Orderly Network Review

How Orderly Network scores in perpetual DEXs

This entry rates Orderly Network's shared perpetual futures order book in our perpetual DEX ranking. Orderly is a backend: traders reach it through front ends run by other teams, which Orderly calls builders, and each builder sets the fee its users pay. The rating covers what Orderly itself publishes. The basis is desk research of Orderly's documentation, terms and GitHub organization, checked on November 1, 2026. No account was opened and no trade was placed. The category uses five equally weighted criteria, each marked 0 to 10, as set out in our ratings methodology.

The overall score is the plain average: (7 + 9 + 5 + 9 + 7) ÷ 5 = 37 ÷ 5 = 7.4. On current marks that puts Orderly fourth of nine in the category.

Three marks were changed on November 1, 2026, moving the overall from 6.2 to 7.4. Funding and liquidation clarity rose from 3 to 9, and risk documentation from 3 to 7. Both had been marked when Orderly's terms could not be verified, and its docs now publish them in detail. Licence and code openness fell from 9 to 5. The open Apache-2.0 contracts cover settlement, while the matching and risk engines are closed, and the category marks closed engines low.

Strongest criteria: funding terms and audits

Funding & liquidation clarity (9)

Funding settles every 1, 4 or 8 hours depending on the market. A premium based on impact bid and ask prices is sampled every 15 seconds and averaged. It is passed through a piecewise function whose slope doubles above 0.5% and quadruples above 1.5%, then combined with an interest term of 0.01% for most markets. The page lists the interval, cap and floor for every market: BTC and ETH settle every 8 hours with a ±0.30% cap. The margin page gives the formulas for initial and maintenance margin, with a parameter table per market. BTC, ETH and SOL have a base initial margin of 1% (100x) and a base maintenance margin of 0.6%, both rising with position size. The liquidation fee is 0.60% of notional on BTC, ETH and SOL and 1.20% elsewhere, half of it paid to the liquidator. The mark stops at 9 because Orderly reserves the right to shorten funding intervals or change caps in volatile markets, so the published table can move.

Audit disclosure (9)

The security page names Halborn, Zellic and Guardian Audits and links a public audits repository. That repository holds 17 PDF reports. Their file names attribute them to CertiK, Guardian, Halborn, OtterSec, Sherlock, Zellic, Zenith and an independent researcher, dated from July 2022 to November 2025. The names point to the EVM contracts, the Solana vault, the OFT token bridge, staking and strategy vaults. That record earns the 9. It stops short of 10 because the security page names only three of those firms, and no report is labelled as covering the off-chain matching or risk engine.

Middle criteria: risk documentation and fees

Risk documentation (7)

The liquidation page sets out a five-step flow. Open orders are cancelled and withdrawals frozen. Then just enough of the position is transferred to liquidators at a discount to restore the initial margin ratio, rather than sold into the book. An insurance fund, built from a share of liquidation fees, absorbs bankrupt accounts. ADL against the most profitable, most leveraged traders is the last step, and its three trigger conditions are listed. The order book design page adds that Orderly's operator can read every order before matching, and the security page says upgrades need a multisig whose signers and threshold are not named. The fund's size and address and the values of its two solvency parameters are not published, the same gap that holds Aevo at 7. For how margin levels translate into liquidation distance, see our guide to crypto risk management.

Fee transparency (7)

The fee page publishes a builder tier table. The base taker fee is 3.00 bps (0.03%) at the public tier, falling to 2.75, 2.50, 2.00 and 1.00 bps. Builders qualify through monthly volume ($50 million to $2 billion) or ORDER staking, and maker rebate caps run from 0 to 0.20 bps. The page's own example shows the catch: a builder charging 5 bps keeps 2 bps over Orderly's 3. The only rule is that a front end cannot charge less than the base fee, so a trader cannot learn their actual fee from Orderly's documentation.

Weakest criterion: licence and code openness (5)

The contract-evm repository carries the Apache-2.0 licence and was last updated in September 2026. It holds the on-chain side of the protocol: the ledger, fee manager, market manager, operator manager and vault contracts that record balances and settle trades on Orderly L2. The order book design page states that orders are matched off-chain by a matching engine and a risk engine, and neither is among the public repositories. The solana-vault repository has no licence file. A reader can audit how deposits and settlements are recorded, but not how orders are matched or accounts liquidated. That half-open core sits between the 2 given to venues with only open SDKs and the 10 given to dYdX's fully open chain. It is a deficiency, not a gap in our check.

What the score does not cover

• Individual front ends. Fees, interfaces and terms of the builder DEXs are not rated here.
• Execution and liquidity. Depth, spreads and withdrawal speed were not measured.
• Cross-chain dependence. Deposits and withdrawals rely on LayerZero messaging between vaults and Orderly L2.
• Access. The terms exclude US persons, US IP addresses and sanctioned persons. Availability is not a criterion.

Orderly Network vs GMX and Hyperliquid

GMX scores 8.4, 1.0 point above Orderly, and the gap is fees (9 against 7) and licence (8 against 5). The two tie on the other three criteria, with 9 for funding and liquidation, 9 for audits and 7 for risk documentation. Hyperliquid, two places below at 7.0, documents trading terms slightly better, with 9 for fees, 10 for funding and liquidation and 8 for risk. Orderly's lead comes from code and audits: 5 against 2 for licence and 9 against 6 for audits.

Who this rating suits

The score describes infrastructure with detailed trading terms, a long audit record and an open settlement layer around a closed matching engine. It is most useful to a builder or trader who wants to check funding, margin and liquidation rules and read the audits behind the contracts holding deposits. A trader using an Orderly-based DEX should check that front end's own fee. The score assesses documentation and is not a recommendation to trade with leverage.