Deposit Funds

In the current beta, deposits are trust-based and administered off-chain.

During the public beta, the deposit mechanism is intentionally simple: you send funds to a designated address and the operator credits your account balance in the exchange. Your balance is tracked in the Vela state layer (MPT) and is visible in your Dashboard. All operations against your balance — fills, fees, withdrawals — are reflected there in real time.

This trust-based model lets the team focus on matching engine performance and protocol correctness before deploying the on-chain settlement contract. The fraud proof system is already implemented in the zkvm crate; on-chain enforcement is what remains.

The beta supports USDC as the primary quote asset. Base assets (ETH, BTC, SOL, etc.) are represented as synthetic positions rather than direct custody. This will change with on-chain settlement, where real assets will be locked in a settlement contract.

After connecting your wallet, navigate to Dashboard. The balances panel shows:

• Available — funds free to use for new orders.
• Locked — funds reserved by open orders. Released when orders are cancelled or filled.
• Total — available + locked.

Withdrawals are initiated via the Dashboard or directly via the POST /withdrawals API endpoint. Each withdrawal request requires an ECDSA signature from your wallet. In the beta, withdrawals are processed manually by the operator and are not guaranteed to be instant.