets and various kinds of order configurability. The result is an extensible order book infrastructure at the base layer of Aptos DeFi.

Back-End Base Layer

Econia, the economic engine of tomorrow, is a hyper-parallelized on-chain order book for the Aptos blockchain, designed to aggregate liquidity from all corners of the world into one digital marketplace. Both everywhere and nowhere, Econia is a kind of financial ghost, a core back-end system for DeFi wherever you may find it.

If the developers behind Econia do their job right, then you might never notice it at all. Unless you too are a DeFi developer.

Designed from the ground up to clear trades as fast as possible, Econia’s interface to the world is a rich API suite, on top of which anyone can build their own custom implementations. Configurable, extensible, and completely permissionless, Econia’s infrastructure provides a base layer for the emerging Aptos DeFi ecosystem.

Host to blazing fast decentralized markets, Econia is a liquidity nervous system that anyone can tap into, from whichever front end they prefer. Clearing trades from various user interfaces against one another through a unified back-end system, Econia helps dApp developers provide their end users with tight spreads, a variety of markets, and all of the depth to be expected from a global trading venue.

Composable features

With Econia’s delegated custodian architecture, end users can delegate authority over portions of their trading activity to third-party custodians, who are only allowed to trade on markets that signing users approve. The result is a modular interface that allows third parties to build margin trading, cross-chain solutions, and in some cases, trading venues for non-coin assets like derivatives:

By combining custodian capabilities with a general-purpose matching engine, Econia’s latest v3 release introduces asset-agnostic support, which means that users are no longer restricted to trading only conventional “coin types” against one another. Here, a market-level custodian approves generic asset transfers, verifying deposits to and withdrawals from an Econia user’s market account, enabling trades against the order book for exotic instruments like options, perpetual futures, and bets in a prediction market:

Econia v3 also adds support for various forms of order configurability, with limit orders now offering fill-or-abort, post-or-abort, and immediate-or-cancel types. Moreover, market orders and swaps now allow users to specify a limit price, as well as minimum and maximum fill amounts for both sides of a trade.

Building Out the Ecosystem

Groups of developers are already building sleek interfaces on top of Econia, and soon enough there will be trading views with all of the interactive features to be expected from a user-facing front end. In the meantime, the developers behind Econia will continue iterating with their organically-growing network of collaborators, building out the protocol to support the needs of all integrators, and by extension, their users.

Economic Engine of Tomorrow

Like the NASDAQ or the NYSE, Econia is an ephemeral connection point between buyers and sellers, but unlike these institutions, Econia is decentralized, distributed, and disturbingly (at least to centralized financial services providers) hard to turn off.

Econia cannot be shut down, cannot be controlled by any one person, and to that extent, Econia is here to stay. Econia is here — to clear your trades.

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