Ethereum-based decentralized exchange 0x plans vote on its next protocol upgrade

By Nawaz Sulemanji

Decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol 0x has finalized its plans for its next major upgrade. 

The project’s community of ZRX token holders are set to vote in early November to finalize changes to the 0x protocol before they are implemented on the Ethereum mainnet. 0x, which raised raised $24 million in a 2017 ICO, today powers many of the smart contracts used across a growing list of Ethereum-based DeFi platforms. 

The next scheduled vote will be the fourth of its kind for the project, following a series of proposals that ZRX token holders approved earlier this year. These votes include support for “trading bundles of assets,” creating “conditional orders based off of arbitrary blockchain states,” and finally support for the non-fungible Ethereum token standard called ERC-1155.

Each of these proposals were overwhelmingly approved (99%+) based on around 5-6 million token holders casting a vote. And since there are 600 million coins in the ZRX circulating supply—with the top four addresses holding almost half of all ZRX tokens—chances are that the vote scheduled between November 4 through November 11 will be just a formality.

One of the big changes planned for the V3 upgrade involves a focus on the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. With V3, 0x aims to help “deepen liquidity for the DeFi ecosystem,” through initiatives like “a new ZRX staking mechanism, DEX liquidity aggregation, the ability for relayers to support flexible fees.”

As further explained in its latest blog-post, the new “staking mechanism gives market makers monetary rewards (in ether) and additional ZRX voting power for providing liquidity.” At present no estimated returns for staking have been announced, but the team did say that “every ZRX holder may earn staking rewards” by delegating tokens to market maker pools that use the project’s services today. 

Apart from just the new staking features, the 0x team has also developed a new set of bridge contracts that “aggregate DEX liquidity from 0x and other networks like Kyber, Uniswap, and Oasis.” New smart contracts dubbed “Liquidity Bridges” will help 0x users to “source the best prices for both popular and long-tail trading pairs across DEXs.”

Assuming a successful community vote early next month, the changes are set to go live on the Ethereum mainnet November 25.

And for those of you building on the V2 version of the platform, not to worry. The 0x team said the plan is to migrate “the entire ecosystem to v3.0 within the first 30 days,” while noting that V2 will remain running on Ethereum’s mainnet.

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