gTrade September Recap: UI Updates, IPFS Migration, and What’s to Come
Hi gTraders!
It’s that time of the month again! In August, our team focused on building new yield opportunities like the $GNS Single-Sided-Staking Vault and Referral Program. If August was a month of empowering $GNS Token Holders, September is the month we empowered the core users of gTrade: our traders. We’ve introduced a ton of cool UI updates this month, a migration to IPFS, and we’ve removed the base spread for crypto pairs!
Despite these updates, the best part is yet to come. You’ll have to read until the end of the article to catch a sneak-peek of what we have coming just around the corner.
Before that, have a look at our September Revenue Distribution:
If you thought August was a big month, September proved to be an even bigger one!
Profit Distribution went from:
~$713,000 in August to ➔ $819,000 in September
Monthly Traded Volume went from:
~$964,000,000 in August ➔ ~$1,680,000,000 in September
gTrade’s September Revenue still topped the August Revenue even as initial hype surrounding the Real Yield Narrative began to quiet down.
Why?
gTrade is a platform built for traders, by traders. The gTrade team understands that improving the trading experience on gTrade is the highest priority in terms of building. A better trading experience translates to more users and more shared revenue. A platform that traders love using, and that offers a variety of asset classes, will eclipse any prevailing DeFi narrative when it comes to the number of people that want to use gTrade. The revenue increase from August to September is a testament to how customer-centric the gTrade team has been throughout 2022, despite broader market conditions.
Let’s dive deeper into what exactly these improvements are and how they benefit you as a trader.
UI Updates
New Favorite Pair System
In the old gTrade, “adding pairs” and “adding a pair as a favorite” (clicking the star icon beside pair) was functionally the same. Using either option made a trading pair visible on your trading dashboard. However, there was no distinction between adding a pair or adding it as a favorite in the old platform!
The new Favorite Pair System is much more intuitive. It gets rid of the overlap above. Now, only your favorite pairs will appear on your trading dashboard.
To further streamline this process, adding pairs on the new gTrade is now contained in a dropdown menu instead of a modal window. A modal window is a web page element that displays itself in front of the site and deactivates all of the other website content. Basically, in the old gTrade — adding a new pair meant being unable to see the rest of your page content (like your chart).
Now, the rest of your trading screen remains active as you add pairs on the new version of gTrade. The favorite pairs dropdown menu is non-intrusive and no longer has to interrupt your trading.
Now that we’ve simplified the process of selecting new pairs, we also give you the option to choose which elements of these pairs you would want to toggle on and off.
If you want to solely focus on the price of the current pair you are trading, you can now toggle the price information of your favorite pairs off by using the “show price” button.
Notice the difference between image above and the image below (with the prices for pairs turned off).
gTrade now gives you the option to show or hide all of the following elements in a similar manner:
- Your favorite pairs
- Their prices (as shown in the example)
- The 24hr price change for each pair
- Your open trades
- Chat
In the new UI, you have the option to make your trading dashboard as minimalist (or maximalist) as you would like.
All traders are different — gTrade now has intuitive customization to suit the needs of every trader.
Movable Trading Panel
In the last section, we’ve discussed how traders can now choose which relevant pieces of data they would like to display on their screens.
But why not take it a step further and give traders control of where they want to see the data on their screens?
The gTrade trading panel is now movable — you can choose to position it on the left or right of your chart. The image below is an example of how your dashboard may look if you choose to move the trading panel to the left.
Movable Notification Pop-Ups
A tenet of the recent gTrade UI updates is the platform’s ability to give traders control over how to display which pieces of information they view as relevant vs irrelevant. Notification pop-ups are no exception to this rule.
You can now select where you would like your notifications to appear on your gTrade dashboard by choosing between four locations: top-left, top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right.
Notifications are no longer distractions. You can now place them to complement your trading panel.
Fullscreen Mode — Resize your panels!
Speaking of panels — you can now resize your chart and trading panel in fullscreen mode by dragging their borders!
Classic mode features the traditional layout where there are margins (spaces) between the panels on gTrade. In the Fullscreen Mode, the margins between different panels disappear and screen space is optimized.
The examples below showcase the difference between expanding and shrinking your chart by dragging its borders in Fullscreen Mode.
gTrade is not only liquidity-efficient… thanks to Fullscreen Mode, it’s now display-efficient as well!
New gTrade Themes
As a highly requested feature — we’re proud to announce we’ve added 3 new color themes to gTrade!
- Light Theme
- Black Theme
- Retrowave Theme
The “standard” gTrade theme is now known as “Dark Theme”.
The images below give you a showcase of the three new themes:
Light Theme
Black Theme
Retrowave Theme
Notice the groovy gradient on the Retrowave theme leverage slider!
We dug into the UI changes to help you make trading an even smoother experience on gTrade. Now, we’ll go over a change that directly helps gTraders get more out of trading Crypto pairs on gTrade !
Changes to Crypto Pairs
1. Base Spread on Crypto pairs removed
We’ve removed the Base Spread on all crypto pairs (outside of the price impact).
This means that there is:
- 0.02% less spread on BTC/USD
- 0.04% less spread on ETH/USD
- 0.06% less spread on Altcoin/USD pairs
The bottom line is that gTrade has reduced its platform fees for trading crypto (the base spread) which results in higher net profits for traders.
