🔥 NEW PAIRS ALERT 🔥

Attention Vela FAM 👀

$SOL, $MATIC, and $AVAX perpetual pairs are now available for trading on our exchange! Check it out now: https://app.vela.exchange/trade

Oh - and guess what? 50x leverage for the new assets is officially enabled 🙂

Please continue to provide your suggestions for additional pairs and trading tools. All the community feedback has been key to us growing our platform! 🙏🏼

Oh...and the waves are just starting. Major PVP alert coming in the next hours.

What else is there this week?
- Buyback announcement
- Arbitrum AMA
- Axelar integration

And of course, last but not least - more scalability and UX improvements! The train doesn't wait for anyone 🙂

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1630665614355464192?s=20

[FLASH TRADING COMPETITION]

🎉 Exciting news for all Vela traders! To celebrate $SOL, $MATIC and $AVAX pairs joining Vela perps, we're hosting a 7-day trading competition with a 💰10,000 $USDC + 2,000 $eVELA of prizes in total!

📅 Starts now until March 7th 11:30PM UTC.

🏆 Winners will be determined by overall PNL for the last 7 days on March 7th at 11:30PM UTC.

- 1st Place: 10,000 USDC
- 2nd Place: 800 eVELA
- 3rd Place: 600 eVELA
- 4th Place: 400 eVELA
- 5th Place: 100 eVELA
- 6th Place: 100 eVELA

👉 Get ready, bring your A-game, and let the trading begin! Good luck everyone 🍀 More events like this to come!

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1630711967668383744?s=20

[Monthly update]

Vela Exchange has had a busy and successful February 💻

Let's reflect on what we accomplished ◀️

✅ $2 billion in trading volume
✅ Becoming 10% of the Total On-Chain Activity on Arbitrum
✅ Hitting Over $30M in TVL for VLP
✅ Fixing Bugs, Stabilizing, and Upgrading Servers
✅ Getting Listed on various CEXs, analytics, and wallets
✅ Trending #1 on CoinGecko
✅ Beta roadmap + Adding 3 new Pairs!
✅ Launching a Flash Trading Competition

We achieved incredible beta milestones with the support of you - our community. Looking ahead, we're thrilled to continue growing and innovating with you by our side Vela FAM 💙

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1631036430851137536?s=20

Flash Giveaway

Our AMA with Arbitrum is in less than 12 hours, and to celebrate...we are launching a juicy social media contest!

Criteria:
- Post what you are most excited to hear about during our AMA
- Share a snippet of your beta experience and what makes you happy as a Vela Fam community member
- Tag @vela_exchange and @arbitrum
- Use #defi and #crypto as hashtags!

Your post can be a thread or a single post. Contest ends Thursday, March 2, 2023 12:30 PM CST!

Oh, the prizes...
1st place gets 50 $VELA 👑
10 runner ups get 10 $VELA each 🤝

[VELA x ARBITRUM AMA]

Get ready for an exciting Twitter Spaces AMA hosted by ARBITRUM 💙

And that's not all, we have a special guest joining us - 🎉 Axelar Network!

There are some big news to be shared - We will be revealing a GAME-CHANGING FEATURE that will leave you amazed!🤯

We can't wait to see you there everyone! 🫡

Starting in 1hour 🕔

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1jMJgLoVONexL

[MULTICHAIN DEPOSITS] ⛓

Introducing Multichain Deposits, powered by Axelar, the latest addition to Vela Exchange. 🔥

👉 With Multichain Deposits, you can easily bring any asset from any chain to Vela Exchange. Swap any token for USDC, mint VLP, or buy gas tokens, all in one place. 🤯

👉 Seamless Asset Transfer: No more multiple transactions or high transaction fees while preparing your funds for trading.

👉 Fast and Efficient Transactions: Swap any token to USDC on Vela Exchange in just one transaction, taking only 30 seconds or less. Start trading immediately!

Are you excited? We sure are! Try it out now and let us know how do you like this newest addition to our palette of UX improvements 💙

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1631366300621770753?s=20

We had an RPC issue and recent deployment impact trades since Tuesday, March 7, 2023 7:45 PM UTC which was resolved at approximately Tuesday, March 7, 2023 10:15 PM UTC.

