It’s now been over 7 weeks since the launch of Axial, the best decentralized exchange for value-pegged assets on Avalanche. This time has brought us various platform improvements, new partnerships, a rapidly growing community and much more.
Let’s take a look back to many of the highlights of these past weeks, in a semi-chronological order:
The Launch
Axial’s launch meant a busy week for the Snowball DAO. The Snowball team, alongside many contributors, were running between meetings, answering questions from the community, and ensuring everything was ready for launch.
Many community members worked together to develop a quick video introduction for Axial with voice-overs and animations to introduce the new project. This can be watched here if you missed out on it.
Because of the hard work of all involved, Axial was able to attract over $7 Million in TVL during its first 24 hours of being live. This amazing kick-start was a great beginning for leading the next few weeks of equally exciting events.
Governance Begins
Governance in Axial started off strong with two snapshot proposals regarding liquidity rewards for AVAX-AXIAL providers. Votes decided on a 20% rewards allocation, rewarding liquidity providers for the Trader Joe DEX. A third proposal was made in order to add a new pool to Axial, MIM-USDC-DAI, which swiftly passed and was executed upon.
While there were a couple more proposals during the last few weeks, the focus on governance at the time shifted to discussions around implementing a more robust voting mechanism. While some of these discussions are still on-going, consensus seems to have formed around some form of staking mechanism for AXIAL tokens, the details of which are still being decided upon.
The TVL Explosion
In the first couple weeks since launch a great deal of excitement and awareness of this new awesome DEX on Avalanche was on display; particularly through the enormous and rapid growth of the platform’s TVL. Reaching $50 Million in TVL was followed by reaching $90 Million in TVL a couple days later.
This meant that for a short period of time, Axial had more TVL than the DAO that launched it in the first place. After some of the hype died down, TVL retraced to a more stable level and is currently fluctuating between $30 Million and $40 Million locked in our various pools.
DEX Aggregators Join In
As Axial provides swapping assets with extremely low fees, it makes sense for DEX aggregators on the network to allow their routing to go through our smart contracts.
The first aggregator to integrate Axial was ParaSwap, followed by YieldYak and then Kyber. As more integrations take place, it means the aggregators’ users pay less for swaps, and more fees are accrued for Axial’s liquidity providers.
Partnerships Are Made
The blockchain space can be lonely without friends, and what sets the Avalanche ecosystem apart is its community of projects supporting one another for guaranteed success. To that end, we’ve partnered with many excellent projects on Avalanche to help us do just that.
Our very first partnership was with OrcaDAO, to launch a new pool containing its AVAI stablecoin, along with extra rewards for liquidity providers in the form of ORCA tokens for a period of time.
Our second partnership was with Teddy, whom brought in 1 Million TEDDY tokens as liquidity rewards for the new pool on Axial containing its stablecoin, TSD.
Our last partnership has been with Frax, bringing some extra FXS rewards for Axial’s AC4D pool - the one that has included the FRAX stablecoin since our platform’s inception.
Welcoming Metapools
While Axial had planned to introduce these pools from the very start, this was accelerated due to a possible exploit on the metapool contract’s code. As always, the safety of funds in our smart contracts are of utmost importance, so we could not launch these without knowing it was completely safe to do so.
During the last few weeks, this exploit was patched, and we’ve now deployed the very first metapool on Axial with the USDC token (native USDC). Already a large percentage of this new native token’s liquidity is on Axial, allowing users to swap between USDC and USDC.e, or other stablecoins, with ease.
Some Juicy Stats
A newsletter is not complete without looking into some interesting stats collected throughout these last few weeks.
- AXIAL Supply - We’ve now passed the 10% mark on the maximum supply of AXIAL that will ever exist!
- Tokens Swapped - Users have swapped over $300 Million in token value through Axial’s many pools, with over 28,000 transactions to date.
- ParaSwap TXs - ParaSwap’s users have greatly benefited from Axial’s liquidity, having transacted over $65 Million in token value over 3,600+ transactions.
- Swap Fees - Over $120,000 has been collected as fees from the many transactions through Axial’s pools, the large majority of which goes right into the pockets of liquidity providers.
- Peak Volume - The highest ever weekly volume on Axial was on its 3rd week after launch, with over $71 Million in volume swapped.
About Axial
Axial is an Avalanche-native decentralized exchange that is the centerpiece for liquidity of value-pegged assets in the ecosystem. It provides traders swap functionality with ultra low fees and slippage, and is integrated into the best DEX aggregators in the space. Axial specializes in providing liquidity between a variety of stable assets, including bridged, synthetic or derivative assets.
The Axial DAO was the first project to be launched as a spinout of the Snowball DAO, led by one of the most experienced teams on Avalanche with a great record of transparency, community-focus and innovation.
