Exchange OS

Background

When major exchanges were first being developed, it was challenging to create a high-performance platform that could reliably guarantee crucial properties like solvency, ownership, and liveness. This challenge led to the emergence of decentralized exchanges and Automated Market Makers (AMMs), including Hashflow’s original RFQ product. However, these solutions often involved a tradeoff: sacrificing performance. Without optimal performance, delivering a seamless user experience becomes difficult.

The past five years have seen the emergence of ZK proofs. These proofs, along with other verifiable computing primitives, represent a revolutionary advance in computing. They enable us to delegate computations while maintaining trust and integrity, marking a significant leap forward in how we approach secure and reliable data processing.

The convergence of decades of cryptographic research with the rapid advancements in proof systems has made it possible to deploy zero-knowledge proofs in real-world applications.

What is Exchange OS?

Hashflow's Exchange OS (or xOS for short) is an engine that can turn any exchange into what we call a provable exchange.

What are Provable Exchanges? And why do they matter?

FTX, one of the largest exchanges ever, stole over $7B worth of user funds in custody and yet no one has addressed this problem. All major crypto exchanges including Binance, OKX, and Coinbase still custody user funds.

No one knows what exchanges do with your money.

Provable exchanges fix this by guaranteeing the following:

• Safety — users always control their assets and onboard to provable exchanges onchain. Most critically, users will be able to exit onchain whenever they wish.

• Transparency — users can always verify that an exchange has the assets that it says it has.

• Performance — users benefit from the highest levels of performance expected from order book style exchanges.

The best part is that any centralized exchange can quickly become provable without major architectural changes. xOS is simply an additional layer that an exchange can opt into when their users are onboarding, to get significant security guarantees without the headaches of rearchitecting their offchain logic or having to move large parts of it onchain. This is the magic of ZKPs — all computation, even offchain, can be proven and verified onchain to get the best properties of crypto.

What’s the big picture?

xOS will initially launch on Celestia as the data availability layer and RISC Zero as the zkVM. We’re planning to add more DA layers including EigenDA, with a goal of eventually multi-plexing DA, to drive costs as low as possible for users. We’ll also incorporate other zkVMs including Starkware, Succinct, and more.

We started Hashflow in 2020 with a mission of making the decentralized trading experience better for every user. At the time, this meant reducing slippage, stopping MEV, and getting users the best prices. As the journey continued, we realized that our vision was even bigger and that with ZK tech, we were positioned to usher in the endgame for decentralized exchange technology. And that’s what we did with Hashflow ExchangeOS.

If you are an exchange operator interested in integrating xOS, reach out to us via: [e-mail]