Decentralisation is needed. What’s hot?

3 min readNov 18, 2022

This analysis was written in October 2022

If you are looking at more investments in the crypto space, I suggest having a look at a new narrative that’s gaining momentum amongst the crypto community and that might explode as soon as the bull market resumes. I am talking about decentralised leveraged trading platforms.

My bet is on $GNS.

Gains Network is a decentralised trading platform that offers up to 1000x leverage and 71 trading pairs.

GNS is built on Polygon, the main Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution with 186m unique addresses and an ecosystem of over 37k dapps.

It will integrate to Arbitrum in the next 2/3 weeks which will bring in more users and therefore more revs, fees and more rewards to stakers/ vaults. Arbitrum has 1.6m unique addresses, but it’s important to note that there’s a large overlap with polygon (crypto savvy users don’t put all their eggs in one basket).

Some quants about GNS:

- 100m market cap

- 7k total unique users

- 300 daily active users (vs 75 in Oct’ 21, 400% growth YoY)

- 60m daily trading volume (vs 13m in Oct ’21, 360% YoY growth).

- 19b in total trading volume

- 1700 daily trades (vs 330 in Oct ’21, 400% YoY growth)

- 50k daily fees (vs 4k in Oct ’21, 1150% YoY growth). More than $SOL, $CURVE

- $713,000 Profit Distribution to stakers and liquidity providers (vs $819,000 in Sept ’22, 15% MoM)

- 25m in TVL (vs 5m in Dec’21, 330% YoY growth)

Tokenomics:

- 4% inflationary at current trading volume

- 4.8% staking APR (varies depending on trading fees)

- 5.52% in GNS/DAI pool APR (varies depending on trading fees)

- 73% of the total supply is being staked

- Part of the profits are distributed to stakers and liquidity providers

Competitors:

Only comparing to direct competitors offering leveraged trading and not to indirect competitors that offer spot trading such as all exchanges, dex etc.

- GMX:

- 3x the mcap of GNS

- 18x more users

- GNS makes 20x more in revs/user as they have more trading pairs (71 vs 4)

- GMX does 140m daily volume vs 70m of GNX

- GMX has 100k in daily fees vs 46k of GNX. Worth noting that 77% of GMX trading fees come from traders on Arbitrum, which GNS will integrate to in the next 2/3 weeks, potentially stealing some of their users due to a more comprehensive offering.

- Binance and Deribit (centralised alternatives)

I won’t be going into the actual metrics here because these are centralised solutions and BNB derives its value mainly from spot trading (Deribit doesn’t have a token) so I will focus on the advantages of a decentralised trading platform:

- No KYC

- Security (on the blockchain and smart contracts are audited)

- Sovereignty (non-custodial)

- No counterparty risk (which is more important than ever now after Celsius and voyager)

Cap table:

- Didn’t have VC funding until very recently, but Sky vision capital and RR2Capital VCs just bought in.

Twitter: Dafne175

LinkedIn: Davide Marcotti

eToro: Dafne17

Sources:

https://polygonscan.com/charts

https://tokenterminal.com/terminal/projects/gains-network