gTrade November Recap:
The Month of All-Time-High Adoption
Hi gTraders!
This month, we saw the biggest month-on-month net increase for distributed profits to our stakers. We’ve also broken all-time highs in new users, $DAI Vault balance, new $GNS Holders, and trading volumes for some of our asset classes!
Outside of these metrics, gTrade has a ton of current and upcoming partnerships in the pipeline — a few of which we discuss in this article.
Most importantly, the new gToken vault is coming soon with new architecture, new use-cases and new protocols that are opting to build on top of it. (It’s actually already live on Polygon!) Did we mention we’ll be launching it alongside our deployment on Arbitrum too? Yes, that’s coming soon as well. We’ve been hard at work on the development side to make this happen. More on that toward the end of this recap!
The results of increased adoption for gTrade have never been as apparent as they were this month — let’s dig in.
The jump in profit distribution from October to November has been the biggest month-over-month increase in the history of gTrade — and this happened in the middle of a bear market!
Recent events regarding bigger, more centralized players in the crypto space have highlighted the need for on-chain transparency and self-custody in the space. gTrade meets both of these criteria in the following ways:
Proof of Reserves — gTrade’s $DAI Vault is our on-chain Proof-of-Reserves that is constantly on display. There are no surprises and certainly no secret liquidity holes needing to be plugged.
Self-Custody — Trading on gTrade does not require you to deposit funds outside of your initial $DAI collateral, nor do we allocate your funds beyond what you’ve approved. We believe this should be the norm!
Though the recent events have been unfortunate, it highlights the increased need for decentralized financial products and services, and the big jump in revenue numbers for November reflect that.
- Profit Distribution went from ~$895,000 in October ➔ ~$1,333,000 in November.
- Monthly Traded Volume went from ~$1,830,000 in October ➔ ~$1,890,000,000 in November.
- Total Number of Trades went from ~43,432 in October to ➔ ~73,875 in November.
The 48.9% increase in profit distribution last month was particularly significant considering the minimal increase in trading volume between October to November. This is primarily due to more trading of higher-fee pairs. All things being equal, our stakers earned almost 50% more in November!
But we’re just getting started.
The gDAI vault will have more incentives for our stakers, more composability and more optionality when it comes to reward structure. We’re excited for everything it’ll bring to gTrade’s ecosystem and users.
Adoption Metrics
The increase in profit distribution over November was accompanied by a large increase in both new traders and $GNS token holders.
Largest Monthly Increase in gTrade Users
Users of the gTrade platform went from ~7,157 ➔ ~8,565 over November. That’s over 1,400 new gTraders in the last month! This is the single biggest net increase in new users since the protocol’s inception.
In fact, November 8 and 9 were two days of consecutive all-time-highs for new gTraders coming onto the platform!
This jump in adoption reflects a renewed demand for decentralized trading solutions. Thanks to our unique synthetic architecture, gTrade offers one of the widest selections of tradable assets in the decentralized trading space, allowing us to meet this incoming demand head-on.
Increase in $GNS Token Holders
Holders of the $GNS token increased from 7,467 to 9,244 in November.
$DAI Vault Balance crossed $20M: New Largest $DAI Holder on Polygon
The $DAI Vault balance surpassed $20,000,000 in November. In the second week of November, there was an inflow into the $DAI Vault of ~$3,000,000 that took place over a few days.
A bigger $DAI Vault balance enhances one of gTrade’s key features, which is the protocol’s high liquidity efficiency.
Forex Volume Surge
It’s no surprise that one of gTrade’s key offerings is the ability to trade forex on-chain in a synthetic manner. Last month, gTrade accumulated over $4.3 billion in all-time synthetic trading volume, accounting for ~21% of gTrade’s total traded volume!
On-chain forex trading is a big narrative that gTrade has been perfectly positioned to capitalize on.
Stock Trading — Return to All Time-High
gTrade reached ~$22.24M in stock trading volume this month! This is within striking range of our all-time-high record of ~$22.93M in May.
Both the increased stock and forex demand this month showcase the diversity of traders that gTrade can accommodate. Different asset classes, different traders — powered by the unmatched liquidity-efficiency of the $DAI vault.
Partnership Updates
QiDao
There’s a new $MAI/$GNS Pool on Quickswap, and it foreshadows a deepening partnership with QiDAO where both protocols can benefit from increased liquidity.
Unfortunately, this is all we can disclose at the moment. But rest assured — the cogs for this partnership are already set in motion.
This is the first of many protocol partnerships we’ll start to share details about. Given the composable nature of the gToken vault, we’re excited for all the collaboration opportunities in the works.
