Unstoppable Progress: Updates from Our Latest AMA
From Margin DEX Launch to Spot DEX Upgrades, Staking, and Beyond.
We recently had a Spaces AMA to give updates on Unstoppable’s progress and answer community questions. If you missed it, no worries — we’ve summarized the main points below. Let’s dive right in!
Want to listen to the Spaces in all it’s details and nuances? We can only recommend it! Catch up here: Update Briefing and Public AMA.
Margin DEX Launch Countdown
Our biggest update is that the highly-anticipated Margin DEX is almost ready for its public mainnet launch. Over the past few weeks, we’ve put the platform through thorough live tests and a trading competition. Although the competition had lower participation than expected, it gave us valuable feedback to optimize various aspects of the DEX, including the backend infrastructure, keeper logic, and frontend UI.
We’re excited to announce that the Margin DEX is now ready for public release, with a feature set that surpasses our initial plans. The platform is highly robust, flexible, and modular, offering unique value propositions to both liquidity providers and traders.
Liquidity providers can benefit from single-sided liquidity provisioning without the risk of impermanent loss or direct exposure to trader PnL. Traders get lower borrow rates compared to other perpetual DEX platforms, as well as no open interest caps or the need to balance long and short positions. This means our platform is well-equipped to handle trending markets where other perpetual exchanges often struggle with unsustainable funding rates.
As we count down to the full public launch, we couldn’t be more excited for the Margin DEX to showcase its capabilities to the wider DeFi community and make a big impact in the perpetual trading space.
Spot DEX Upgrade
At the same time, our Spot DEX is set for a big upgrade. Coming next week, we’re expanding its scope from just Uniswap V3 pools to allow any-to-any token swaps on Arbitrum. By integrating with aggregators, we’ll enable swaps across all Arbitrum exchanges, including Uniswap, Sushiswap, Camelot, Balancer, and more.
This upgrade will also bring advanced trading features to these exchanges, like limit orders, dollar cost averaging, and other upcoming automated strategies. Based on the high volumes seen on similar platforms with limit orders across various chains, we’re eager to tap deeper into this market segment and attract more users to the Unstoppable ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Arbitrum remains the dominant L2 by TVL and activity. We’re hopeful that the coming months will bring an uptick in excitement and user engagement to the chain. However, our long-term goal is to position Unstoppable as a truly chain-agnostic DeFi hub that rivals top centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase in terms of depth and features.
Marketing
Along with the product updates, we’ve started working with some key marketing partners, including an agency led by DeFi Ignas and Web3Arthur, as well as Blocmates. They’ll help us grow the community and get more people to notice what we’re building. We’ll begin with promotions featuring smaller collective influencers and potentially move into a longer-term partnership.
However, while we’ll invest in targeted marketing, we’ll never resort to follower buying, quick shills, or paying off big influencers for short-term hype. Our focus is on genuine, community-driven growth, and we need your help to spread the word organically!
The most powerful marketing comes from organic word-of-mouth by our existing community. Whether it’s sharing our tweets, telling others about our features, or having productive discussions about the platform, every bit of real support makes a difference. Together, we can strengthen Unstoppable’s voice and bring in the users who will benefit most from what we’re creating.
Staking & Tokenomics
Originally we planned to use ByteMasons’ Reliquary staking contracts. However, these contracts were more complex and feature-rich than we actually needed. So when a vulnerability was recently discovered in them, we’ve decided to take a simpler approach by creating our own streamlined in-house staking contract. This contract is now ready to go after a final round of internal review.
With our staking model, users who stake their UND or eUND will earn multiplier points over time. Long-term stakers will get higher multipliers, but we’ve also implemented catch-up mechanisms to make sure new stakers can earn competitive rewards and not feel like second-class citizens. As a small thank you, everyone who took part in our public sale will be retroactively given day-one multiplier points as a reward for their early support and conviction.
When it comes to sharing revenue, we’ll be distributing collected fees to stakers regularly in epochs, based on their stake and multiplier. The distributions will start once the protocol has collected a sizable amount of fees from Margin and Spot DEX activity.
Noteably, Unstoppable’s tokenomic design sends all spot and margin trading fees to stakers and growth initiatives instead of to liquidity provider subsidies, which is common on perpetual platforms. As we move forward, we plan to let our community vote on fee distribution ratios to help find the best balance between staker rewards and growth spending.
Roadmap and Milestones
We know that our community really wants a detailed roadmap with exact target dates for each planned feature. Believe us, we’d love to provide that level of specificity. However, if there’s one constant truth in this space, it’s that things rarely go exactly according to plan. Unexpected challenges come up, edge cases surface during testing, and sometimes our developers need to temporarily focus on fixing critical things for long-term progress.
