gTrade February 2023 Recap: Positive-Sum Gains
Hi, gTraders!
Following the footsteps of January’s all-time highs in TVL, trading volume, and OI, February saw an influx of protocols integrating $gDAI and $GNS in exciting ways. If there is one thing that defines the month of February for gTrade, it’s the sheer amount of cross-protocol activity that’s taken place!
We specifically designed the $gDAI token for composability, but the $GNS token has been an equal recipient to gaining surface area across different protocols. With the several developments we outline below, we’re pleased to say that there’s never been an easier time to gain exposure and put to work the $gDAI and $GNS tokens!
We dive into the best of these new integrations below, with some new landmark stats and a few meaningful dev updates. Let’s get into it!
February 2023 Revenue Distribution
Profit distribution, trading volume, and vault TVL all exceeded a 3x gain from December to January:
- Monthly Traded Volume remained consistent at $3.42B for both January and February.
- Profit Distribution went from $2.3M in January ➔ $2.72M in February!
- $gDAI Vault TVL (both chains) went from $42.7M in January to ➔ $44.1M in February.
gTrade moved from strength to strength as February continued to surpass January’s all-time highs in trading volume, profit distribution, and TVL. February also brought its share of additional ATHs for the platform!
New All-Time Highs
- Total Open Interest on the platform has steadily climbed to rest at the $50m range after hitting a peak of $57m. OI has been a valuable metric for us to track, often correlated with trading volumes and DAUs on the platform.
- Total Trading Volume — On February 3rd, gTrade surpassed a landmark $25b in total trading volume! In fact — currently as of writing — the platform has already broken the $30b total trading volume milestone! But we’ll save that for the March recap.
- Commodities Daily Trading Volume — In January, we introduced commodities to the platform and on February 17th, commodities hit a daily all-time-high in trading volume of $8m! This doesn’t yet compare to our crypto and forex volumes, but it’s a milestone nonetheless.
- Stock Daily Trading Volume — On February 14th, daily trading volume for stocks hit an ATH at $9.9m — surpassing $8.6m from May 2022. We hope trading stocks on Valentine’s day didn’t jeopardize the relationships of our gTraders!
Platform Changes
February saw several optimizations to gTrade across the board — including the addition of exotic forex pairs and increased $GNS token burn.
Exotic Forex Pairs
We increased the total forex pairs on the platform to 17 by introducing 7 new exotic forex pairs to gTrade:
- EUR/SEK
- USD/CNH
- USD/KRW
- USD/MXN
- USD/SGD
- USD/ZAR
- EUR/NOK
It’s important to note that although these new forex pairs are considered exotic, they have each been carefully considered as new additions. These new pairs constitute the most liquid markets outside of the forex majors/minors and all have the potential to become on-chain forex favorites. All exotic forex pairs are tradeable with up to 500x leverage!
Forex Fee Structure Adjustment
Given the increased variety of forex pairs of gTrade, we opted for a staggered fee structure to account for the different levels of risk management each forex tier requires:
- Major Pairs: 0.012% fee
- Minor Pairs: 0.016% fee
- Exotic Pairs: 0.02% fee
Stock Fee Reduction
In February, we implemented the following fee reductions for stock pairs:
- Tier 1 fees: 0.12% ➔ 0.08%
- Tier 2 fees: 0.2% ➔ 0.12%
- Tier 3 fees: 0.32% ➔ 0.16%
We also adjusted the max leverage for these pairs alongside the reduced fees:
- Tier 1 max leverage: 100x ➔ 50x
- Tier 2 max leverage: 50x ➔ 40x
- Tier 3 max leverage: 30x ➔ 20x
More fee details of forex and stock pairs can be found here.
Multicharts
This highly-requested quality-of-life feature made viewing/trading multiple pairs on gTrade much smoother. You can now view up to 4 charts per window on the platform!
You can see the same chart on different timeframes, or check price correlation between several different pairs — all within a single window.
Increased $GNS Burn
Given the high and fast-increasing collateralization ratios of both $gDAI Vaults, we’ve increased the percentage of trading losses going to burning $GNS
- 3% on Polygon
- 5% on Arbitrum
Increased $GNS token burning means more scarcity for $GNS holders. Given these changes, the question to ask now is:
Is the $GNS token currently net-deflationary?
You’ll soon find out…
Improved Backend Scaling for Price Feeds
Lastly, our dev team worked hard to come up with a more efficient solution to use less data transfer for the off-chain price feed (not used to execute trades, only for the front-end and NFT bots)! This also allowed them to increase its maximum number of price updates per second from 10 to 40.
Integrations
There were a ton of new integrations for gTrade in February! They are best categorized into groups and all have been instrumental in pushing the adoption and liquidity of the $GNS and $gDAI tokens. Here are some of our faves:
Strategies
QiDAO — gDAI Borrowing
Early in February, QiDAO deployed new $gDAI vaults on Polygon that allow $gDAI to be used as collateral for zero-interest minting of $MAI. This lets you use $MAI to lever your $gDAI positions for more yield!
