The Ones in the Arena: Hubble Exchange
“Security should be a core part of the development process rather than an afterthought.” — atvanguard, Developer, Hubble Exchange
Houston, we have lift-off! This week we’re launching into Hubble Exchange, a multi-collateral, cross-margined perpetual futures protocol on Avalanche.
Hubble is sponsoring a 7-day security audit contest at Code4rena with a prize pool totalling $75k. In honor of the contest blasting off this week, we asked Hubble dev atvanguard to tell us more about the project, his views on DeFi security, and what else he thinks is out of this world.
What are you building, and what sets it apart from similar offerings in the space?
Hubble Exchange is a vAMM based decentralized perpetual futures exchange. It’s a multi-collateral and cross-margining system — the trading experience is similar to FTX. The closest project similar to ours is Perpetual Protocol V2 (Curie). The difference is that we use a curve V2 AMM that intelligently concentrates liquidity around the current mark price. So it’s favorable to passive LPs.
What’s your vision for your project? What are you building towards in the longer view?
Hubble is trying to do for perps what Uniswap did for spot markets, i.e., eliminate orderbooks. Even though perp volumes are multiples of spot, they are still predominantly traded on orderbooks. We want to change that. Longer term, we want to build a fully-features derivatives dex.
What’s the most innovative idea in your project/protocol?
It’s the fact that users (called Makers) can add leveraged liquidity to the AMM, and earn trading fees on that. Imagine earning up to 5x the trading fee that you’d earn by LPing the same amount, say on Univ3 or curve V2.
It takes courage to undergo a public audit by a swarm of anonymous security researchers. It also says a lot about how much you prioritize security. What advice would you give to those on the fence?
Code4rena is the best way to get a bunch of white-hat hackers looking at your code. It’s like getting 5 audits at once. The quality of wardens at Code4rena is top notch, and there is no doubt in my mind that such a public audit is the best value for money spent.
Security has become an increasingly vital topic in Web3 and DeFi. How do you think the ecosystem needs to evolve in order to rise to the challenge?
We definitely need more people and tooling around security. More importantly, I feel security should be a core part of the development process rather than an afterthought. Write tons of tests, track your code coverage, get peer reviews.
What gets you most excited about Web3?
Software has eaten everything — except money. Web3 is a stab at that. As a programmer, nothing excites me more than being able to witness this revolution.
Complete the following sentence: “I wish more Web3 projects would…”
Think of building use cases that can survive even without liquidity mining. Bringing in revenue organically should be the holy grail. Of course, launch the token, but let that be a final nail in the coffin.
What Web3 project name do you wish you’d thought of first?
What do you geek out about, beyond Web3?
Beaches, Techno, and table tennis.
Is there anything else you want to make sure we include?
Our Litepaper.
Learn more about Hubble Exchange
- Website: hubble.exchange
- Twitter: twitter.com/HubbleExchange
- Medium: medium.com/hubbleexchange
Hubble Exchange’s $75K security audit contest opened February 17, 2022, and runs for 7 days. Details at code4rena.com.
The Ones in the Arena spotlights emerging and established DeFi projects and their founders, with an eye to celebrating and learning from them. The series’ name is inspired in part by Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, which has a central place in Code4rena’s philosophy.
