Retrograde and Vortex Merger Announcement

The Retrograde engine has restarted. Our trajectory is now clear.

Retrograde and Vortex Protocol have signed a definitive merger agreement.

The combination of both protocols creates an unparalleled team and resources across DeFi and ecosystems, bringing together some of the strengths and learnings from Terra over to the major innovations that are arising across Cosmos.

Mergers have been the foundation of some of the most successful enterprises in the world, enabling entities to combine resources, team, connections and markets to give themselves a massive competitive advantage. However, mergers have only existed in traditional markets.

We’re proud to announce one of the first mergers in DeFi — carrying across Retrograde’s mission of championing governance and yield to Vortex, the premier perpetuals protocol in Cosmos.

The two teams will synergize to bolster the Vortex mission of bringing the perpetuals DEX trading experience on par and past centralized exchanges; the Retrograde team bringing experience in go to market strategy, developer resources and a wealth of connections from our time in DeFi.

The Vortex team are deep domain experts in all things derivatives and particularly perpetual futures from an economic and technical perspective. Together, we can drive forward perpetuals adoption on-chain, an ambitious task with arguably one of the largest market opportunities in crypto.

Shipping is what we do best — the app goes live for testing tomorrow (4th August 22) as part of the Sei Incentivised testnet.

Terra Recap & Clarifications

Retrograde is not launching on Terra in the near term due to legal uncertainty. We value our strong relationships with investors, DAOs and supporters, and hope to carry these forward.

Reminder: we have snapshotted everyone who took part in our launch — you will be eligible for a future Vortex airdrop.

Why Vortex?

TLDR: Opportunities to trade derivatives on-chain are currently inadequate. We think Vortex, initially building on Sei, will be the application to bring perpetuals trading off of Binance/FTX and onto Cosmos.

Launching on a new chain brings its own risks, however we are confident this is the right choice and excited to work alongside other teams on Sei to create a decentralised, permission-less alternative to the incumbent CEXes.

Derivatives is undoubtedly the largest market in finance. With trading volumes and fees both multiples that of spot trading (think Uniswap and traditional AMMs).

The only problem is that barely any of that volume exists on-chain today. DEX market share for spot is over 10% whilst futures is only 2%. There is a 5x opportunity at least on a market that is already multiples larger than spot.

Ironically derivatives have a much greater need to be on chain due to regulatory pressure. In order to make DeFi a true competitor to traditional finance, we need effective, trustworthy and permission-less derivatives trading.

So why haven’t derivatives trading taken off on chain? We believe this is due to the lack of scalable orderbook infrastructure in DeFi.

So far, the AMM has been an excellent way to facilitate spot trading on chain. However, AMM based solutions for derivatives are easy to start (because you don’t need to solve for the counterparty) but incredibly difficult to scale — hence the blow up of Drift and Perp.

We are bullish on the Cosmos dedicated appchain vision as the solution to this problem; a general purpose chain has no hope of facilitating and scaling an orderbook.

For this reason, we we were attracted to Sei as a Cosmos appchain that is designed solely to facilitate an orderbook, making every possible tradeoff to achieve this goal via chain level optimisations. Block times are clocking in at under one second, and the team are pushing Cosmos and Tendermint to their absolute limits.

Note: the orderbook is built INTO the underlying chain which gives apps vertical control over the stack, and allows liquidity & market making of all spot markets to be shared by all apps building on top of Sei.

We are particularly excited about the prospect of bringing a wide range of perpetual markets on chain, which is why we see our merger with Vortex as such an exciting opportunity.

Sei is a new chain, which we recognise brings its own set of risks. However, their team has so far executed, and having met them we are optimistic about the future.

Moving forwards, we will combine under the Vortex name and brand, retaining our existing Discord to ensure no-one gets lost along the way.

Come and join here as we prepare to launch Vortex on testnet, and being a new chapter for every retroCHAD: https://discord.gg/yRycjKtNCg

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Disclaimer: None of the above should be construed as financial, legal, or any other kind of advice.