gTrade December Recap:
New Vault & New Chain
Hi, gTraders!
December was the month we put the pedal to the medal with two big deployments: the gDAI Vault and the Arbitrum launch! Last month was also critical in setting up key foundational pieces to enable the bridges between Polygon and Arbitrum. We intend to fully contribute to the Arbitrum ecosystem — and we’re happy to say that all the infrastructure is now in place to realize this vision.
Naturally, we paired these new features with new frontend UX updates — including one that is unique to gTrade in the decentralized trading space that makes our trading experience comparable (or better) than CEX.
But we don’t rest on our laurels. Expect an eventful January planned out for our gTraders!
Read on until the end to see what we have in store this month.
Here are the Profit Distribution stats in December.
Profit Distribution was ~$624,000 in December.
Monthly Traded Volume was ~$1.10B in December.
It was another solid month for $GNS holders and $DAI/$gDAI Vault Stakers, even with $DAI stakers moving liquidity to the new $gDAI Vault and traders anticipating the Arbitrum launch!
Arbitrum & $gDAI Launch
Our much anticipated Arbitrum launch took place on Dec 31, 2022 — which was the culmination of over 6 months of building and almost a year of planning!
In terms of platform performance, Arbitrum presents a boost to both the consistency/speed of trades (no reorgs), on top of bringing massive partnership and composability potential for $gDAI. Arbitrum has been the most dominant L2 in 2022 and has experienced a meteoric rise in adoption in the latter half of 2022. Our decision to launch on Arbitrum is one that was diligently considered through a number of key factors:
- Arbitrum’s growth despite the bear market
- The collaborative and composable nature of the chain ecosystem
- Arbitrum’s ecosystem of traders
Our rationale was to bring a superior trading platform to a chain that already had a strong user-base, the attention of the DeFi community, and the capacity for growth through greater network effects.
We set out to bring our A-game to the Arbitrum ecosystem — which ultimately resulted in the deployment of the new $gDAI Vault.
gTokens open up an entirely new class of collateral possibilities (eg. $gETH, $gBTC) and is one of the building blocks we are bringing to the table alongside our Arbitrum launch.
You can read a deeper breakdown of the $gDAI Vault and the $gToken primitive in our dedicated gToken Vaults article here.
We didn’t launch on Arbitrum just to mirror the existing gTrade platform — we launched a suite of new DeFi primitives with it that have the potential to disrupt the status quo both inside and outside the ecosystem!
Transitioning Vault Liquidity
Moving the over-collateralization from the old $DAI Vault to the new $gDAI vaults was anything but trivial! On the backend, this involved:
- Closing the gov fund delta-neutral trades that were opened back in May.
- Claiming the old vault over-collateralization
- Use this $DAI for over-collateralization split between the new Arbitrum and Polygon $gDAI Vaults.
- All of this without pausing trading at any time (smooth switch from previous vault to new vault on Polygon).
If you still have $DAI staked in the old Polygon $DAI vault, please stake it into the new $gDAI vault.
New Front-End Interfaces
In the past, you had to access staking in the $DAI Vault through the Staking section on the main menu. We got rid of this extra step on the new gTrade website to give you an even more streamlined frontend experience.
A lot of effort was put into building the UIs for the new components such as the $gDAI interface, the OTC page and the Bridge page. A fantastic frontend experience was the final key step in making the launch as successful as possible. As a result, the gTrade frontend is now more sleek, intuitive and easy to use.
You can also switch between Polygon and Arbitrum directly from the dropdown menu on the vault page.
Using the menu allows you to quickly jump back and forth to check vault stats between the Polygon and Arbitrum $gDAI Vaults.
Speaking of stats, the $gDAI Vault TVL has already surpassed $13M on Polygon. It reached >60% of the old $DAI Vault’s all-time-high TVL in just two weeks. Thank you to all gTrade LPs for your swift action!
The Arbitrum $gDAI Vault launched just a couple of days ago and is beginning to build with a favorable 12% APY currently!
We’re excited to see how the $gDAI Vaults will grow and balance out across Polygon + Arbitrum.
GNS + GNS NFT Bridge
We wanted to make the bridging experience from Polygon to Arbitrum as simple for our gTraders as possible, so we created our own bridging front-end. This makes it easy for our gTraders to move $GNS and GNS NFTs from Polygon to Arbitrum and vice-versa.
We’ve integrated with Layer Zero, an omnichain interoperability protocol, for the cross-chain messaging technology.
In terms of security, the bridge is rate-limited to prevent any exploit to the messaging protocol from significantly impacting the supply of either $GNS or the NFTs. This measure was developed in tandem with the feedback from the Halborn Security Audit. Although this took more development resources than expected, the extra time spent is of no consequence when measured against the outsized security gains that come from building the safest bridge possible for gTraders.
New OTC Mechanism
$GNS minting and burning is now managed through the new OTC page.
While the new vault is over-collateralized, a percentage of ALL trading losses go into a pool that can be used by anyone to sell their $GNS OTC. The vault will buy and burn the $GNS and send the equivalent DAI amount OTC using the 1 hour TWAP price. The percentage of losses can be adjusted depending on the current collateralization ratio.