Crypto trading volume on gTrade has climbed since we have implemented this change. This is something we are proud to categorize as a win-win for the platform and for traders!
2. Reduced Minimum Leverage from 4x to 3x on Crypto Pairs
You’ve asked for it and we’ve answered! The minimum leverage for Crypto Pairs is now 3x, which means that you can now trade on gTrade with smaller size.
Our goal is to make gTrade user-friendly and accessible — it was never meant to be a platform only for whales. It is continuous building towards small changes like these that make the platform easier to use over time.
With these two changes, trading crypto on gTrade is now more profitable (no more base spread) and more accessible (lower minimum leverage) !
IPFS Migration
For gTrade to be the most user-friendly decentralized trading platform, it has to be accessible to traders at all times. gTrade cannot truly be user-friendly and decentralized if it relies on centralized services for web-hosting and data storage.
Centralized Web Hosting weaknesses:
- Censorship — Most of these servers farms are owned by big companies that can be pressured into moderating the content stored on these servers.
- Server Issues — Most server farms are concentrated around single-locations. If the servers were to go down for whatever reason, the websites hosted would become inaccessible.
- DDOS Attacks -DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks refer to malicious computers flooding the target server with a high enough volume of fraudulent requests that cause normal users to become deprioritized in accessing the server data (or website). The malicious computers “deny service” to normal users this way.
The gTrade website nearly fell victim to a DDOS attack in September — this was the catalyst needed to propel the platform to migrate to IPFS.
IPFS stands for Interplanetary File Service, and is a distributed file system protocol that stores data on a P2P network similar to how BitTorrent works.
The advantage of IPFS?
- gTrade is now always accessible to traders. You will always be able to use and trade on gTrade.
The disadvantage of IPFS?
- It is slower than regular server-based web-hosting.
- Instead of typing a simple URL, accessing gTrade via IPFS involves typing a complicated hash into your browser’s address bar.
Solution: The Best of Both Worlds
gTrade implemented a best-of-both worlds solution by leveraging the decentralization and availability of the IPFS network, the speed of CDN (Content Delivery Network) and the ease of use of DNS (Domain Name System).
Essentially, there are two doors by which to access gTrade through:
- The normal way via https://gains.trade — this is fast, 99% reliable and hosted on IPFS.
- Through any IPFS gateway by typing the special hash (the content ID of the website) — this is 100% reliable, hosted on IPFS and takes 2–3 minutes to load.
In other words, you’ll always be able to use gTrade. Trade without worries, fren!
Growth in Forex: June to September
Thanks to gTrade’s synthetic architecture, it’s one of the few decentralized platforms that allows for forex trading — and the only one for a platform of its size.
You can see in the charts below that trading volume for forex pretty much went parabolic from June 2022 onwards. If you’ve been keeping up with our tweets, you’ll see the forex pairs routinely form a part of the top most traded pairs every week.
Something also has to be said about the simplicity of being able to trade multiple forex pairs on gTrade using only $DAI. The combination of the recent macro environment and the ease-of-use on the platform for trading forex has crafted a strong narrative for gTrade.
We want to give our traders the option to trade as many different asset classes as possible — we’re a platform that sets out to accommodate traders of all specialties, not just crypto.
We hope that the new asset classes we introduce in the future will bring a similar level of enthusiasm to the gTrade community that forex has brought. Keep your eyes peeled, gTraders, because we have some new asset classes coming soon!
Share Trade Feature
It’s no understatement to say that gTrade would not be where it is now without our immensely supportive community. The Share Trade feature was a heavily-requested one, and for good reason.
There are few ways to better empower our community more than allowing them to share their victories with friends and other traders.
On top of that — the Share Trade Feature changes depending on the gTrade theme you choose to use! Here are a few examples that showcase how sharing your trades can look like:
How’s that for variety?
We’ve saved the best part of the Share Trade Feature for last:
You are not limited to sharing only your current open trades: you may also share any of your closed trades from the past!
Even if you’re going through a rough trading patch, the Share Trade Feature will still let you relive your glory days in public.
Victories are better savored as a community, and the Share Trade feature is a powerful vehicle to do that!
Conclusion: What’s on the Horizon for gTrade?
Arbitrum Migration
Arbitrum is one of the most collaborative chains both in composability (different DApps working together) and partnerships. Our migration to Arbitrum is a phenomenal way to reach new traders, but also develop mutually-beneficial relationships with cutting edge protocols. As you’re probably aware, Arbitrum is booming! We’re excited to launch there and will keep you updated as we inch closer to that goal in the coming weeks.
Reimagining gTrade’s $DAI vault
The $DAI Vault is the backbone of gTrade, as it supplies liquidity for all of gTrade’s pairs. But the current version of the $DAI Vault can still be significantly improved in two regards:
- Incentives alignment — the ability of gTrade to maintain its vault collateral balance through built-in incentives
- Composability — the possibility for other protocols to build on top of the vault to offer even more use cases to the users’ who staked their $DAI
We can’t tease any more than this, but the move to Arbitrum will be accompanied by a brand-new vault design that will be further optimized and composable. We expect this to be a massive stepping stone for the scaling of the gTrade platform.
