Nash open sources its protocol and client to promote transparency and innovation

Nash has open-sourced its core protocol and client libraries, intended to encourage transparency in decentralized finance and provide the means for other companies to build their services on top of Nash.

Protocol

Making the nash-protocol open to the public allows users to verify that Nash is truly a non-custodial system. The account and funds management system, cryptography primitives, and order placement/fulfilment logic can all be examined. The team notes:

“This allows us to be fully transparent about how we generate user wallets from a seed phrase, which data we store and how users authenticate when accessing our system… Anyone with security concerns is able to verify that all these protocols are implemented correctly and that no secret data can leak.”

Additionally, the protocol for signing trades and all interaction with the Nash matching engine or trading contracts can also be studied, proving that Nash cannot issue trades on behalf of the user.

Typescript client

Alongside the protocol, Nash has also made its Typescript client open-source. Used for accessing the Nash exchange, publishing the client makes it possible for third-parties to create their own clients to use with Nash.

This reduces the dependence on Nash’s own reference implementations, and enables entities such as brokers to build on top of Nash’s services without introducing the security concerns raised through custody. This can be achieved by combining these tools with Nash’s decentralized API keys, generated via secure multi-party computation.

Nash notes that these tools are not a white label solution. Rather than a company offering a Nash account for each user, a business would have its own account on Nash and use it to provide trading desks or other services to its customers without taking on any third-party risk.

In December 2019, Nash released the first version of an open-source bot for market making, written in Python. According to the team, Nash intends to continue releasing open-source tools to further drive innovation and ecosystem growth.