Positions opened during this time will not show up until we manually update your account, so please open a request here: https://veladefi.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/3/group/11/create/45

As mentioned, we will always take care of our beta testers and if you were impacted with a liquidation or other issues as a result of the last two hours of RPC outages - please include any info in the ticketing system that can help us diagnose and provide support.

If you need to close positions that are currently not showing, please refer to these resources:

PDF (recommended): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OdKrfrwhaUcMgdL1Z6ew4prYd4KzBwFF/view?usp=sharing

Video tutorial by @lillyspolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dy0WXCNGQA

Thank you for your patience Vela Fam!

[FLASH TRADING COMPETITION]

The competition is officially over🎉

We're blown away by the incredible talent and competitiveness displayed by all the traders!

The event was nothing short of spectacular, and we're evaluating the results as we speak.

The winners will be announced tomorrow📣


👉 P.S. Keep honing your trading skills and remain prepared for even bigger challenges ahead.

The best is yet to come 🤫

[RESULTS - FLASH TRADING COMPETITION]

We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who participated in our recent Flash Trading Competition! 💙
It was a great success, and we are thrilled to see such high levels of engagement from our community.

Rewards consist of 💰 10,000 $USDC + 2,000 $eVELA and are distributed as following:

🥇1st Place: 10,000 $USDC - HEISENBERG
🥈2nd Place: 800 eVELA - S3V3ND3V11
🥉3rd Place: 600 eVELA - TRADER503
4th Place: 400 eVELA - ANONYMOUS
5th Place: 100 eVELA - ARATHKONE
6th Place: 100 eVELA - PRINT


Congratulations to all of our winners! Your rewards will be distributed soon to your trading wallets 👍🏼

Finally, we want to remind you that this is just the beginning❗️

Another flash trading event is just around the corner, we're also planning a GRAND TRADING COMPETITION 🏆 that's going to blow your mind! 🧠

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1633552275435302912

\

[PHASE 3] 🎉

With Phase 2 of the Vela Exchange Beta complete, it’s time to look forward and get a preview of the future 🔎

Phase 3 includes some of the most exciting milestones in our Beta Roadmap 🔥, including but not limited to:

✅ Beta NFT Claim
✅ Flash Trading Competition #2
✅ Grand Trading Competition
✅ Beta Rewards Airdrop
✅ Official Launch Announcement & Roadmap
✅ [REDACTED] 👀

As always, our community is what keeps us going. We are thrilled to announce the last phase of our Beta Launch and can't wait to see how things unfold. Stay tuned for more updates and 🙏 keep testing!

https://medium.com/@vela_exchange/vela-beta-phase-3-is-here-71c24cb8acd6

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1633860671157989376?s=20

💙

[#3 NFT CLAIM] 🎉

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our official Vela NFT #3 - dedicated to open beta participants! 🔥 This unique edition is not to be missed!

To claim your NFT, make sure you hold at least 50 $VELA tokens and rank in the top 2500 in trading volume on Vela Exchange. Only 2500 copies will be available, so don't miss out!

Minting opens up next week, giving you plenty of time to make yourself eligible. 👇

And that's not all, this is the third official VELA NFT, and one more is coming soon! For those who collect all four, you'll be able to forge them into something very special. 👀 Keep an eye on the forge page: https://app.vela.exchange/account/nft-forge


Remember, this is just the beginning of open beta rewards. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements along the way 🫡

Let's continue to grow together!💙

https://vxtwitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1634285557282115584?s=20

Updates on NFTs, Trading Mechanics, Rewards

Hey everyone, thanks for all the support throughout the last several days of massive volatility in the market.

Our team has been working hard on long-term adjustments that will apply to our official launch, and we think everyone will love what we'll have to share in the next week or so. Official launch may be closer than we thought!

First - we heard everyone on their feedback on the NFTs.

