gTrade August Recap: A Month of Development, New Users, and Real Yield
Hi, gTraders!
What a month — gTrade was able to position itself as one of the front-running projects of the Real Yield narrative and brought on hundreds of new users.
Have a look at our August Revenue Distribution:
Profit Distristribution went from ~$602,000 in July to ➔ $713,000 in August!
Monthly Traded Volume went from ~$818,000,000 in July ➔ ~$964,000,000 in August!
Most importantly, it’s our users that got the lion’s share of our wins in August.
A fee-based revenue sharing model was something we believed in and have built from gTrade inception, but the gTrade team really delivered last month. In the last 30 days, the gTrade team implemented 2 additional ways for users to earn real yield from the platform, rounding out the total revenue avenues on gTrade to 5:
- Provide liquidity to the $DAI Vault ➔ get rewarded in $DAI
- Provide liquidity in the GNS/DAI Pool ➔ get rewarded in $GNS
- Hold an NFT and run a bot that executes limit orders and liquidations on gTrade in exchange for $GNS
- Stake $GNS to earn $DAI
- Being part of the referral program to earn $GNS
The month of August also came with significant changes to the $DAI Vault as well as to the trading fees and UI, with progress on the v6.3 update, and revisited priorities, so we’ll touch on those today as well.
v6.2 Release: $GNS Single-Sided Staking
The last bull market taught crypto investors that the yield source is more important than yield rate, because high APY projects often came with inflationary tokens that dropped in value over time.
In the $GNS Staking Article, we defined Real Yield as needing to meet 3 criteria:
- A project has a real use-case that offers a product/service users pay for.
- A portion of the revenue generated by the protocol is redistributed to token-holders.
- A native token with minimal inflation and with one or more use cases.
These are the standards around which we have designed the $GNS Single-Sided Staking system. As one of our most anticipated features, SSS rewards gTraders for staking $GNS with rewards in $DAI. The value (and peg) of $DAI has stood the test of time — and unlike other stablecoins, $DAI’s decentralized model greatly reduces centralization risk.
To know more about $GNS staking for $DAI and how it fits in the vision for the protocol, please refer to this article:
v6.2 Release: The gTrade Referral Program
The gTrade Referral Program was designed as an alternative earning avenue for users who are active on social media and aligned with the values of the protocol. Referral Program rewards are earned in the $GNS token.
The gTrade Referral Program was built on 2 tenets:
- Organic Growth — Incentivize the community to leverage its network in order to increase the number of gTrade users.
- Inclusivity — You don’t need to be a developer, liquidity provider or pro-trader to benefit from being part of the gTrade community. We want to share earning potential with as many user types as possible.
To know more about the referral program, please refer to this article: https://gainsnetwork-io.medium.com/gtrades-referral-program-launch-12df25bc45f4
V6.2 Release: Other major improvements
1. Collaterals from opened trades don’t go to the DAI vault anymore
In earlier iterations of gTrade, $DAI collateral (when traders open a trade) used to go into the $DAI Vault. This caused the DAI vault collateralization to be volatile due to opened and closed trades only (not taking into account PnL). Now, $DAI collateral no longer goes into the $DAI Vault and goes into a separate storage contract instead.
Before: $DAI Vault balance = $DAI from Liquidity Providers + Open Trades Collaterals + Trades Negative PnL
Now: $DAI Vault balance = $DAI from Liquidity Providers + Trades Negative PnL
There’s now a clear delineation between the real DAI vault collateralization vs the $DAI used for collateral when trades are opened. Now, only trader PnL goes through the $DAI Vault:
- When a Trader Wins (Positive PNL): $DAI goes from the $DAI Vault to the trader
- When a Trader Loses (Negative PNL): PNL goes from the trader to the $DAI Vault
2. Market and Limit orders are both at 0.08% now
The Trading Fees are now significantly simpler. Both Market Orders and Limit Orders are now at 0.08%, with the additional 0.02% fee on market orders going to $GNS stakers.
3. The 0.5% Collateral Closing Fee has been Removed
This further simplifies the fee system and makes it much easier to compare with other platforms. It is balanced by the increase in market order fee from 0.06% to 0.08%.
To know more about the v6.2 release, please refer to this article: https://gainsnetwork-io.medium.com/gns-staking-a-new-referral-system-and-much-more-v6-1-1-b6c8166ad210
UI Improvements: Favorite Pairs System
As you can see we have removed the left trading pairs panel and replaced it with a much simpler yet more powerful system: favorite pairs.
You can now customize your layout by saving the pairs your want to monitor while trading on the platform.
And by clicking on the “Add Pair” button, you can view all available pairs, sort them, filter by asset class, hide closed pairs (eg. stocks outside market hours), or search a specific one.
You can click on any pair to select it, but if you don’t favorite it, it will disappear. If you want to save pairs into your layout, you can click on the star icons on the above image.
Not only is it a much better UI / UX, but it also significantly improves the page performance, as before it used to display price updates for all pairs all the time.
V6.3 Progress: Lookback & Guaranteed Limit Orders
We have finished researching the architecture to implement lookbacks into the platform, and are very satisfied with the results and various benefits it brings.
The main aspect of this feature is the guarantee of execution of ALL limit orders. Currently, we only guarantee stop losses on cryptos. After this update, we will be able to guarantee every single type of limit order on all asset classes.
But it doesn’t stop there, here are the other derived benefits from this new architecture:
- Updating orders won’t cost anything (currently, updating guaranteed SLs costs a fee on cryptos)
- Improvement in the execution of market orders (less slippage from transaction times)
- Full decentralization of the off-chain price feed used by NFT bots to execute limit orders and by frontends to calculate trades PnLs
- Faster oracles (websocket instead of HTTP)
- Full equivalence between the on-chain oracles feeds and the off-chain feeds used by the frontends and NFT bots (currently off-chain uses WebSocket, and on-chain uses HTTP)
- Makes the backend infrastructure related to pricing more robust, scalable, and performant (separation in small isolated services).
Conclusion & Next Priorities
August was a fruitful month for our gTraders in terms of new features, but we’re already looking ahead to September.
The v6.3 update represents a very significant amount of work as it requires coding new backend services, more infrastructure from our chainlink nodes, a smart contract update, an audit, and a front-end update, which will probably take us about 2 months.
After discussing with OG community members, we have decided to put Arbitrum as the highest priority.
As good as the lookback update is, we know our platform is already more than competitive enough to go multi-chain, and attracting more volume to the protocol is always a higher priority. Therefore the platform will release on Arbitrum with no guaranteed orders within 1 to 2 months, and then we will introduce fully guaranteed orders with the v6.3 update.
You can also expect significant UI / UX improvements on the website this month…
Stay tuned for the updates gTraders!
