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Fundamentals
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About Rocket
Fully onchain perpetuals powered by micro auctions
Micro Auctions — A Giant Leap in Exchange Technology
RocketFi is a fully onchain DeFi Exchange powered by micro auctions — eliminating speed games and ensuring HFT resistance. Each block functions as a micro auction, producing a single fair clearing price for all participants. Natural buyers and sellers are matched directly, minimizing spread costs.
HFT Resistant
Innovative liquidity protection for natural takers and market makers
Price Improvement
Get matched at your limit price or better
0.01% Fees
Ultra-low fees for every trade on the platform
RocketChain
A custom-built, high-performance Layer 1 blockchain designed to power complex financial tools and scalable DeFi applications.
Products
Options
Coming soon — on-chain options powered by micro auctions
RWAs
Coming soon — tokenized real-world assets
Understanding Block-Based Micro Auctions
How auction-based exchange design eliminates latency games, tightens spreads, and delivers fairer prices for everyone.
Traditional financial exchanges run on continuous limit order books (CLOBs), where orders are matched one at a time in the order they arrive. This design rewards whoever is fastest — creating an arms race among high-frequency traders that ultimately harms ordinary participants. Block-based micro auctions offer a fundamentally better approach: collect orders over a short window, then clear them all at a single fair price.
Auctions Are Everywhere
Auctions are one of the oldest and most efficient mechanisms for price discovery. They appear across every corner of the modern economy:
Advertising
Google and Meta sell billions of dollars of ad space through real-time auctions every day.
Government Debt
Treasury bills and bonds are auctioned weekly, setting interest rates that ripple across the entire economy.
Stock Exchange Opens
NYSE and NASDAQ use opening and closing auctions to set fair reference prices each trading day.
Everyday Markets
From eBay listings to spectrum licenses to carbon credits — auctions underpin countless markets.
Auctions work because they aggregate information from many participants into a single market-clearing price, ensuring efficient allocation of scarce resources.
The Problem with CLOBs
Continuous limit order books process orders sequentially — first come, first served. While this seems fair, it creates a system where speed is the ultimate advantage:
⚡ Latency Arbitrage
High-frequency traders invest billions in co-location, microwave towers, and custom hardware to shave microseconds off their order times. When public news moves the fair price, the fastest firm snipes stale quotes before market makers can update — extracting risk-free profit at the expense of liquidity providers.
💧 Adverse Liquidity Impact
Because market makers know they'll be picked off by faster traders, they widen their spreads and reduce the depth they post. The result: higher trading costs for everyone, thinner order books, and a market that is less resilient to large orders.
🏎️ The Arms Race
The speed competition is a negative-sum game. Billions spent on faster infrastructure produce no new information and no better prices — they simply redistribute value from slower participants to faster ones. Society gains nothing, but pays the cost.
What's a Block-Based Micro Auction?
A block-based micro auction replaces continuous matching with discrete, frequent batches. Instead of racing to be first, all participants within a block are treated equally. Here's how it works:
Collect Orders
During a short time window (one block), the exchange collects all incoming buy and sell orders without matching any of them.
Seal the Block
When the block closes, no new orders can enter. The set of orders is fixed.
Compute Clearing Price
The engine finds the single price that maximizes the volume of trades — the price at which the most buy and sell interest overlaps.
Execute at Uniform Price
All matched orders execute at the same clearing price. Buyers who bid above it and sellers who offered below it all trade at this single fair price.
Next Block Begins
The process repeats immediately. Unmatched orders carry over to the next auction.
The crucial insight: within a single block, there is no time priority. Arriving one millisecond earlier confers zero advantage. This eliminates the entire speed arms race at its root.
How It Works in Practice
Example 1: Natural Cross — Mutual Gain
Alice wants to buy ETH at $2,000 or less. Bob wants to sell ETH at $1,998 or more. On a CLOB, whoever posts first sets the price and the other crosses the spread — one side always pays more than necessary.
In a micro auction, both orders land in the same block. The clearing price is $1,999 — Alice saves $1 vs. her limit, Bob gets $1 more than his floor. Both benefit from meeting in the middle.
Example 2: Adverse Selection Damped
A news event shifts ETH's fair value from $2,000 to $2,020. On a CLOB, a fast HFT bot sweeps every resting sell below $2,020 before market makers can cancel — the makers lose $20 per coin. This is latency arbitrage.
In a micro auction, the block collects both the informed buy and the maker's cancel. The clearing price reflects the new information, so no one is picked off. Market makers can post tighter quotes, knowing they won't be sniped.
How Auctions Outperform CLOBs
Tighter Spreads
Market makers no longer need wide spreads to protect against sniping, so bid-ask gaps shrink.
Deeper Books
With lower adverse selection risk, makers post more size at better prices, deepening available liquidity.
Better Execution
Traders receive a uniform clearing price that often improves on their limit — price improvement is the norm, not the exception.
Fairer Prices
The clearing price aggregates all available information within the block, producing a more accurate mid-market price.
MEV Vanishes
In crypto, miners/validators can't front-run or sandwich because all orders in a block settle at the same price. MEV extraction becomes impossible.
Isn't Batching Too Slow?
A common concern is that discrete auctions introduce unacceptable latency. In practice, Rocket's blocks are extremely short — measured in milliseconds, not minutes. For all but the most latency-sensitive HFT strategies (which harm other participants anyway), the delay is imperceptible.
Moreover, academic research (Budish, Cramton & Shim, 2015) demonstrates that even intervals as short as 100 milliseconds are sufficient to eliminate the latency arms race while preserving efficient price discovery. Rocket's architecture goes further, proving that sub-second batching delivers a strictly better market structure.
Beyond Crypto
While Rocket is building micro auctions for onchain perpetuals, the design applies far beyond crypto. Equities, FX, commodities, and fixed income markets all suffer from the same latency arbitrage problem. Stock exchanges like IEX have already introduced speed bumps for similar reasons. Block-based auctions represent the next evolution — a mechanism that doesn't just slow down the arms race but removes it entirely. As traditional finance moves toward shorter settlement times and greater electronification, auction-based matching will become the gold standard for fair, efficient markets.
Conclusion
Block-based micro auctions replace the speed game with a fairness game. By collecting orders into discrete blocks and clearing them at a single uniform price, they deliver tighter spreads, deeper liquidity, better execution, and zero MEV — all without sacrificing meaningful speed. Rocket is bringing this technology fully onchain, making institutional-grade market design accessible to every trader in DeFi.