The OpenRelay team formed in 2017 to launch the world’s first open source 0x order book. The OpenRelay Order Book was, for a time, the most advanced order book solution for decentralized trading, supporting over 27 million orders at a time. It lead to innovative tokens like Embiggen and NotCoin, and tools like Massive and Fling.

But by far the biggest thing to come out of OpenRelay has been Rivet.cloud and the EtherCattle Initiative. The OpenRelay Order Book was designed to be very light touch and reliable — it has run itself for years only requiring intervention when 0x protocol upgrades are required. But in the early days, the one part our system that wasn’t light touch or reliable was our node infrastructure. That’s why We set out to build open source node infrastructure solutions that were as reliable and fault-tolerant as the rest of OpenRelay’s infrastructure—and where we really found our niche.

While we shifted our focus to growing Rivet.cloud, the 0x protocol has been growing in a different direction. The decentralized 0x Mesh protocol has largely replaced the need for hosted order book infrastructure, and many of the enhancements to the 0x protocol have become difficult to support in our existing architecture. Rather than try to play catch-up in an ecosystem that seems to be doing fine on its own, we have decided to shut down the OpenRelay order book to focus our full attention on Rivet, where we believe we can create significantly more value for the community.

As always, our team remains committed to open source software. We will continue to support the Open Source EtherCattle Initiative, as well as our open source event log and transaction indexer, Flume. In the coming weeks we will be releasing details on Cardinal — an EVM para-client that aims to succeed the EtherCattle Initiative, allowing us to support a wide-variety of EVM based chains through a single, streamlined platform. We will also be announcing PluGeth — our extensible Geth fork to end all Geth forks.

If you want to keep in touch and see where all these projects are going, we invite you to join us on our new Discord Server. It hasn’t been an easy decision to shutter our earliest project, but it’s absolutely the right way to focus our efforts on the projects bringing the most value to our community.