What we can promise is complete transparency and regular communication about our development progress, as well as a strong commitment to delivering well-tested features as quickly as possible without compromising our high standards for security, reliability, and decentralization. We highly encourage you to keep an eye out for our periodic updates across social channels and to directly engage with us on Telegram or Discord whenever you have questions!
Growth Incentives
We’re not too worried about attracting liquidity provider growth. Our offer for liquidity providers is strong and compelling while posing only very limited risk to them. Once we see an increase in trading activity, the returns for liquidity providers will become more attractive, creating a kind of growth flywheel effect.
The harder part is getting trader adoption, given the countless options to trade with leverage on-chain. From a trader’s perspective, the differences in platform design may often be of secondary importance, if at all. This is where we need to dedicate additional effort.
In addition to increasing marketing, we’re designing a referral system to boost organic user growth. The current idea is to link referrals to our ‘trader flywheel’ model, where a part of the fees are repeatedly pooled into rewards for trading competitions. We’ll provide more details as this plan takes shape.
Multi-Chain Expansion
Expansion to other L1s and L2s like Base is on our radar. We’re closely monitoring the momentum and narratives around these ecosystems to evaluate which warrant the development resources required for an integration. It’s not an easy decision, and there may not be a clear right answer, because the grass always seems greener somewhere else.
At the same time we are preparing for a seamless cross-chain future where Unstoppable can connect to any major liquidity hub, irrespective of the chain design, be it Ethereum, Solana, or Bitcoin. The key lies in striking the right balance between seizing short-term opportunities and building for the long haul. Our ultimate objective is to position Unstoppable as a truly chain-agnostic on-chain exchange, capable of adapting to the constantly changing trends in the crypto ecosystem.
Grant Applications
Our application for the Uniswap-Arbitrum Grant Program (UAGP) was rejected with a pretty general reply saying that our protocol doesn’t line up with what the grant program is currently focused on. It’s worth pointing out that even in the few days of the Early Access Margin DEX trading competition, we drove over $1.5M through Uniswap V3 pools. This significant volume seems like a great match for a grant program that’s supposedly looking to support protocols that benefit both the Uniswap and Arbitrum ecosystems.
Despite this initial setback, we’re staying positive about future chances to work with the UAGP or Arbitrum Foundation / DAO in the future. We plan to make a strong case backed by our on-chain volume data and highlight our upcoming mobile app, which has already gotten interest from various involved parties.
Treasury
We’re still in a strong financial position to fund our ambitious roadmap. The only major change to our treasury recently has been the initial seeding of the Margin DEX liquidity with about one million dollars, split across ETH, USDC, and WBTC. This strategic move ensures that the Margin DEX has enough liquidity to provide smooth trading experiences for our users right from the start.
As always, we’re committed to being transparent about our treasury management. You can see all our treasury addresses in our docs. We want to keep our community informed about how we’re using our funds. To give a more complete picture of our financial position, we’ll be putting out a seperate overview of our treasury expenses for the first half of this year at the end of Q2.
Trading Competition Round 2
We’re planning to launch another trading competition soon after the Margin DEX goes public. But instead of offering a set prize pool, we’ll be using a tiered rewards system that grows along with platform activity. For instance, let’s say we start by seeding the pool with $5K USDC. As total trading volume hits big milestones like $1M, $5M, and beyond, we’ll gradually boost the prize allocation with extra amounts like $5K and $10K. This new structure lets all participants directly influence the size of the prize they’re competing for — the more you trade, the bigger the collective reward!
By linking prizes to volume tiers, we effectively gamify the platform’s growth and create a sense of shared goal among our traders. This approach not only encourages active participation but also shared commitment to the platform’s success. At the same time, this strategy allows us to be responsible with treasury resources and ensure that prize distribution scales sustainably as the platform gains adoption. It’s a win-win situation that drives value for the ecosystem and aligns everyone’s interests.
While the exact details of the trading competition are still being worked out, we can assure you that there will be more of these events coming up.
Wrap Up
And with that, we’ve covered all the key topics from our recent Spaces AMA. As always, we want to express our deepest gratitude for the support and engagement of the Unstoppable community. Your belief in our mission is what drives us to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
If you share this conviction, we humbly ask for your help in spreading the word about Unstoppable to anyone in your network who’s interested in trading cryptocurrencies. Together, we can onboard the next wave of users and establish Unstoppable as the go-to entry point for decentralized finance.
We’re planning to hold AMAs more often moving forward, so please keep an eye out for the next one. In the meantime, feel free to hop into our Telegram or Discord anytime to chat with the team and dive deeper into any of these topics.
As always, stay unstoppable everyone!