A few adjustments we decided to make:
- Max supply will be 5k
- Top 5,000 volume qualify to claim the NFT
- Claimers must have at least 25 VELA staked

Just as a preview - the official launch NFT will likely require different criteria, and it will be a more exclusive NFT. As a teaser - you do not need all NFTs to craft your final Vela Navigator, but each ingredient matters!

Trading Mechanics Updates

The latest updates to help lower fee costs and risk while discouraging front-runners are the following:
- Lowering of crypto leverage to 20x and forex to 50x
- Increase of the funding rate timer to 6 hours

We have not seen examples of front-running since making our adjustments (yes we know the fees are high and suck! we are working on several resolutions, one of which is increasing the timer of funding rates)

The official launch will have some really robust controls to prevent front-running, and can't wait to share what the launch will bring.

Hyper VLP and USDC rewards for VELA stakers

This one is very important to pay attention to.

#1 Hyper VLP rewards will go out in the next 24 hours, and may be airdropped as soon as tonight NA time. The adjustment of many Hyper VLP minters that belonged to the wrong tier or were unable to mint due to technical reasons definitely increased the complexity of this exercise - but things are looking good to go.

#2 USDC rewards for VELA staking will be an airdrop - the claim function will not be part of the beta release and will start during mainnet launch.

The first snapshot will be sometime between today and 3/20/23, and will be a total of $55k USDC.

The second snapshot will take place between 3/20/23 and 3/29, after which snapshots will be every two weeks on Wednesday.

Since we are accelerating our official launch, our team has decided to focus on infrastructure and trading mechanics upgrades rather than UI deployments - so please be patient with us as the next few weeks continue.

Thank you everyone! More updates soon 🙂

A few important notes for this week and upcoming events!

1. News on official launch will start coming out next week. Yes - this means beta is ending in the next weeks, and any incentives snapshots will be coming with the end of beta. We are HYPED!

2. Refunds have gone out for extreme funding rates and liquidations associated with front-running protections set last week. There are still some straggler cases and we are being careful to review each request on a case-by-case basis.

3. The NFT drop will be in the next 1-2 days! Keep your eyes peeled for news on the mint 🙂

Thank you all!

[Vela Open Beta NFT] 📢

The official Vela NFT for open beta is now available! This unique edition is dedicated exclusively to open beta participants 🔥
To claim the NFT:

✅ Hold at least 25 $VELA tokens (staked only)
✅ Be in the top 5000 trading volume on Vela Exchange

Collect NFTs from the first saga to unlock exclusive benefits in the future 💰

No need to stress - if you don't qualify, you can still get your hands on this NFT on the open market 👍🏼

The claiming page is calling your name: https://galxe.com/vela/campaign/GCE5UUhRTR 💫

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1637559456094646272?s=20

Those of you that staked your $VELA should see a nice little gift in your wallets.

This is just the beginning of real yield for VelaFam, and we are happy to see our supporters continue to receive value 🙂

Pretty big last few days:
Real Yield airdrop for $VELA stakers ✅
NFT claim ✅
Refunds issued ✅

What else could be coming 🤲 ?

🔥 God damn Official Launch is going to FIRE! 🔥

[OKX AMA]

Don't miss the upcoming #AMA held on OKX Twitter Spaces 📢

Speakers: Vela, Beacon, RDNT 👀

✍️ Live Q&A

https://discord.gg/velaexchange?event=1088491381925883916

Set a reminder, starting in ~1hour❗️

https://twitter.com/okx/status/1638601539219513346?s=20
https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1yoKMZMvdNpGQ

[BITGET AMA]

Don't miss the upcoming #AMA held on Bitget Twitter Spaces 📢

🎙 Speakers:

Uncle B, Head of Partnerships
Feynman, Head of Ops

https://discord.gg/velaexchange?event=1090669153184124938

Set a reminder, starting in less than 2hours❗️

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1rmxPkONbEZJN

See you there VELA FAM 💙

[$ARB LISTING] 🔥

From now on you can trade $ARB on Vela 🎉

Benefit from up to 20x leverage while utilizing our advanced trading functionalities!

