Ethereum’s Top DEX Is Relaunching to Tap Istanbul’s Lower Gas Fees

IDEX, the top decentralized exchange (DEX) for ERC-20 tokens in 2019, according to etherscan, is launching a new DEX on top of Rollup technology, a Layer 2 scalability protocol only made possible through Ethereum’s latest “Istanbul” hard fork. As part of the relaunch, a demo was released on Thursday.

A non-contentious hard fork, Istanbul has six ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) including EIP 2028, which reduces the gas fee for requesting calldata from 68 gas per byte to 16 gas per byte. Calldata is information broadcast on the ethereum state necessary for creating specific smart contracts. 

By reducing gas fees, Rollup-based smart contracts, which bundle on-chain transactions off-chain, have become an expedient scalability tool – for IDEX and others.

For Aurora Labs, the company behind IDEX, Istanbul means lower operating costs as well as more transactions processed, CTO Jason Ahmad said in a phone interview. In fact, Ahmad expects EIP 2028 to reduce gas fees by as much as 90 percent on the new platform.

“The design for off-chain exchange functionality with on-chain custody and settlement is much more efficient, much more cost-effective and frankly is a better judicious use of the scarce blockchain resource,” Ahmad said.

Thursday’s move is IDEX’s first overhaul since its launch in October 2017. In 2018, IDEX accounted for 3 percent of all gas fees paid to miners on the ethereum network, amounting to $4.3 million, according to Ahmad.

Update (5, December 18:25 UTC): A prior version of this story said the new IDEX platform was launching Thursday. Only a demo is currently available.