High performance exchange

The Katana Perps exchange is an off-chain system that manages all aspects of trading, including order management, matching, and liquidations. Its design mirrors the architecture of top centralized exchanges, enabling Katana Perps to match them in both latency and throughput — performance that is unavailable from other DEXs.

Order Book

The off-chain order book and matching engine deliver:

• Extreme performance — Processing tens of thousands of orders per second with millisecond latency.

• Guaranteed sequencing — Orders are executed in the precise order they are received by the server, eliminating ambiguity and ensuring fairness.

This stands in contrast to the majority of DEXs, which execute trades on-chain. On-chain execution introduces low throughput and high latency tied to block times, as well as non-deterministic ordering where validators or sequencers decide which transactions are included and in what order.

Advanced Orders

The high-performance matching engine enables advanced order types that are typically only available on centralized exchanges. These include stop-loss, take-profit, post-only, and fill-or-kill orders, among others. Access to these order types allows traders to implement sophisticated strategies — such as automated risk management and precise entry and exit execution — that are not possible on most DEXs.

A comprehensive overview of all supported order types is available in the Order Types section, and detailed specifications can be found in the Katana Perps API documentation.