About

Vega Protocol is a decentralized exchange for futures and perpetuals, offering cash-settled trading options on its Alpha Mainnet. It features a non-custodial, pseudonymous environment with no third-party access to user funds. Vega's infrastructure includes a purpose-built proof of stake blockchain, low-fee structure, transparent and open-source trading, and efficient margin trading. The platform supports decentralized liquidity incentivization and permissionless market creation.

History

Vega Protocol was founded in 2018 with the aim to develop a protocol that allows anyone to trade derivatives products safely using margin and in a non-custodial manner, so parties can define and exchange real world financial risk without intermediation.

Vega includes built-in liquidity incentives and pseudonymous market creation, which ensures that high-quality markets can be created by anybody in the world, without censorship or restriction.

Vega has a proof-of-stake bridge to connect to all major blockchains for collateral which can be in the form of any digital asset including BTC, ERC20 tokens, and stablecoins,

Vega also offers a toolkit of product features and economic primitives from which all cash flows and settlement instructions can be easily specified.

Vega improves upon automated market maker based DEXs by adding active pricing with limit order books as well as passive liquidity pools. The network, secured with proof-of-stake, will facilitate fully automated, end-to-end margin trading and execution of complex financial products.

By using a blockchain optimized for this purpose, Vega is able to process thousands of transactions per second with low fees and high capital efficiency to support sophisticated derivatives products.

Fees are only charged when trades are executed and it is free to submit, cancel, and amend limit orders. The network is secured through staking, where token holders choose the validators they want to operate the network by delegating tokens to them. Trading fees are distributed to validators, token holders and liquidity providers as a reward for securing and operating the network. Important network functionality is controlled by governance voting.

The Vega whitepaper was published in 2018, the testnet was launched in March 2020, the public testnet was launched in December 2020, and token distribution happened via CoinList. The Vega ERC-20 bridge was launched in January 2021 to connect to Ethereum-based assets, and the restricted mainnet was launched in November 2021