Introduction to Laminar

E-market operations are frequent and varied: buyers and sellers quickly perform such operations as issuing orders, cancelling orders, replacing orders, etc., hoping to take the lead in the market and complete their transactions at the best possible price; There are also many forms of market participants, with some retail traders patiently waiting for orders to be traded, which can also be accompanied by a degree of tension that can sometimes turn into anxiety and indignation. Systemic strategies attempt to determine price changes by consuming large amounts of market data. On this basis, the market maker tries to provide liquidity and minimize abnormal volatility for the ensuing market turmoil. The centralized electronics market has now existed for decades. They have become durable products thanks to years of refinement. While they trade the most liquid and popular products in the world, we believe that major equity electronics markets such as the NASDAQ or NYSE may not be as innovative as possible to keep pace with the times.

Let’s talk about the decentralized exchanges “DEXs’ that innovate in traditional centralized exchanges, especially order book-style decentralized trading DEXs, which simply operate like the decentralized exchanges of traditional exchanges.

Unlike centralized exchanges, DEX does so because of the many constraints and limitations of the selected protocol on the blockchain. The computing power of the protocol is shared with every program or smart contract on the chain you can imagine. You may think your upcoming order for DEX is the most important thing since the discovery of Higgs boson — but no one will open a fast lane for you right away and the blockchain is being shared. The nodes on the chain are dealing with things like people paying online to buy items, and Larry Jr. is going to finish his summer homework: post his NFT. But what complicates this issue is that agreements usually process transactions in order. Essentially, if the network is busy, transactions can take more time. Sounds challenging, right? This is where Laminar came into play.

What is Laminar flow?

Let’s pull a little further and explain why we call our DEX Laminar. In fluid mechanics, laminar flow occurs when the particles of the fluid move in a smooth path without any disturbance or mixing. Think so — particles can travel together and pass each other without affecting particles in other paths. What does this have to do with our DEX? A little bit of peace, soon you will understand.

What is Laminar?
Then go back to the blockchain. The order in which transactions are executed is rather critical. That’s why so many blockchain transactions are in order. That is, one after another, executing all transactions in turn without any concurrency, ensuring the integrity of the blockchain. But the downside of doing so is that it’s slow to process transactions sequentially, and if your overall transaction throughput is low, on-chain procedures that require significant transaction throughput, such as DEX on-chain, will be affected.

In laminar fluids (reality), particles can be connected in series if they do not affect each other. Similarly, back in the blockchain, if transactions do not affect each other, they can be executed in series at the same time.

Again, Aptos uses Block-STM, a parallel execution engine for smart contracts. In general, this technology allows transactions to be executed and validated simultaneously over multiple threads through a mechanism that checks their dependencies. In other words, if two or more transactions do not affect each other, they can run simultaneously.

In traditional transactions handled by centralized exchanges or DEXs, a significant portion does not overlap. For example, cancel a price limit order in the order book or confirm orders at different levels. Therefore, it is very possible to create a flexible DEX using Block-STM mode.

Let’s look at several of Laminar’s key features:

Main characteristics
1. Parallel cancellation

As mentioned earlier, Laminar will use a core innovation feature of Aptos called Block-STM to allow instructions to be executed in parallel where possible, increasing the overall throughput of DEX and reducing market makers’ spurious cancellation requests. After all, for any participant, there will always be some change in the time required to submit a request. The potential disadvantages of delayed variability are reduced, given that cancellations and other non-related requests can be executed in parallel in the same block. This is beneficial not only to market makers, but more importantly to liquidity.

2. Delayed orders

In order to attract retail customers, users can benefit by allowing their orders to stay on the chain for a short time, thereby reducing the single-handling fee. These orders wait for N blocks in the event queue before checking out. Here, market makers are more active in trading passive orders (non-delayed orders) because they know they are not sniped by high-frequency trading robots.

This allows users to weigh and choose between speed and cost, helps Laminar attract users willing to sacrifice speed to reduce transaction costs, and motivates market makers to quote narrower spreads.

Therefore, simply put, our users can exchange for lower fees by issuing delayed orders, while market makers can specify passive orders (non-delayed orders), provide more active high-frequency liquidity than delayed orders, and offer better prices for most users.

3. SDK, UI, or API interface

Laminar is for everyone, we mean everyone among us. DEX is completely decentralized and will always remain that way, but we know that different users may prefer to interact with DEX in different ways. For this reason, we will provide many interfaces to suit the needs of all parties.

SDK
As the bottom-level method of interacting with programs on the chain, SDK provides developers with the ability to start and run quickly to interact with nodes and directly invoke commands on the chain. The SDK will be available in both Rust and Python versions.

UI
The Laminar team will deploy an intuitive web-based user interface for traders who tend to point to trade. The user interface will be equipped with diagrams and real-time order book graphics, similar to a centralized cryptocurrency exchange.

API
We will provide developers with a REST and Websocket interface to interact programmatically with DEX. If you want to integrate Laminar with your trading platform, or if you have a systemic strategy, you want to deploy and trade quickly — our API is exactly what you are prepared for and ready for.

We want you to like the brief introduction to Laminar. We’ll explore more details in the upcoming new post and welcome to our Medium, Twitter and be part of our Discord.