GMX has not only taken its place as the dominant Decentralized Perpetual Exchange on Arbitrum and Avalanche but in the entirety of the crypto ecosystem, accounting for about a third of Perpetual DEX volume and up to half of the total fees. With the upcoming release of GMX v2, I believe that GMX will cement itself as the leading DEX in the space for the foreseeable future. GMX v2 addresses v1 concerns by introducing an innovative liquidity provision system, expanding the tradable market, and elevating the user experience for both traders and liquidity providers. Castle Capital wrote a great piece I enjoyed reading covering all of the updates and improvements, which you can find here: Deciphering GMX V2: A Research Report.
GMX v2 is our Uniswap v3 moment. Protocols using token incentives to bring traders and liquidity will come and fade over time, but GMX will retain the throne. GMX has seen incredible success in the Arbitrum and Avalanche ecosystems and has continued to serve as staples for each ecosystem’s users and community. I believe, however, that with a successful launch of v2, it will be time to start considering the expansion of GMX and deploying on new chains. We have seen the success that other Blue Chip protocols (Uniswap, AAVE, Curve) have had by bringing their proven applications and best-in-class user experiences to other ecosystems. By deploying on new chains, these protocols retain their market share and onboard new users to the protocol that may not have otherwise interacted with the application.
GMX has reached this Blue Chip protocol status and deploying on new chains (pre-approved by the DAO) while maintaining the strong GMX community is the next step in onboarding the next wave of users to the GMX protocol.
I have created this post to prompt the discussion of deploying GMX v2 on additional chains, rollups, or even as an Arbitrum Orbit L3. This is purely meant to initiate the discussion as the successful deployment of v2 to mainnet must first occur and the due diligence on each new chain will need to be conducted.
One first such candidate I would like to instigate this discussion for is Optimism and Base, the L2 built using Optimism’s codebase by Coinbase. I understand there may be concerns with the Base protocol due to the centralization risks of Coinbase; however, their use of a centralized sequencer is no different than any other L2 rollup today and they will also be looking to decentralize in the future as opportunities become available, such as a decentralized shared sequencer. I look forward to debating deploying GMX on these ecosystems and others like it such as Polygon, Zksync, Starknet, etc…
Hi farfel! Thanks for raising this issue. I do believe that with GMX V2 's launch soon behind us, the discussion as to what additional blockchain to deploy GMX on will come to the fore again.
There are some relevant other threads that already address this matter, of course. Let me link them in for reference:
And to help infuse the discussion with data, here’s the list of existing blockchains and their activity level:
It was silly of me to not see those prior discussions! Looking forward to seeing GMX take these next steps in its maturity as a protocol and community.
Not silly at all. We need to continuously as a community think about how to improve the functionality, usability, and how to expand GMX to more chains. Right now we have competition brewing across the space and to maintain the lead won’t be on name only.
Polygon previous engaged the community. GMX contributors are you still in discussion with the team to keep that line of communication open? Understandably the focus is on GMX v2 and safety/functionality being paramount however as a community we need to keep pushing for what we want to see (in a safe and obviously productive manner).
@ImmieV One question that remains with the expansion to additional chains is the ability to bootstrap liquidity into the GLP pools. With v2, the funding fees do incentivize traders and market makers to take the other side of trades, so the entire burden doesn’t fall on GLP holders. However, liquidity fragmentation remains a major issue protocols face when deploying on new chains. MUX’s approach to this is their unified liquidity that has the broker module and allows trading against the liquidity across all chains. Their Multiplexing layer remains fully centralized, however. I was wondering if there are any mechanisms we are considering for unifying liquidity or bootstrapping liquidity on new chains?
Farhel I love the question however my knowledge and scope here would be very limited. Would love to see other people perhaps think of potential solutions.