gTrade October Recap: Building the Foundation for the Next Big Step
Hi, gTraders!
The gTrade team has been busy building with our heads down over the past month. At this point, we all know exactly what we’re building for. Our team has been busy taking care of all the final details for the Arbitrum launch and the updated $DAI Vault.
Despite the focus on building for Arbitrum, gTrade has managed to break a couple of records in October, in regards to distributed fees, monthly volume, $DAI Vault TVL, and a new highest volume trading day!
Read on to learn more about how gTrade set some new metric landmarks in October, and to find out what we have coming right around the corner for you!
Our October numbers have topped our September numbers. We’ve been on a consistent upward trajectory month after month!
Profit Distribution went from ~$819,000 in September ➔ ~$895,000 in October
Monthly Traded Volume went from ~$1,680,000,000 in September ➔ ~$1,830,000,000 in October
Much of the trading volume on gTrade came from Forex trading, one of the platform’s edges. gTrade’s unique synthetic architecture makes it possible to list a wide variety of asset classes.
If you enjoyed trading Forex on gTrade in October, you’ll love the new asset classes we have in store in the coming months (more on that below).
Outside of profit distribution and monthly traded volume, gTrade has also made some meaningful strides in a couple of other metrics that we list below, but let’s introduce the new members of our team first.
Let’s welcome the newest addition to the gTrade Team!
Sam for Business Development, Marketing and Connections
Sam is the latest addition to the gTrade team and what a powerhouse he’s already been! He helps with marketing, business development, and connections — but “helps” is a massive understatement. Sam is a crypto OG who has been in the space since 2014 and has directly contributed to the growth of some of the biggest protocols in the space.
He’s done some fantastic work over the last month and is a big driving force behind gTrade’s increased visibility over October. Sam’s got the ear of some of the biggest people (and platforms) in the crypto space and he’s paved the way for the big uptick in awareness of gTrade in the past month.
Nathan as a Full-Time Dev
gTrade has always had a frequent feature release schedule relative to other crypto projects. Seb, the founder and lead dev, places building a great product that people will use as the highest priority.
With the Arbitrum launch around the corner, we needed all the dev power we can get and Nathan has been instrumental in helping with the new DAI vault and frontend tasks.
New Landmark Metrics
In the meantime, here are some notable long-term metrics to contextualize the growth of the protocol leading into October.
$DAI Vault and $GNS/DAI Pool TVL Update
The combined TVL of our $DAI Vault and $GNS/DAI Pool is approaching the March All-Time-Highs.
In particular, our $DAI Vault has grown in dominance and now has a balance that sits around ~$17,000,000. This is a massive increase from just a couple of months ago when the $DAI Vault balance was sitting around ~$10,700,000 in September.
The $DAI Vault is at the heart of gTrade’s synthetic architecture as it provides liquidity for all of gTrade’s trading pairs.
A bigger $DAI Vault means:
- More liquidity for all trading pairs
- More capital to pay profitable traders
- Potentially higher maximum position sizes
In other words, having a $DAI Vault that is liquid is a massive quality-of-life upgrade for all of our gTraders. Given the data for the past few months, we’re happy to say that our $DAI Vault is growing according to plan — especially considering the massive jump in Vault balance between September to October.
A New Highest Trading Volume Day!
gTrade recently had its highest volume trading ever — and right in the middle of a bear market too!
On October 13, the daily trading volume on gTrade reached ~$338,540,000!
This is the second time gTrade has broken $300,000,000 in daily trading volume, the last time being earlier this year on March 4 when the platform reached ~$312,190,000 in daily volume.
Increase in $GNS Holders
The number of $GNS holders grew from ~5,000 in early October to ~7,467 holders by the end of the month, which is a ~50% increase in $GNS holders in just one month.
We’re extremely pleased to see this increase in adoption for the $GNS Token.
Ambassador Program Growth
We’ve always had a close relationship with our community. The gTrade Ambassador Program launched last September was a great opportunity for mutually organic growth as after all — we aim to be a user-owned platform. We are thrilled to announce that we’ve onboarded over 40 gTrade Ambassadors since the ambassador program was launched.
This was a great way to give back to some of the most active members in the gTrade community!
To summarize, the month of October sees the gTrade Pool TVLs returning to all-time highs, a new highest volume trading day, a ~50% increase in $GNS Token holders, and the successful implementation of the Ambassador Program. Despite all the heads-down building in the past month, the platform continues to outdo itself and break old records!
