How Aevo Became the First OP Stack Fork on Mainnet

Aevo is a decentralized options and perpetuals exchange built on top of Ethereum and the OP Stack. Formerly known as Ribbon Finance, Aevo is backed by Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures.

Aevo was the first OP Stack fork on mainnet, having launched earlier this year in April. They use Conduit for operating and maintaining their high performance chain that traders on their platform have come to rely on. Conduit has invested thousands of engineering hours to make its deployments reliable, scalable, and secure.

Bringing TradFi traders onchain required a high performance solution

Onchain exchanges like Uniswap, because they primarily exist on Ethereum or other shared layers, were too expensive for the volume of trades that Aevo wanted to serve and too slow for TradFi traders accustomed to instant order confirmations.

On the other hand, centralized exchanges are much easier to use, but lack the transparency into their solvency and operations, since everything is offchain.

In order to bring more traders onchain, Aevo decided they needed to launch their own app chain. This allowed them to benefit from greater transparency, by keeping funds and exchange logic onchain, while also reaping the benefits of lower gas fees and higher throughput on their own rollup.

We wanted to operate our own rollup so that we could would not run into throughput issues that we may have faced if we ran on another L2 like OP Mainnet or Arbitrum. For example, congestion could occur on those chains if an app gets popular or there is a hot NFT mint — hence we wanted an isolated environment for our exchange to operate from.
– Julian Koh, CEO

Why Aevo chose Conduit

During the time Aevo were exploring providers, Conduit didn’t actually exist yet. Instead, Aevo reached out to another provider available at the time to operate their rollup.

Fast forward a few months, Conduit now had a fully self-serve Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) product with best-in-class infrastructure, and Julian Koh, CEO of Aevo, reached out to explore Conduit’s offering.

While on our first call, the Aevo team realized that their initial provider was using an old version of the Optimism codebase which wouldn’t be receiving any new improvements or updates and had a lot of legacy tech debt.

Conduit and Aevo worked closely together to migrate Aevo’s application to a rollup hosted and operated by Conduit. Receiving all the latest improvements and updates from the newest version of Optimism’s codebase while being hosted on best-in-class Conduit infrastructure.

Andrew had many years of infrastructure experience before starting Conduit which gave us higher confidence in their ability to operate and maintain the infrastructure that we required. After playing around with Conduit and spinning up our own chain extremely easily, we decided to make the switch to Conduit before we launched officially.
– Julian Koh, CEO

Deploying to mainnet

Conduit was able to work closely with the Aevo team to hit their deadlines and launch dates seamlessly.

Aevo were on an aggressive timeline, having needed to migrate from their previous provider to Conduit, they didn’t want to waste any time deploying to mainnet.

But the journey didn’t end there – Conduit is always shipping improvements to both our product and service so that we continue to provide value to our customers beyond mainnet launch. As Conduit’s first customer, Aevo has a unique lens into the platform’s growth and maturity.

Since we wanted to launch with an OP Bedrock version before the official launch on OP Mainnet, we worked very closely with Conduit to iron out the technical issues and complexities to ensure that the launch went as smoothly as possible. Conduit has been extremely integral part of Aevo's success so far.
– Julian Koh, CEO