What are short-term orders?

As part of the default settings of the v4 open source software (”dYdX Chain”), short-term orders are short-lived orders that are not stored on-chain unless filled. These orders stay in-memory of the network validators, for up to 20 blocks, with only their fill amount and expiry block height being committed to state. Short-term orders are mainly intended for use by market makers with high throughput or for market orders. More information on short-term orders on dYdX Chain is available here.

As part of the default settings of the v4 open source software, long-term orders are “stateful orders” that are committed to the blockchain. Long-term orders encompass any order that lives on the orderbook for longer than the short block window. The short block window represents the maximum number of blocks past the current block height that a short-term MsgPlaceOrder or MsgCancelOrder message will be considered valid by a validator. Currently the default short block window is 20 blocks on the v4 open source software.

Short-term orders are different than long-term orders on the v4 open source software because short-term orders only stay in-memory up to 20 blocks. Short-term orders are only valid until after the chain passes the Good-Till-Block parameter (aka expiry, even if partially-filled or cancelled). Meanwhile, long-term orders are stateful orders that persists in the in-memory orderbook until filled, expired, or canceled.

Short term orders can only be GTB because in the interest of being resilient to chain halts or slowdowns. Short-term orders have a maximum GTB of current block height + short block window. The default value is 20 blocks, or about 30 seconds on the v4 open source software.

Stateful orders have a maximum GTBT of current block time + Stateful Order Time Window. The maximum default value is 90 days on the front end and 95 days on the protocol for v4 open source software. GTBT is used instead of GTB to give a more meaningful expiration time for stateful orders.

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