Decentralized Perpetual Exchanges

Hey Artemists,

Jon here 👋. I’m one of the cofounders of Artemis. We’re excited to share that we added ✨ Decentralized Perpetual Future Exchanges ✨ on Artemis!

This is the first category we added onto Artemis.xyz outside of L1/L2 chains!

Decentralized Perp Exchanges offer a decentralized alternative to centralized exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, the recently fallen FTX, etc. For more info on how perps work check out this piece by Blockworks.

Metrics that matter for perp DEXs

• Trading volume: 🏆 dYdX is #1 in daily trading volume at $981m
• Traders: 🏆 GMX is #1 in daily traders at 1.6k)
• TVL: 🏆 GMX flipped DYDX and is #1 in TVL at $540m
• Gas Paid:🏆 GMX is #1 in daily gas fees paid by users at $2.3k
• Protocol Fees: 🏆 GMX is #1 in protocol fees at $212k)

Overview

1. dYdX is a decentralized perp contracts exchange that runs on L2 Starkware but is moving to Cosmos to build its own chain
2. GMX is a decentralized perpetual exchange on Arbitrum and Avalanche
3. Gains Network is a decentralized trading platform built on Polygon & Arbitrum
4. Perpetual Protocol is a perpetuals future DEX which runs on xDai and Optimism

5 takeaways for Perp DEXs

1. Perp DEXs are up ~100% in 2023 📈 with dYdX leading the way at +153%

2. dYdX has by far the most trading volume at $981m. That's ~7x that of GMX’s trading volume. GMX is #2 but slightly ahead of Gains Network.

3. But GMX has the most amount of TVL at $543m. That’s 1.4x that of dYdX, 10x+ larger than Gains Network. It’s worth noting that GMX TVL > dYdX TVL flip happened in late Sept '22 and has continued to persist.

4. GMX has value accrual with $522k daily fees accruing to the protocol on Feb 7th, 2023 more than other players.

Worth noting that the GMX governance and utility token accrues 30% of the platform fees and GLP the liquidity provider token accrues 70% of the platform fees.

5. Majority of GMX activity is on Arbitrum (vs Avalanche)

• 97% of all trading volume is on Arbitrum vs 3% on Avalanche
• 90% of all traders are on Arbitrum
• 88% of all transactions are on Arbitrum
• 85% of all fees spent is on Arbitrum

That’s all folks. Check out the Perp DEX Comparison Dashboard for more 🫡

Cheers,

Jon

P.S Some tweet thread and deep dives from friends of Artemis on Perp DEXs like GMX and Gains Network!