0VIX Protocol
0VIX highlighted a number of different strategies using the $gDAI Vault on Polygon.
1. A liquidation-safe $gDAI Strategy
2. A Strategy that doubles your $DAI Yield
Both strategies involve $MATIC, $DAI, $gDAI and $VIX — but the strategy possibilities extend well beyond those. Midway through the month, we also collaborated with 0VIX by incentivizing their upcoming $gDAI market on Polygon (now live) with $5,000 worth of $GNS and additional $VIX rewards for the first month! $gDAI is now listed on 0VIX as a non-collateralizable asset.
Farms, Wallets, DEXs, and Aggregators
- Bitkeep Wallet now natively supports $GNS. In practical terms, this means that swapping $GNS within Bitkeep is completely gasless!
- Quickswap introduced two Gamma V3 farms for $GNS (MAI/GNS and DAI/GNS).
- Gamma Strategies listed the UniV3 GNS/DAI LP for the following pairs in both wide and narrow ranges: DAI/GNS 1% on Polygon, GNS/DAI 1% on Arbitrum
- DefiLlama began tracking gTrade on their Yield Dashboard. This is especially useful for users looking to compare gTrade’s yield opportunities to other protocols.
OpenOcean
OpenOcean is a DEX aggregator that teamed up with gTrade (and other projects) to encourage a 2-month exploration of the entire Arbitrum ecosystem! This campaign is powered by Galxe. Of course, this means there is an NFT airdrop attached to OpenOcean’s expedition.
How do you claim your NFT?
- Swap $GNS via OpenOcean.
- Claim your NFT Rewards on Galxe.
If only all airdrops were this simple!
MUX Protocol
MUX protocol integrated gTrade into the MUX Leveraged Trading Aggregator on Arbitrum, which gives traders on MUX access to all of gTrade’s trading pairs on Arbitrum. We’re excited about the increased exposure for gTrade’s unique trading offerings!
A MUX integration with gTrade on Polygon is set to follow suit in the future.
gTrade is exploring new partnership opportunities on a near-daily basis. We cherry-picked the above integrations to give a glimpse of what February looked like — from strategies to token accessibility to protocols routing gTrade’s unique trading pairs!
Arbitrum Trading Contest Complete
We’d be remiss not to mention the conclusion to one of the most pivotal events of them all: our trading contest on Arbitrum that kicked off 2023 with a bang! This contest was a big driver in strengthening our trading volume on gTrade in February.
The $100k in $DAI has already been distributed to the 50 winners. Double-check if you’re one of the winners here (you can also just check your wallet).
gTrade in the Media
- OurNetwork included gTrade in their Arbitrum Mega Issue. Give the issue a read for a purely stat-based breakdown of gTrade’s meteoric growth over the past 6 months!
- Token Terminal conducted an (action-packed) 15-minute AMA with gTrade. It’s live on both Youtube and Spotify. If you prefer to read, we also wrote a thread about it here.
Gains Network — Decentralized and capital efficient leverage trading | 15-minute fundamentals ep. 35
- 0VIX Protocol also had an AMA with gTrade to discuss $gDAI and upcoming $GNS incentives.
- Delphi Digital launched a members-only deep dive on gTrade. If you know anything about Delphi Digital, you’re aware of the institutional grade research it employs when looking into protocols!
On the Horizon
gTrade is a platform where various participants in the ecosystem are rewarded for their participation. One area we are currently focusing on is the improvement of our NFT bot incentives. On top of tweaking the current NFT bot incentive structure, we’re also looking at improved ways to increase NFT bot utilization across the platform.
NFT bots are an essential part of the gTrade ecosystem as they are currently responsible for the execution of Limit, Stop, Take Profit, Stop Loss, and Liquidation orders. Bot runners should be incentivized accordingly, given their role in the decentralization of the platform.
Another area we have been focusing on is the lookbacks update, which will bring guaranteed price execution to all limit/stop orders and take profits, stop losses, and liquidations. The first part is close to being ready and consists of running a new decentralized off-chain price feed powered by our Chainlink node operators, which will bring the following benefits:
- Decentralizes the off-chain price feed used by front-ends and NFT bots
- Reduces latency for trades by up to 1 second
- Eliminates any possible discrepancy between prices used by front-ends and NFT bots compared to prices used by the on-chain oracles to execute trades
Finally, after the success of our trading contest, we’ve decided to draw up a few more events in the near future. But we’ll leave those as a surprise for now.
That’s a wrap on our February recap. Another meaningful month for the platform centered around an ATH revenue distribution of $2.72M! 2023 has been a monumental year for us thus far — let’s keep it going.
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