Forward is excited to announce that we are integrating Chainlink Price Feeds on BNB Chain mainnet to support our exchange and lending and borrowing protocol (LBP). We are also planning to integrate Chainlink Keepers to help automatically liquidate positions, liquidate loans, and rollover loans. By integrating the industry-leading decentralized oracle network, Forward will be able to power our DeFi exchange and lending/borrowing platform with hyper-reliable, cost- efficient, and decentralized price data and automation.

Unlocking Advanced Utility With Complementary DeFi Products

By combining the utility of our exchange and LBP, Forward is able to instantly match users’ long and short perpetual futures orders using our Automated Position Hedger (APH). The exchange requires liquidity to instantly support new positions, which creates real borrowing demand for the LBP. This enables either open positions on a variety of underlying assets via our exchange or access to yield by lending to the LBP. Ultimately, this eliminates the need for a central limit order book or market maker, which helps lower the trading fees for our users.

Supporting Fair Market Prices With Chainlink Price Feeds

As derivatives contracts are based on the price movements of underlying assets, it’s critical that our exchange uses globally accurate price data to help ensure that users receive fair market prices for the positions they open. It’s also important that our protocol operates seamlessly during the network congestion that can occur during major market movements, since traders often use contracts to hedge or take on more risk when market conditions are volatile.

After reviewing various data solutions, we decided to integrate Chainlink Price Feeds to provide accurate market data for the following USD price pairs: BNB, BUSD, and USDT. Price Feeds are the market-leading data solution as they provide a multitude of critical features such as:

• High-Quality Data — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators, leading to price data that’s aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned of outliers and wash trading. Chainlink’s data aggregation model generates more precise global market prices that are inherently resistant to inaccuracies or manipulation of any single or small set of exchanges.
• Secure Node Operators — Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by independent, security-reviewed, and Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading blockchain DevOps teams, data providers, and traditional enterprises. Chainlink nodes have a strong track record of reliability, even during high gas prices and infrastructure outages.
• Decentralized Network — Chainlink Price Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and oracle network levels, generating strong protections against downtime and tampering by either the data provider or oracle network.
• Reputation System — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on- chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical and real-time performance of node operators and oracle networks.

Increasing Reliability and Decentralization With Chainlink Keepers

To operate successfully, our exchange and LBP must execute contracts when assets hit a specific price or at specific points in time. For example, when a user opens a long position and the asset price drops below the liquidation price, it’s critical that we liquidate that position immediately to protect the solvency of our platform. Furthermore, when a loan is opened longer than the initially defined period, such as after 28 days, we need to automatically recalculate the interest rate in order to rollover the loan. Given that our low-fee platform secures valuable financial contracts, this required a hyper-reliable yet cost-effective automation solution.

Chainlink Keepers serve as decentralized, hyper-reliable, and economically incentivized automation bots that wake up smart contracts when they need to perform critical on-chain functions, which usually take place at regular time intervals (e.g., every day at the same time) or based on external events (e.g., when an asset hits a specific price).

We chose to integrate Chainlink Keepers because they offer:

• Decentralized Execution — Chainlink Keepers provide reliable, trust-minimized automation with no single point of failure, mitigating risks around manual processes and centralized servers.
• Increased Efficiency — Projects that use Chainlink Keepers are able to reduce time spent on DevOps, minimize operational overhead, and streamline development workflows.
• Enhanced Security — Chainlink Keepers sign on-chain transactions themselves, enabling automated smart contract execution without exposing private keys.
• Reduced Costs — Chainlink Keepers perform efficient off-chain computation for smart contracts, allowing developers to build feature-rich dApps at lower costs.

Looking Ahead: Becoming the Leading Decentralized Derivatives Exchange

Our mission is to become the leading decentralized derivative platform and revolutionize the way people trade. To do this, we need to offer a wide variety of financial contracts on our DeFi platform. Given that this requires us to incorporate the price data for the corresponding underlying assets into our platform, we plan to integrate many more price pairs into our platform in the future using Chainlink Price Feeds.

“Integrating Chainlink Price Feeds will give us access to the hyper-reliable and globally precise market data that we need to become the leading decentralized derivatives exchange. We’re also looking forward to integrating Keepers into our platform to further increase the reliability of our protocol.” – Chanon Charatsuttikul, CEO