In this article I will be going over Ballastfi dex. I will provide a brief overview of the features. Ballast is a DeFi infrastructure initiative built on Sui, an upcoming and scalable L1 solution. The on-chain DeFi suite by Ballast provides a CEX-competitive experience to DeFi users.

Founded in November 2022, Ballast is one of the first products to offer a complete trading suite solution on Sui. The advantages of the suite model include better user experience compared to a simple AMM : flexible liquidity, easy access for institutional traders, secure and transparent on-chain verification, opportunity to price different types of instruments, and trading robots interoperability.

The Ballast infrastructure unlocks the opportunity to change various types of assets with different levels of complexity in the DeFi space including but not limited to perpetual & quarterly futures, power perpetuals, floor perpetuals, options, exotic options, everlasting options, options vaults, basis trading, fixed yield, structured products, and RFQ.

CORE FEATURES:

AMM & Swap Interface (v1)

Our AMM is composed of a suite of persistent, non-upgradable smart contracts that together create an automated market maker, a protocol that facilitates peer-to-peer market making and swapping of tokens on the Sui blockchain. Central Limit Order Book model (v2)

Ballast uses a single asset pool, the liquidity of which is sent for market making to the order book. Thus, traders will always have enough liquidity for comfortable trading, and investors can profit from the sophisticated market-making mechanism developed by the Ballast team.

The secondversion of the Ballast spot DEX on Sui is the first order book implementation that supports on-chain order matching and Sui wallet connection. Ballast also provides users with an opportunity to make instant token swaps at the market price in a single click. Ballast boasts lower fees compared to AMMs. On Ballast, for example, on the SUI/USDC market takers pay 0.1% where 0.05% goes to makers and another 0.05% – to the treasury fund. As for USDT/USDC, the taker fee is 0.04% and the maker’s rebate is -0.02%.

Ballast offers a decentralized way to trade perpetual futures contracts meaning that traders have no need to rely on centralized exchanges and trust their funds to a single entity. Instead, funds are stored on users' wallets e.g. Suiwallet. Ballast's perpetuals will support leveraged trading, cash settlements, and multi-collateral features.

The goal of Ballast in terms of options trading is to provide a decentralized platform for their operation and to ensure a convenient and easy-to-use foundational block for well-versed, expert traders and as well as novel traders. Ballast will support partial collaterization for options.

The Ballast ecosystem is primarily comprised of three types of users: liquidity providers, traders, and developers. Liquidity providers are incentivized to contribute Sui tokens to common liquidity pools. Traders can swap these tokens for one another for a fixed 0.30% fee (which goes to liquidity providers). Developers can integrate directly with Ballast smart contracts to power new and exciting interactions with tokens, trading interfaces, retail experiences, and more.

In total, interactions between these classes create a positive feedback loop, fueling digital economies by defining a common language through which tokens can be pooled, traded and used.

Liquidity providers, or LPs, are not a homogenous group:

• Passive LPs are token holders who wish to passively invest their assets to accumulate trading fees.

• Professional LPs are focused on market making as their primary strategy. They usually develop custom tools and ways of tracking their liquidity positions across different DeFi projects.

• Token projects sometimes choose to become LPs to create a liquid marketplace for their token. This allows tokens to be bought and sold more easily, and unlocks interoperability with other DeFi projects through Ballast.

• Finally, some DeFi pioneers are exploring complex liquidity provision interactions like incentivized liquidity, liquidity as collateral, and other experimental strategies. Ballast is the perfect protocol for projects to experiment with these kinds of ideas.

There are a several categories of traders in the protocol ecosystem:

• Speculators use a variety of community built tools and products to swap tokens using liquidity pulled from the Ballast protocol.

• Arbitrage bots seek profits by comparing prices across different platforms to find an edge. (Though it might seem extractive, these bots actually help equalize prices across broader Sui markets and keep things fair.)

• DAPP users buy tokens on Ballast for use in other applications on Sui.

• Smart contracts that execute trades on the protocol by implementing swap functionality (from products like DEX aggregators to custom Solidity scripts).

In all cases, trades are subject to the same flat fee for trading on the protocol. Each is important for increasing the accuracy of prices and incentivizing liquidity.

There are far too many ways Ballast can be used in the wider Sui ecosystem to count, but some examples include:

• The open-source, accessible nature of Ballast means there are countless UX experiments and front-ends built to offer access to Ballast functionality. You can find Ballast functions in most of the major DeFi dashboard projects.

• Wallets often integrate swapping and liquidity provision functionality as a core offering of their product.

• DEX (decentralized exchange) aggregators pull liquidity from many liquidity protocols to offer traders the best prices by splitting their trades. Ballast could potentially be the biggest single decentralized liquidity source for these projects.

• Smart contract developers use the suite of functions available to invent new DeFi tools and other various experimental ideas.