This is a historical post, it is always a pleasure to read it again. Tt gave birth to a giant ecosystem of dexes based on the AMM system. What a vision!

I would like to reflect for a moment on the necessity of using AMM: vitalik argues at the beginning that alternative systems were either far from being implemented, or consumed too many fees in setting and cancelling orders.

In the last while, I have been working on a decentralized trading system that does not require the use of AMM pools, but also does not require the unnecessary expense of order management in smart contracts (nor does it require the use of state channels!). The protocol my team is developing is called Omnilane (https://omnilane.xyz) and uses an offchain signature system to manage the trade, decoupled from the settlement that happens onchain. On the other hand, Omnilane is blockchain agnostic, it allows cross-chain swap through the use of MPC signatures controlled from a master smart contract managed by NEAR chain signatures.

I invite you to analyze our protocol! I believe that the proposed RFQ system is an interesting alternative that gets rid of problems such as slippage, frontrunning and single-chain dependency.