How Conduit Cut Orderly Network’s Transaction Settlement Costs By Over 73% Amidst Spiking User Growth With SuperBlobs

Orderly Network is an omnichain liquidity infrastructure provider powering a growing roster of DEXs, perpetuals protocols, Telegram trading bots, and more — any dApp that wants to offer cross-chain trading can plug into Orderly. Orderly’s unique buildout allows it to offer traders the liquidity and performance of a CEX, while remaining permissionless, transparent, and decentralized. Since launching in 2022, Orderly has processed over $67B in trading volume on behalf of more than 400,000 traders.

We’re proud to say that Conduit has been part of the journey. 

The Orderly team came to us when they decided to build a key piece of their infrastructure — the Orderly settlement layer — as a rollup on Ethereum. With our help, Orderly has achieved the uptime and security it needs to become the trusted clearinghouse for an entire DeFi ecosystem. Even better: When Conduit and Celestia teamed up to create SuperBlobs, Orderly was able to achieve drastic savings on Ethereum settlement costs, enabling the network to grow scalably. 

The Orderly Network rollup stack 

Rollup framework: OP Stack

Settlement layer: Ethereum

Data availability: Celestia

Interoperability: LayerZero

How Orderly works

Orderly’s architecture is made up of three core components:

• The asset layer consists of token vaults across all markets and chains Orderly supports.
• The engine layer is the matching engine that powers Orderly’s cross-chain orderbook.
• The settlement layer is the heart of Orderly infrastructure: an L2 rollup where liquidity from across chains converges and trades are settled

Any time a user executes a cross-chain trade on a protocol powered by Orderly, the engine layer routes their requested trade to the orderbook, finds a matching order, and executes those orders on the settlement layer. 

How LayerZero enables Orderly’s secure cross-chain functionality

Orderly's integration with LayerZero enables seamless user interactions across blockchains. LayerZero, an omnichain interoperability protocol, supports censorship-resistant messaging and permissionless development through immutable smart contracts called Endpoints. As the leading interoperability protocol, LayerZero has facilitated over 135 million messages across 80+ blockchains, with hundreds of applications using it for messaging.

Orderly relies on LayerZero to manage user deposits and withdrawals efficiently across all supported chains. The primary benefit of this integration is that it unlocks the ability for users to access capital on any chain. 

Specifically, when Orderly trades are executed on its settlement layer, the settlement layer then sends and receives deposit and withdrawal instructions from its orderbook, and updates users’ onchain balances. These instructions are then relayed to and from the vaults that make up the asset layer, powered entirely by LayerZero.

The integration with LayerZero is significant for several reasons. It provides users with access to necessary capital across any supported chain and securely manages accounting across all of Orderly’s Asset Vaults. Additionally, it can be used as a framework that can help all blockchains and rollups solve their liquidity needs. 

As of June 2024, Orderly regularly processes more than 100,000 transactions per day, with all messages being delivered through LayerZero. Consequently, Orderly has consistently been the second-most active protocol on LayerZero, usually only behind Stargate.

By having LayerZero as a trusted infrastructure partner, Orderly will be able to continue to expand its offerings throughout the Omnichain.

How Conduit deployed Orderly’s settlement layer

The all-important Orderly settlement layer is where Conduit comes into the picture. While Orderly considered building the chain for its settlement layer in-house, the team ultimately decided to play to its strengths. “Using a service provider would allow us to focus our resources entirely on building the app, which is what we specialize in, and not have to worry too much about the infrastructure,” said Orderly CPO Bryan Chu. 

With the settlement layer acting as the core ledger and sole source of truth for all dApps and traders in its ecosystem, Orderly knew its rollup infrastructure provider had to provide guaranteed uptime, robust security monitoring, and deep experience in rollup operations — and the ability to launch the rollup fast.

After a thorough evaluation, Orderly decided on Conduit. 

“We chose Conduit because they offered the speed, efficiency, and hands-on approach we needed to deploy our complex settlement layer with precision,” said Orderly COO Arjun Arora. “Their user-friendly platform and team of experts gave us the confidence to focus on building a great product for our users, knowing the underlying infrastructure was in good hands.” 