And that's not all! We have an awesome contest to celebrate this new listing! 🥳

✅ Contest: Biggest Realized PNL on $ARB Pair
✅ Prize: 5,000 $ARB tokens
✅ Deadline: Tuesday, 11 PM UTC

To participate:

- Trade $ARB on Vela Exchange and aim for the highest PNL
- Snap a screenshot of your trade 📸
- Share your screenshot on Twitter and tag @vela_exchange (use $ARB and $VELA tags)

We're excited to bring you another listing during our beta phase, and we can't wait to see your trading skills in action! Remember, the beta is nearing its end, and we're getting ready for our highly anticipated official launch. Stay tuned for more updates! 💙

https://twitter.com/vela_exchange/status/1641515716242468864?s=20

I know that the community we have built has been excited about the success of the beta. I don’t think we have seen a beta explode out of the gates like the Vela Exchange beta launch, so kudos to all of you guys for making this happen.

We have recently discovered some information that has changed our perspective on how to close the beta with the least amount of risk to our traders and liquidity providers.

As mentioned in previous communications, we recruited several white hat developers who found vulnerabilities with potential flash loan attacks and price feed related issues.

While we were able to temporarily mitigate the exploit paths for beta, and enhance Official Launch to address them holistically, this new superpowered team has been auditing the rest of the codebase and developing new smart contracts for the launch. The dev team, in combination with several weeks of analytics discovery with partners and advisors, found a major discrepancy with VLP price that is significant enough to warrant this announcement.

The VLP price calculation is off by around ~.08, which means the true value is closer to 1.03 rather than the 1.11+ our calculations are showing.

Calculated numbers up until the depeg of USDC in mid-March checked out, but after the depeg, Vela analytics started to show some volatile numbers across Dune and other sources, we started to dig into numbers across the board and upgrade our analytics.

In short, Beta must to be closed now, which means:
- Traders with open positions will be forced to close, and USDC will be refunded in the next 48 hours
- Collateral will be airdropped and refunded
- VLP redeeming / minting is frozen, and all VLP holders will have their USDC airdropped to them in the next 48 hours (most likely sooner)

We know this comes as a surprise, and we are obviously disappointed in this outcome. Prior to this announcement, we reduced OI limits as a precaution as we finalized analysis into the issue - but now the data is 100% clear.

The best outcome was to act fast and make sure all traders can properly receive their collateral, and all VLP minters are able to receive their original USDC + any additional USDC from the vault.

We do not expect any VLP minters to be at a loss.

If you minted at 1.1 for example, you will receive 1.1 USDC back at minimum for each VLP minted. Minters at cheaper, earlier prices will receive a higher portion of any USDC on top of their original mint price than newer minters at higher mint prices.

Hyper VLP minters will still receive this month’s distribution, but further distributions will be delayed until start of the Official Launch.

This beta was intended to battle-test our platform, and it certainly did.

We created a mostly custom platform with a small team of smart-contract developers and thousands of lines of code that has some of the most sophisticated trading features in DeFi. The calculation issue went through many different audit teams without being discovered, and it speaks to the complexity of building a leading perpetual dex, as well as how methodical we have to be for the official launch.

With the data from over 50,000 traders testing the platform during this beta, addition of 4+ top notch technical resources for smart-contracts / analytics, and new advisory members, we are confident that the official launch will be robust and ready to take the lead with competitors.

Immediate Next Steps

Our team will schedule an AMA tomorrow to answer all questions around the closing of beta and VLP redemptions. Feel free to jump in and ask any and all questions.

The commitment we have to our community hasn’t changed, and the vision to push the frontiers of the DEX space is still in full motion. When beta is properly closed, we will share some very promising previews of the Vela Exchange Official Launch.

But until then, let’s make sure everyone is taken care of, and we are all aligned on the recent discovery.

Much love,
Vela Team

The team is close to verifying all numbers for the VLP and collateral refunds.

This is a critical task, and we will be performing a few more queries/checks within the next 12 hours. If things are good to go, we will disperse funds after our AMA at 10am CST (check events).

Appreciate all the patience guys - it means a lot to see many calm voices in the middle of this situation. Things will get better soon.