Since it’s founding in 2016, the primary priority of the Acuity project has changed from on-chain decentralized social media (DeSo) to decentralized exchange (DeFi). This is because it became apparent that DeFi is a critical component of on-chain DeSo, and in fact of all blockchain projects. A major advantage of a DEX is that it is not prone to expanding the trading supply like CEXs almost always do. Once Acuity DEX has become well enough established the focus will return to DeSo.
The Acuity DEX Book describes the exchange in detail.
The previous iteration of Acuity DEX was accessed via a browser dapp. The base coin and all ERC20 tokens on all EVM chains and ACU could be traded cross-chain via atomic swap. This worked great, but there was one major problem: a lack of liquidity.
Buying from an existing sell order was relatively simple: Create a buy lock and alert the seller via telegram. The seller would then create a sell lock that could be retrieved by the buyer. The whole process can be seen in this video.
The issue is that a seller would have to be available all the time to respond to buy locks in a timely manner.
Acuity DEX Bot
The solution is the Acuity DEX Bot. It is a Rust program that runs continuously to perform all the atomic swap steps necessary for both sellers and buyers. It holds the private key to a hot wallet and can either run in the cloud or on your own device.
The bot can be controlled either by another bot, or by the Acuity DEX Desktop App (let me know if you think of a cool name for it).
A major component of the DEX Bot is Hybrid Indexer. This is an event indexer for Substrate chains such as Acuity. I was funded during 2023 by two grants from the Web3 Foundation to create this.
Sell orders are published very cheaply via the Acuity DEX blockchain, but are not stored in chain state. They are emitted as events. Hybrid indexes these events so they can be queried instantly.
Controller Bot
In order to provide liquidity to the DEX, sellers will be able to write their own controller bot. For example, you could write an arbitrage bot or use AI to predict the market. The controller bot will instruct the DEX bot what the seller order should be and the DEX bot will take care of the rest. The DEX bot can also send and receive funds.
Because the DEX bot is controlled via JSON-RPC over a local WebSocket, a controller bot can be written in just about any programming language such as Python or JavaScript.
Example controller bots will be provided.
Desktop App
The Acuity DEX Desktop App is being written in Rust using the iced GUI library. It will be available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
It will enable buyers and sellers to easily trade on the DEX.
Hardspoon
The Acuity DEX blockchain (ACU) performed a hardspoon on 29th January 2024. A snapshot of all ACU balances was taken and the new chain was launched. The chain can be accessed directly.
Acuity Discourse
Previously Acuity used Telegram and Discord. Because these platforms are so ephemeral and had poor moderation capabilities they were not effective for community building. For this reason we are moving to Discourse (where you are reading this blog post). This is the most modern of the old-school Internet forums. It will encourage writing of posts that are long-form and permanent.
Eventually the Acuity Discourse will be replaced with Acuity on-chain social media, but for now the focus is on the exchange.
If you would like to participate in the community, please sign up. We are especially keen to work with developers who are interested in writing their own Acuity controller bots.
Project links
- Acuity Chains Browser - Manage your account on the ACU blockchain
- Acuity DEX Book - read all the details of how the Acuity DEX works.
- YouTube - keep up to date with development of the exchange. Especially useful if you want to write a liquidity bot.
- GitHub