I want to thank the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) leadership for their proposal to have GMX expand there. The Binance ecosystem has been really supportive to GMX, from BSC being the original home of the Gambit community, the listing of the GMX token on Binance and active engagement with Binance web3 wallets to expand the access to the protocol to name a few examples.
What are the key factors to consider when looking at chain expansion:
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does expansion expose GMX to additional users who are not engaging or could engage more if we expanded beyond existing chains: BSC has a wide user base with a long contingent of retail users who having utilized Binance (the largest centralized crypto exchange) are making their first forays into self sovereign ownership of assets. The chain has consistently been in the top three of transactions, unique wallets and TVL, providing a clear addressable market.
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does the chain have an ecosystem and protocols available that can work with GMX: BSC is home to protocols like Venus (lending markets), Beefy (autocompounder), key Oracle partner Chainlink and most uniquely Binance-peg asset backed tokens in addition to large supplies of other bridged tokens. This means that GMX Synths can supported fully backed markets for every asset in the top 20 list on coinmarketcap including BTC, ETH, BNB, DOGE, ADA, MATIC, LTC, DOT and SHIBA without the heavy effort of getting supply bridged. This allows liquidity providers and traders to benefit from the same stable model that GLP has delivered on a wider range of assets.
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will the leadership of the chain support GMX in our goal of creating efficient capital markets on their chain: BSC has shown a great intent to support GMX using its wide reach to assist in building visibility and liquidity to ensure that the bootstrapping process for deployment of Synthetics will not require large incentives. They have also already made introductions to leading protocols in the ecosystem to ensure strong introductions.
More broadly does GMX need to expand to more chains? No it doesn’t but if we expand chains we have the potential to have more people who are more native to a single chain to experience the platform and have a greater footprint to support any future efforts on a cross-chain marketplace by having users and other protocols already partnered natively in those environments.
The deployment of GMX Synths is also much more versatile and easier to deploy compared to the current GLP model. What this means is that after fully deploying on our existing chains (Arbitrum and Avalanche) the effort for further chain expansion isn’t as large for an additional 1 or 2 more EVM environments.