DeFi Llama
DeFi Llama has begun tracking gTrade on their Fees & Revenue Dashboard. Previously, you would have needed to access our Dune Dashboard to pull this data up, but DeFiLlama provides a much simpler visual interface that makes revenue easier to compare between different protocols. Protocol fees are one of the most important metrics to track for decentralized perpetual exchanges — they’re an indicator of legitimate protocol revenue and enable attractive staking rewards. We’re hoping they’ll also eventually include trading losses in protocol revenue!
https://defillama.com/fees/gains-network
As you know, DeFi Llama is one of the largest all-in-one DeFi dashboards for tracking protocols, yields, revenue, etc. DeFiLlama is often the first pitstop for DeFi power-users when researching a protocol.
Arbitrum AMA
Our founder and lead dev, Seb, had a really insightful AMA with the Arbitrum team on Twitter this month. On the AMA, Seb talks about what’s in store in the near future for Arbitrum and for the new gToken vaults, including some unreleased alpha on the vault architecture and exciting upcoming catalysts. We dig deeper in the gToken vault article here.
Protocol Updates
Improved $DAI Vault Collateralization
Though we’re extremely excited to launch the new gDAI Vault, it’s important to note that the current DAI Vault’s collateralization mechanisms are working as intended given the recent battle-testing from the FTX collapse.
The circles on the image compare the $DAI Vault collateralization levels during the $LUNA crash vs during the FTX collapse. The $LUNA crash drained the $DAI Vault collateral which negatively impacted the protocol at the time.
Fortunately, the gTrade dev team is extremely resilient. They quickly shipped new collateralization solutions to discourage any large long vs short imbalances between pairs in the form of new trading fees in the v6.1 update — with the new price impact playing a pivotal role for protocol safety.
Lastly, the max Open Interest was reduced for additional safety. If the FTX Collapse was a proving ground for the v6.1 update, the ensuing results showed that the new safety mechanisms were a resounding success.
We’re glad to see that the $DAI Vault became further over-collateralized after the FTX collapse, in part as a result of the risk-management measures we put in place over the past several months.
Adjustable Gas Preference on gTrade
This is a neat new feature for gTraders that prioritize transaction speed over gas costs (and vice versa). After all, a trading platform should let you choose exactly how much you are willing to spend for faster transactions.
Halborn Audit Update
A couple of weeks ago we received initial audit feedback from Halborn. There were no issues regarding the vault contracts, aside from just a few comments from them that we have already implemented.
Here’s a link to the full Halborn Audit for transparency. The full audit can be downloaded by anyone.
Here’s a summary of the executive overview:
The only critical risk was in regards to the bridging contract and it was solved on Dec 12. There are no major risks remaining for the new contracts.
We’re one step closer to deploying on Arbitrum! Our dev team is hard at work finalizing contracts and the front-end.
What’s on the Horizon
gToken Vaults, Arbitrum Launch, & Partnerships
We recently released an article dedicated to gToken vaults and it’s a big one. The current $DAI vault is the backbone of gTrade and creating an even more sophisticated one enables our next wave of responsible scaling.
We spent the majority of November building both the gToken Vaults on Arbitrum and on Polygon. In doing so, we’ve had to double our dev-power by hiring two more full-time devs to work on the Vault (bringing our full-time dev team up to 4 people).
As you’ll read in the gToken Vault article, the architecture of the new gDAI Vault departs from the current $DAI Vault in a number of key ways. Upon depositing $DAI into the new vault, gDAI is minted as a vault receipt token and NFTs are now minted to represent locked staked positions. Both of these encourage the collaboration and composability potential of the gDAI Vault.
On the back-end, finishing the unit tests and triple checking the vault took the lion’s share of the dev work for November.
You can read more about the results of this massive undertaking here in our gToken article.
Feel free to drop us any and all questions on Telegram/Discord!
The gDAI vault went live on Polygon last week, and will soon be followed by its launch on Arbitrum!
$100k Trading Contest after the Arbitrum Launch
gTrade deploying on Arbitrum means faster transaction times, near-instant finality and being part of an interesting and growing ecosystem. Most importantly, the gTrade community wants it really badly!
To kick the launch off in style, we’re hosting a trading contest with $100,000 worth of prizes. This is a fun (and competitive way) to give Arbitrum traders a chance to try gTrade, as well as being a token of appreciation for all of our gTraders that have been patiently wanting to use the protocol on Arbitrum.
November may have been jam-packed — but December is launch month. Hope you’re ready for it!
