The State of Decentralized Derivatives Trading: Research #03
Welcome to the third article in a series of decentralized futures and options trading platforms research! October was a fruitful time for DEXes that provide derivatives trading facilities to its users, and today we’d love to cover their progress and boast our core achievements this month.
In this bi-weekly research, we will disclose the updates on the following platforms:
Mango Markets
Mango has started working with NFTs and launched their Mango Heroes NFT items to boost community engagement. Additionally, the team has plans to open derivative trading for crypto assets, which currently is not available on Solana in the form of SPL tokens, DOT-PERP for example. SOL/USDC is the platform’s most popular trading pair, and the DEX itself has already reached $77 mln daily trading volumes.
The Mango team also improved the interface by allowing users to see their open orders on charts. They keep increasing the leverage for some assets trading and have announced a 20x leverage for BTC contracts. Mango already has 7 assets that can be used as collateral for derivatives trading.
Serum
Serum being the central liquidity hub for Solana’s ecosystem has launched its Serum-based projects aggregator. The team has also featured RiskSwap in their Serum Stories and forged a strategic partnership with our team.
Hegic
The Hegic team is also actively engaged in NFT activities. Additionally, the team launched an on-chain platform analytics service that represents core stats in real-time.
dYdX
The dYdX team has achieved some really impressive results in terms of liquidity. According to them, $188 million of liquidity on BTC perp on their platform is available with slippage of 0.14%, while on Binance Perp the same slippage accounts for only $26 million of liquidity. The team plans to expand the list of tradable assets and has released a very nice guide about adding assets to dYdX.
MCDEX
MCDEX have introduced their new anti-washing rules concerning Trading Mining. The team has also released a mobile version of the platform, launched a referral and an ambassador program. Additionally, MCDEX increased the funding, because the previous one resulted in an uncorrelation with the index and had insufficient incentives for traders.
Drift Protocol
The Drift Protocol DEX launched on mainnet and paid early adopters rewards in the form of NFTs. These NFTs give access to future community rewards, access to trading competitions, the ability to burn the tickets into Drift Play Pass NFTs or merchandise, special Discord roles; and a few other features. The team raised $3.8 mln during their seed investments round.
RiskSwap
In November, RiskSwap launches two incentivization programs for spot traders: 20% fee cashback for all users, and a $1000 in SOL airdrop among 10 lucky winners who make a post on Twitter describing their spot trading experience. Additionally, the team added charts to the spot terminal and launched public testing of its perpetuals trading platform. Early testers who provide the team with valuable feedback are to be rewarded.
In terms of business development, RiskSwap partnered with Serum and got a grant worth 10,000 SRM.
Summary
Many derivatives DEXes started utilizing NFTs to reward their community and give them access to some cool features. This has become an alternative to traditional token airdrops because these tools do not affect selling pressure and engage the audience in more activities. Modern platforms actively work on improving the user experience, expanding the functionality and bringing more people to decentralized futures and options trading. A great trend for the whole industry!
We support the global transition of financial services to DeFi! To get involved with RiskSwap, visit our website or reach out to us on Twitter, Medium, Telegram, and Discord.
