The 36th largest cryptocurrency by market cap of $166.6 million is now entering a new phase as the company announces “0x v3 is now live on Ethereum mainnet,” on Dec. 2nd. This latest version has several 0x Improvement Proposals bundled together.

1/ 0x v3 is now live on Ethereum mainnet! ⛓️

A brief thread on how the v3 upgrade evolves 0x into a community-owned liquidity API… 👀https://t.co/tGkRGwtsvX

— 0x (@0xProject) December 2, 2019

V3, the company says is its “biggest upgrade” since the launch of the network in August 2017 that will establish 0x as a robust liquidity API for the DeFi ecosystem and solve some of the major problems facing decentralized exchange.

“An open and non-rent seeking protocol,” 0x facilitates the trustless exchange of ERC-20 tokens.

Founded in 2017, 0x raised $24 million via Initial Coin offering (ICO) also allows for apps to be built on top of its protocol. Various projects like August, Aragan, and district0x are already using its framework.

Focusing on the Rapidly Expanding DeFi Economy

In Sept. last year, the company released version 2 of the protocol that resulted in dozens of teams to build projects in a range of verticals including decentralized finance (DeFi), predicting markets, and NFL gaming.

Now, 0x is focusing on providing the “best liquidity API for the rapidly expanding DeFi economy.”

With this version, DeFi projects also have the ability to access sources of on-chain liquidity via bridge contracts that connect to DEXs. Liquidity bridges and other sources of 0x liquidity will be accessible through 0x API.

Other improvements in this version include the ability to pay the fee with any Ethereum-based token, more reliable order cancellations, maximization of profits when matching orders by taking a spread on either side of the trade, two new callback signature types, and informative error messages are now part of reverts.

Introducing ZRX Staking Mechanism

Staking ZRX is one of the features of this version to grant market makers ownership in protocol and encourage participation governance. Market makers are important shareholders of the ecosystem because they provide necessary liquidity.

ZRX staking mechanism will offer rewards and additional voting power. Initially, market maker pools will be required to stake 100 ZRX to be eligible.

As for the security of your tokens when delegating your ZRX to market maker pools, the net rewards are calculated and distributed in ETH meaning ZRX balance will be untouched.

This new release, however, didn’t have any effect on the price as 0x currently trades at $0.2769 with 24 hours loss of 0.28%, as per Coincodex. 0x is down over $90% from it's all-time high of $2.50.