This mechanism acts as a self-adjusting throttle to manage the collateralization ratio, while also shielding the $GNS token price from potential market-selling pressure and creating deflationary pressure on the supply!
If the vault were to be under-collateralized, it would be refilled by minting and selling $GNS OTC, capped at 0.05% of the $GNS total supply every 24 hours (18.25% per year). This enables $GNS minting to refill the vault safely, while also preventing the $GNS token from market sell pressure. It acts as a secondary market to buy $GNS directly from the vault.
Please note that just like the burn, if nobody actually interacts, nothing happens. For example, there isn’t a bot run by the protocol doing it at fixed predictable intervals.
FYI — you can easily access this OTC page from gTrade’s main menu (no slippage or Uniswap LP fees!).
V6.3 Update
The v6.3 update technically included the $gDAI vault, but it also brought the following change:
The GNS/DAI price oracle (to calculate GNS rewards eg. for NFT bots) now uses a Uniswap V3 pool, which is much more liquidity efficient. We have provided $100k of protocol-owned liquidity (on Polygon & Arbitrum) over a very big range to provide a solid foundation for LPs to provide concentrated liquidity on top of.
Therefore we reduced the GNS/DAI LP incentives to zero (trading fees are no longer distributed to GNS/DAI Liquidity Providers). Instead, the previous GNS/DAI LP incentives are now split 50/50 between the $gDAI vault and $GNS Single-Sided Stakers!
It is possible thanks to the incredible capital efficiency of Uniswap V3 pools and the high native APR they bring.
This adjustment makes participation in the ecosystem more compelling (whether through vault LPing or token staking). $gDAI Liquidity Providers and $GNS stakers are now receiving a significantly greater share of trading fee revenue!
One-Click Trading (1CT) is live
One of the many critiques leveled against decentralized trading platforms is that they tend to be slower than CEXs in trade execution.
gTrade took this personally.
Once enabled, one-click trading removes the need for Metamask confirmations. We’ll be writing a deep-dive thread on this, as we’re the only decentralized platform offering this feature.
It’s important to note that all of these updates add up in a synergistic manner to create a net-faster trading experience.
- On Polygon, without 1CT — a single trade was taking an average of ~20s (incl. block confirmations)
- On Arbitrum, with 1CT enabled — a single trade takes an average of ~3.5s
Simply put, the combination of Arbitrum’s transaction speed + having 1CT enabled results in trades that are ~6x faster!
We now have a trading UX in place that can better match the speed of the real-time prices our custom Chainlink DON uses.
Here’s a detailed guide on how to set 1CT up. It only takes a few minutes!
Bonus: This feature works particularly well with the gTrade mobile app to make the mobile experience even smoother.
Partnerships, Integrations and Community
Impermax Finance
Impermax Finance has launched an isolated pool for the GNS/DAI LP. GNS/DAI LP tokens can now be used as collateral on Imperax’s permissionless platform. We want to bring new use-cases to holders of our LP Token, and Impermax Finance offered the perfect solution to this.
GMD Protocol
GMD Protocol is an exciting Yield Aggregator Platform building alongside an exciting array of projects on Arbitrum. They’ve already announced an upcoming GMD x gTrade Vault on their Twitter — more info to come!
Crypto Banter
We recently secured a sponsorship with Crypto Banter! They’re a collective of some of the biggest content creators and thought leaders in the crypto space with around ~600,000 Youtube subscribers. We’re the first decentralized leverage trading platform they’ve chosen to partner with. We’re excited to see this partnership blossom — especially given the opportunity to reach new crypto users on YouTube!
Oracle vs Orderbook-based Trading Platforms
It’s important to remember precisely why we have chosen to use an Oracle-Based Trading Model for gTrade. We’ve written an informative deep dive on the advantages of Oracle-based models in this thread here, but here are some hot-takes:
- A unified liquidity source ($gDAI) is much more capital-efficient.
- Oracle-based platforms have more control over the price impact of individual trading pairs.
- Trading execution can be guaranteed.
- Let’s not even get started on the scamwicks.
Both our thread and the thread we respond to are instrumental in highlighting the specific edges of Oracle-based Trading Platforms vs platforms that use an Order Book model.
What’s on the Horizon
December was the culmination of many months of development to bring a new $gDAI Vault, a new composable $gDAI token and to open the floodgates for many DeFi-native traders in the Arbitrum ecosystem.
Here’s what we can mention about the upcoming priorities:
- We’re launching a $100,000 Arbitrum Trading Contest in January (more details in the coming days).
- We are listing some new asset classes as our next priorities. We’re confident the community will love the increased optionality these new asset classes will bring!
gTrade’s vision is to become the fairest and most trader-centric decentralized platform in the space. In December, we compounded key technical pieces to solidify the foundation for this mission.
Our Arbitrum launch to close out 2022 was the result of over 6 months of concentrated effort driven by the desire to not only bring our platform to the leading Ethereum L2 — but also to implement new DeFi primitives that are pushing forward the decentralized leverage trading space.
Here’s to an even bigger 2023 for gTrade!
