0x Ecosystem Update, May 2020 🗓
Welcome 👋 to the May 2020 ecosystem update from 0x Tracker, a monthly review of happenings from the 0x ecosystem. Each month we provide 0x trading insights, news from across the 0x ecosystem, and a summary of 0x Tracker updates.
📈 Trading Insights
0x trading volume continued its upward trend for the year with a slight bump over April from $111 million to $115.8 million. Protocol fees were also up $2,348 from $10,284 in April to $12,632 in May. The number of trades however was down significantly from 87k to 60k, meaning average trade size increased during May. This larger average trade size was likely encouraged by increased gas prices across the Ethereum network.
A lot of this volume has been driven by Tokenlon, in particular liquidity that has been supplied by the OneBit Quant market maker. OneBit Quant is an automated market maker that specialises in high frequency trading.
With Tokenlon driving a lot of trading activity, we can see that V2 still dominates protocol usage. If/when Tokenlon migrates to V3 of the 0x protocol we should see a large increase in generated protocol fees.
There’s been a lot of activity this month with regards to staking dashboard development (see Ecosystem News below). The official 0x Dune Analytics dashboard in particular provides a lot of staking insights. We can see that staked ZRX continues to increase, driving ZRX demand higher each month.
Last month we improved the trader insights feature of 0x Tracker with labels to help identify specific traders. We can see from this data that Set Protocol in particular has continued its upward trend of 0x liquidity consumption in May. Moving over to relayers, we can see that Bamboo Relay has also continued it’s upward trend of relaying volume in May, particularly for USDC-ETH trading.
Top tokens for the month continued to be ETH & stable coins, however Binance USD saw a big jump in trading thanks to a Tokenlon trading promotion. We continue to see Tether volume driving upwards, taking over DAI/USDC which are in a downward trend. PAX, IMBTC, and WBTC are some more of this years favourite tokens, all with volume trending upwards.
🗺 Ecosystem News
There’s been lots of activity in the wider 0x ecosystem this month with a big focus on how ZRX is being put to work in staking and voting.
- Voting on ZEIP-77 finished, falling in favour of decreasing the ZRX staking epoch from 10 days to 7 days. Over $10m of ZRX was used in the vote.
- The 0x Ecosystem Dev Meeting for May was released on YouTube. Topics included the exchange proxy, meta-transactions and request for quote.
- Matcha, the official 0x token exchange built on 0x API, was released to the first batch of beta testers. You can sign up for early access now.
- A number of staking dashboards were released including the official 0x dashboard built on Dune Analytics, an ROI dashboard built by Timur Badretdinov, and a Staking Rewards page.
- Alex Kroeger from the 0x team contributed a staking analysis to “Our Network”, a weekly DeFi newsletter. Alex also appeared at REIMAGINE 2020 for a chat about 0x, the recording is available on YouTube.
- Lawrence Forman from the 0x team put together a deep-dive blog post around 0x API’s Smart Order Routing which allows 0x to tap into on-chain DEXs such as Uniswap, Curve, Oasis, and Kyber.
- Radar Relay relaunched with more liquidity sources, wallets, and a better user experience. WBTC was also made available for trading.
- 0x joined the Chicago DeFi Alliance (CDA) alongside dYdX, Kyber Network, IDEX, Opyn, Set Protocol, and Synthetix. The CDA’s mission is to provide support and mentorship to startups in the DeFi space in areas including trading, markets, and regulation.
🌵 0x Tracker Updates
Development activity on 0x Tracker this month was all about improvements to existing features, and long term sustainability through monetisation.
- The fills browser was updated with stats and metrics, allowing users to visualise queries over 0x trading data. Filtering fills by date range, tokens, and traders was introduced, allowing more powerful queries to be built.
- Relayer pages were given an overhaul with stats and traded token information being added to individual relayers.
- The site was given a UI refresh to improve navigation, and a quick search was introduced which now allows for searching over relayers, tokens, and traders in addition to fills.
- We launched NFT powered advertising slots which provides the opportunity to sponsor 0x Tracker on a fortnightly basis whilst promoting your brand. The first fortnight has already sold, subsequent fortnights are open for bidding.
🎬 Wrapping Up
That’s it for May, stay tuned for another update next month. If you enjoyed this update then consider subscribing to the newsletter to receive the monthly update direct to your inbox.
