How Stork Helped Helix Launch the First Ever On-Chain AI Index
About Helix
Helix is a decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) on the Injective blockchain, offering perpetual futures contracts (perps) and spot asset markets. Helix offers markets on a fully on-chain central-limit order book (CLOB) with ultra-fast, nearly zero-cost transactions.
Helix is one of the largest DEXs in crypto, having processed ~$43B in trading volume, facilitated 100M+ trades, and listed 82 markets, including top crypto assets and innovative indices. Helix offers its markets to both retail traders and institutions, with the look and feel of a highly performant centralized exchange (CEX), all while preserving self-custody and transparency.
Helix is now on the cusp of launching a truly trailblazing product, in a bid to offer traders and institutions exposure to the hottest sector of the decade: Artificial Intelligence. The Helix AI Index is a first-of-its-kind perp market that combines both AI crypto tokens and leading AI equities, all tradable 24/7 in a decentralized manner.
Products Used
Stork for Real-Time Composite Oracle Service (COS)
The Stork COS is an ultra-low-latency oracle powering the AI Index’s pricing and rebalancing mechanism for both crypto assets and equities that make up the AI Index.
Key Results
First Ever AI Index Perpetual
Stork has enabled a first-of-its-kind AI Index comprising assets from crypto and traditional finance (TradFi). 10 AI-centric crypto tokens and 6 AI equities are housed in one on-chain index.
Cross-Market Coverage
An instrument to gain exposure to both AI-related crypto markets (including NEAR, ICP, and Bittensor) and AI equities (including NVIDIA, TSMC, and Palantir).
Low Fees, Fast Execution
Stork’s ultra-low latency COS paired with Injective’s speed and Helix’s robust infrastructure offer a near CEX-like trading experience but with DeFi trustlessness, permissionlessness, and custody.
The Problems and Stork’s Solutions
The vision underpinning the Helix AI Index is straightforward but ambitious: offering retail and institutional players diversified exposure across top AI crypto tokens and equities via a single, borderless on-chain instrument. Providing the data feed to make this vision a reality was a complex undertaking, for which Helix worked with Stork. Stork COS’ architecture is uniquely positioned to provide a customized data solution capable of fusing crypto and equity feeds in real time and rebalancing positions in order to remain within risk parameters.
Real Time, Multi-Asset Data
Generally, oracles only offer individual feeds of crypto tokens, and esoteric feeds like equities require separate data pipelines. Combining both asset classes into one index needs a high-performance, unified data feed, provided by Stork’s COS.
Stork’s architecture enables it to scale infinitely, as aggregation responsibilities are split between multiple decentralized aggregators. Thus, Stork’s data feeds are not limited by the number of assets an application needs in a particular data feed.
Automated Risk Management
Artificial Intelligence is still a relatively nascent asset class and is subject to periods of volatility, to both the upside and the downside. To create an index for such a volatile industry, risk management is key.
To reduce risk from concentration, the Helix AI Index has a 10% weight cap on tokens and a 25% cap on equities. Stork’s COS provides a data feed with rebalancing logic that updates monthly.
Any excess weight is redistributed proportionally among the rest of the index each month. This prevents large-cap assets (e.g., NVIDIA) from overshadowing the smaller up-and-coming AI tokens.
Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure
Helix’s trading volume regularly hits billions of dollars per month. Any index deployed by Helix like the Helix AI Index would likely have millions of dollars of open interest per month. Further, Helix has institutional customers like high-frequency trading firms that demand speed in execution. To serve these challenging conditions, Stork’s COS has to be enterprise-grade.
To ensure accuracy of the data and that data has not been tampered with, Stork’s COS has multi-level guardrails that ensure intrinsic trustlessness. Publishers’ signatures are verified by Aggregators and Aggregators’ signatures are verified by on-chain contracts or subscribers. Further, Stork’s COS employs a ‘pull’ approach to oracle structuring, ensuring that data is available whenever required, with sub-second ultra-low latency. The robustness of Stork’s data feeds is further fortified by having multiple sources of data aggregated by multiple Aggregators so as to not rely on a single point of failure.
There is also transparency built into all data updates. The latest value of a feed that has been pulled from Stork’s COS can easily be verified on-chain as Stork’s smart contracts maintain a registry of this data, and even have a public facing interface for less sophisticated users.
The Results & Conclusion
“Products like the Helix AI Index are what decentralized finance was conceived for. Supplying the data that will allow this perp market to move with the speed of data which is exactly what our goal is here at Stork. Collaborating on this index is also our first foray in creating a product that combines equity and crypto markets together into one aggregate index, and we could not be more excited to be pioneering it with the team at Helix.
- Meredith Pitkoff, CEO and Co-founder of Stork Labs Network
The Helix AI Index is a first-of-its-kind fusion of crypto-asset exposure and TradFi-asset exposure, all woven together in one AI exposure basket. Investors have never had the opportunity to have exposure to one industry across asset classes in this manner ever before. This unified instrument greatly simplifies how investors diversify across AI’s most promising opportunities, both in crypto and TradFi.
By combining AI-focused crypto tokens and equities in a single, on-chain perpetual market, Helix and Stork have redefined the boundaries of decentralized finance. At the heart of this innovation is Stork’s Real-Time COS, which delivers high-frequency, multi-asset data that enables Helix to maintain accurate, transparent indices around the clock. Together, Helix and Stork stand at the forefront of a new era in DeFi, where traders can access global markets, mitigate risk, and capitalize on disruptive trends in one seamless environment.