But that’s not all — October has rolled out a few key quality-of-life upgrades on the gTrade Platform.
Platform Improvements
A good platform is composed of the sum of all the little things working together in concert.
Here are a few things you may not have noticed:
- Frontend Optimization — We’ve sped up the metamask confirmations for trades (static gas limits).
- Website Cache Optimization — We’ve sped up the loading times for the front page (should be slightly faster)
- Network Selection Dropdown — This dropdown will allow you to switch between the Polygon and Arbitrum chains when using gTrade. Of course, we had to add this feature!
Progressive Web App (PWA) for Android Users
If you want to use gTrade as a phone app and you own an Android phone, you’re in luck!
Android users can now download gTrade as a Progressive Web App (PWA) that can be saved directly on their phone like any other android app.
The process is pretty straightforward:
- Go to https://gains.trade on Chrome or Brave.
- Tap install.
- Follow on-screen instructions.
- Easily access gTrade from your home screen!
This should make gTrading on your Android phone that much easier to do now! By the way, this also works on desktops.
News Bot
You might have noticed that the highest volume trading day on gTrade was on October 13. It’s no coincidence that this was immediately preceded by the October 12 FOMC meeting the day before.
Forex trading was responsible for a lot of gTrade’s net trading volume in October, which in and of itself is great for the platform.
On the other hand, what isn’t so great for the platform are traders placing delta-neutral trades within minutes of news event announcements to game the system.
Some gTraders were opening Delta-Neutral Trades (longs and shorts for the same pair) which caused them to get liquidated at -100% of their position and take up to +900% profit from the other side.
Gaming the system affects the protocol in a similar way to how traders gamed the $LUNA crash last May when everyone knew to short $LUNA.
To remedy this, we’ve implemented an artificial price impact on pairs that are affected by high-impact news events. This limits the exposure of the platform for a time window of 1 hour before to 10 mins after a specific news event.
This implementation took us about a week to develop in the middle of the month. While we plan to keep it around for some time, its structure is likely to change in the future as we further consider how to most safely, fairly, and transparently address high-impact news events.
For gTrade to truly be the decentralized platform we envision it to become, we have to implement measures to disincentivize these kinds of actions, because a balanced platform is a fair platform.
Leverage for Non-Tokenized Assets
Memecoin season has returned at the end of October thanks to Elon taking over Twitter.
As of writing, $DOGE is now the second-most traded pair on gTrade this week with ~$72,150,000 worth of synthetically traded volume.
A lot of other trading platforms list $DOGE, but very few allow non-ERC20 tokens like $DOGE to be traded with leverage.
Fortunately, gTrade’s custom Chainlink DON allows for non-tokenized assets to be traded with leverage on the platform.
The protocol is designed to support any asset that has a price feed, regardless of the asset class, and whether it is tokenized or untokenized.
Our vision is to cater to traders of all specialties (even the memecoiners!).
Arbitrum Contract Audit with Halborn
On the Arbitrum front — our contracts are currently being audited by Halborn. We’re going with the best of the best for our Arbitrum Launch.
Notable projects that Halborn has audited include BlockFi, Thorchain, Dapper, Polygon, and Sushi.
The audit ETA should be November 21st, and the launch should happen shortly after. We’re working on everything else that needs to be ready for the Arbitrum launch in parallel, while the audit is being done.
The contract audit is one of the final big steps we need to take before deploying on Arbitrum.
What’s On the Horizon
New Features
We’ve teased a few upcoming features on Twitter, but we’re dropping a *little more* detail in this article.
Contrary to popular belief, the upcoming secret feature isn’t copy trading.
Here are some more hints:
- gTrade becomes significantly easier to use
- gTraders trading low time frames will love it
- It’s a 2x improvement for a very specific part of the gTrade UX
- Early testers have even called it a CEX-like experience.
We’re also listing a new asset class soon to make gTrade cater to traders of all specialties. We can’t tell you what it is yet — except that some people on Twitter have already correctly guessed it!
Arbitrum
The Arbitrum launch has been the talk of the town — and for good reason! We expect to onboard a lot of new traders as gTrade is a platform that offers ~70+ trading pairs across many different asset classes. This eclipses what the other trading platforms on Arbitrum are offering in terms of optionality. We’re also extremely excited about the composability and partnership potential that the Arbitrum ecosystem offers — more on that soon.
We know you’ve been waiting patiently, and the launch is right around the corner.
Stay tuned, gTraders!
