Introduction
Carbon Network is a decentralized financial protocol that operates on the Cosmos-SDK. Developed by Switcheo Labs, Carbon is designed to support the secure and scalable trading of sophisticated financial instruments such as derivatives, futures, and bonds. It also acts as a building block for cross-chain DeFi by bridging the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems, enabling cross-chain money markets and permissionless listing of tokens from IBC, EVM, and non-EVM chains.
Financial Sophistication
Carbon Network is engineered for financial sophistication. As a highly scalable solution, it can support almost any financial asset, from derivatives to synthetic assets, without compromising security, speed, or cost. Currently, Carbon supports spot markets, quarterly futures, and perpetual swaps on Demex, its reference trading UI, with up to 50x leverage. With the launch of perpetual markets, Carbon positions itself as the only decentralized protocol with cash-settled futures that allows for a risk-free cash and carry trade in the Cosmos ecosystem.
High Performance and Low Fees
Carbon Network 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 nodes use Tendermint BFT as the consensus protocol, transactions no longer need to be confirmed on multiple blockchains to be fully executed. This allows for high throughput and low latency, translating 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.
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, NFT 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.
Permissionless and Decentralized
Decentralization is not just a slogan at Carbon. The protocol is designed and was born out of the desire to create a truly decentralized experience for traders. From features like permissionless listing to the plethora of wallets it natively supports, Carbon is designed to be driven and run by the community through governance. More information can be found in On-Chain Governance.
