Headline: New Solana DEX reignites debate over who first solved front‑running — XRP Ledger veterans say it was solved years ago
A new decentralized exchange prototype on Solana is drawing fresh attention — and sparking a reminder that some market-structure problems in crypto have been tackled before. Mato, presented by founder Thomas Gehrmann at Solana Summit Germany, promotes a continuous clearing auction model designed to reduce front‑running and order‑sequencing games by batching and processing orders in parallel rather than one-by-one.
Crypto commentator Crypto Goblin summarized Mato’s pitch: orders stream across a user‑set time window, active demand and supply are aggregated, and a single market price clears the book as orders enter or leave. The goal is fairness — no single actor controls sequencing and no taker gets privileged priority.
That framing prompted a sharp reply from former Ripple developer Matt Hamilton, who pointed to the XRP Ledger’s early exchange architecture. “This problem was solved 15 years ago on the XRP Ledger,” Hamilton wrote, calling XRPL “the very first DEX in existence” and lamenting that many chains keep re‑solving the same issues. He added that it’s good to see such solutions arriving on Solana, but worried the industry keeps revisiting solved problems instead of moving on.
Hamilton’s comment has refocused attention on XRPL’s long history. Launched in 2012, the ledger includes a built‑in central limit order book DEX that lets users trade XRP and issued tokens directly on‑chain. XRPL’s documentation notes that its native exchange does not rely solely on automated market makers — trades can be routed through the order book, AMMs, or a hybrid, depending on liquidity.
XRPL’s on‑ledger exchange tools were implemented at the protocol level rather than via smart contracts, a design choice that keeps trading functions close to the base layer. Ripple and advocates routinely point to the DEX as one of the world’s oldest continuously operating decentralized exchanges, and that longevity underpins claims that XRPL was an early entrant into what later became known as DeFi.
The ledger is still evolving. The XRPL Foundation has proposed “AMM Swappable Curves” to introduce StableSwap‑style pools and concentrated liquidity to the native AMM. Meanwhile, community votes are underway for XLS‑65 and XLS‑66, amendments intended to add native vaults and fixed‑rate lending — enabling pooled assets and fixed‑term loans without external smart contracts. On the enterprise front, Ripple and Bitso recently launched MXNB, a Mexican peso stablecoin on XRPL tied into Ripple’s Payments on DEX infrastructure for regulated settlement.
Mato and XRPL are not identical solutions: Mato’s continuous auction is a specific anti‑MEV/anti‑front‑running approach on Solana, while XRPL uses a native order book that later incorporated AMM features. Still, the exchange of ideas highlights how early blockchain design choices remain relevant as builders iterate. As Solana projects test new DEX architectures, XRPL supporters point to over a decade of live experience as evidence that some foundational ideas in decentralized trading arrived earlier than many recall.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