The Conduit team guided Orderly through the rollup setup process, helping the team select a tech stack tailored to the task of providing cross-chain liquidity to a network of trading protocols. Ultimately, Orderly deployed on the OP Stack, settling transactions on Ethereum and using Celestia for data availability. “We were really impressed with the ecosystem vibrancy that comes with the OP Stack,” said Chu, citing the frequency of high-quality upgrades. Conduit’s long-running support of the OP stack was another plus. 

“As we prepared for rollout, Conduit was very responsive even though our time zones are 12 hours apart,” Chu added. “[CEO] Andrew Huang himself was very knowledgeable and gave us a lot of advice on choosing the right architecture as well as chain parameters, helping us to scale as quickly as possible.”

A few weeks later, Orderly was ready to deploy on mainnet. Within days of launch, Orderly’s settlement layer was processing over 40,000 transactions per day, and as of June 2024 is regularly processing more than 100,000.

Conduit cuts Orderly’s settlement costs 73%, increases DA usage efficiency 10x with SuperBlobs on Celestia

Orderly’s settlement layer is a uniquely data-intensive rollup, as it processes hundreds of orders and trades per second off-chain, then allows them to settle fully onchain. “We want our users to be able to verify every single one of their matched trades onchain, and this means posting a lot of data to the chain for settlement and verification purposes,” explained Chu. 

Given that data availability is the most expensive cost of running a rollup, it was crucial that we help Orderly post data to Ethereum as efficiently as possible. For that reason, we recommended Orderly use Celestia’s modular data availability layer, as its sampling framework is well-suited to Orderly’s infrastructure and data load. However, Orderly still faced high settlement costs due to the sheer volume of data it needs to process.

Conduit addressed this by developing a new, even more efficient blobs framework specifically for rollups deployed with Celestia, which we’ve deemed SuperBlobs. SuperBlobs enable rollups to include more transaction data in each blob, making settlement significantly more cost-efficient. 

Under the default blobs framework, Orderly’s settlement layer posted a new batch of transaction data to Ethereum every two to three minutes, with each batch at approximately 120 KB. SuperBlobs raises Orderly’s maximum possible data per batch to 1.8 MB, 15x the previous maximum and 2.5x the maximum capacity of Ethereum blobs under EIP-4844. 

Immediately after implementing SuperBlobs, Orderly was able to process the same volume of transactions while posting a new batch every 40 minutes. Recently, as the network has grown and become busier, Orderly has begun posting new batches every four to six minutes. But now, those batches contain roughly 1.1 MB of data — significantly more than what was possible before SuperBlobs. 

Orderly started saving money on settlement immediately after Conduit implemented SuperBlobs on May 16, 2024.

Average daily settlement costs fell 73% in the 30 days following SuperBlobs’ implementation, even as Orderly’s user base grew 29% and its gas usage more than doubled during that time.  

In U.S. dollar terms, Orderly saved more than $8,000 on settlement costs in the 30 days following the implementation of SuperBlobs, while simultaneously increasing activity on the network.

Those savings will only get bigger as Orderly continues to grow and scale. More importantly, efficiency gains of this magnitude open up new possibilities for Orderly. “SuperBlobs allow us to continue to post the amount of data that we want to, maintaining full integrity of the exchange onchain without having to cut any corners,” said Chu. “Longer term, this can set the stage for fully decentralizing our matching engine, removing any trust assumptions.” 

The Fjord upgrade and beyond

We look forward to continuing to support the Orderly Network, in particular by ensuring its settlement layer rollup is proactively upgraded to benefit from relevant network upgrades. One such upgrade that occurred recently is Fjord from Optimism. Among other things, Fjord enables OP Stack rollups to safely increase their gas limit to 200 megagas per second, enabling them to process more transactions per block. In preparation for Fjord, we increased Orderly’s upper gas limit from 20 megagas per second to 50, manually installing guard rails to ensure testing can be done safely. Since then, Orderly has achieved gas throughput of over 6.7 megagas per second, up from around 1.3 prior to the change — an increase of over 5x. We expect those gains to increase even more with Fjord. 

As the rollup-native cloud platform, it’s our responsibility to not just deploy our customers’ rollups, but to work hand-in-hand with them to ensure their rollups are always on the cutting edge, fully taking advantage of the latest network upgrades. We believe our work with Orderly shows the concrete benefits rollup operators can realize under that approach.

If you'd like to see how Conduit can help you launch a rollup for your onchain clearinghouse, contact us here!