Overview

Driving financial innovation and freedom through decentralized paradigms

In Carbon’s vision to empower open financial markets, it provides the necessary tools for anyone to launch their own decentralized paradigms on Carbon Core. To support these financial constructs and new innovations, robust architecture must be set in place for systems to run seamlessly and securely.

Carbon Core is a custom-built application-specific chain that utilizes underlying technology from Tendermint comprising:

  • Tendermint Core, the BFT Consensus Engine

  • Cosmos-SDK, the Blockchain Application Framework

  • IBC protocol, the Interchain Standard for Blockchain Communication

Tendermint Core

The delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPOS) system built into Tendermint Core is utilized as Carbon's underlying consensus mechanism.

Tendermint BFT provides several key benefits to the Carbon protocol:

  1. Security: Tendermint BFT is a Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm, which means that it can tolerate the presence of malicious actors (referred to as "Byzantine" actors) in the network. This is achieved through a process of voting and consensus that ensures that a majority of honest actors can come to a consensus even in the presence of malicious actors.

  2. Performance: Tendermint BFT is a fast consensus algorithm, as it uses a deterministic voting process that allows for faster block production and finality. This enables the Carbon protocol to confirm transactions quickly and efficiently.

Cosmos-SDK

The Cosmos-SDK is designed as a modular framework, allowing Carbon developers to build on specific modules and easily add new features as needed.

Learn more about Cosmos-SDK here.

Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)

IBC allows for interoperability between different blockchain networks, enabling dApps built on Carbon Core to communicate and exchange value with other blockchains in the ecosystem.

Learn more about IBC here.

Financial Sophistication

As an extremely scalable solution, Carbon Core can support almost any financial asset from derivatives to synthetic assets without compromising security, speed or cost.

Currently, Carbon Core already supports spot markets, quarterly futures and perpetual swaps on Demex, our reference trading UI, with up to 50x leverage. With the launch of perpetual markets, Carbon Core is positioned to be the only decentralized protocol with cash-settled futures that allows for a risk-free cash and carry trade in the Cosmos ecosystem.

High Performance

Carbon Core is built specifically for trading; The entire blockchain is highly-optimized for trading-related execution paths while minimizing the number of possible attack vectors on the blockchain.

As Carbon Core nodes use Tendermint BFT as the consensus protocol, transactions no longer need to be confirmed on multiple blockchains in order to be fully executed. This allows for high throughput and low latency, and has translated to low block times (1.9s) on Carbon for fast confirmations.

The protocol has also been tested to sustain a very high transaction throughput of more than 5000 transactions per second (TPS) and can absorb a peak load exceeding 10,000 TPS.

Low Fees

Users can enjoy trades with low or even zero network fees on the Carbon blockchain. This is because all trade transactions are done on an independent Cosmos-SDK chain that does not process other transactions (such as gaming, NFTs mints, etc.).

Carbon's blockchain technology allows for more efficient use of resources and thus lower network fees due to the fact that it optimizes trade transactions directly through its protocol rather than running them through a virtual machine.

Fixed network fees

Network fees on the trading protocol are fixed per transaction. This means there are no gas bidding wars, no submitting transactions hoping they will be mined, no front-running, and reduced Miner Extractable Value. Carbon Core minimizes such value extraction by adopting batch execution for orderbook order matching mechanism. In batch execution, orders within a batch are treated equally without prioritization by order time.

Read more about Carbon Core's Frequent Batch Auction mechanism here.

Permissionless

Decentralization is not just a slogan at Carbon - We’re constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries of DeFi to create useful solutions that can bring about a world where trust is truly optional. From features like permissionless listing to the plethora of wallets we natively support, Carbon Core is designed and was born out of the desire to create a truly decentralized experience for traders.

Through governance, the Carbon protocol can be driven and run by the community. More information can be found in Governance.

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