GMX is a decentralized spot and perpetual exchange that supports low swap fees and zero-price impact trades. It is live on Arbitrum and Avalanche, having over 150k users and surpassing $85B in trade volume with over 400M$ in TVL.
Polygon is the leading blockchain development platform including solutions like Polygon PoS and Polygon zkEVM (first public EVM compatible ZK rollup live on testnet).
Polygon’s scaling solutions have seen widespread adoption with tens of thousands of decentralized applications hosted, 2.2B+ total transactions processed, 180M+ unique user addresses, and $2B+ in assets secured.
Proposal
Seeing the magnanimous growth of GMX, we wanted to congratulate the team on its success and propose to help in its growth trajectory by inviting the team to launch GMX on Polygon PoS. With a weekly active user base of 400k+ on the PoS and collaboration with multiple brands like Robinhood to create a broader and more wholesome stream of users onboarding Polygon, we firmly believe this can help GMX to get more success by deploying on Polygon PoS, for many reasons. We will outline the most important ones here briefly.
Why Polygon?
Polygon PoS has the second most robust DeFi ecosystem, right after Ethereum L1: Polygon’s DeFi ecosystem has experienced consistent growth irrespective of the market conditions and continues to be the preferred destination for DeFi. From Ethereum blue chip protocols, like Aave, Uniswap v3, Curve, LIDO, Balancer, etc. to Prominent Polygon-native projects, such as QuickSwap, QiDao,Tetu, Gains Network, TimeSwap, Teller Finance the success story speaks about the growth all the protocols have commanded over at Polygon.
Additionally, Polygon’s DeFi ecosystem has already become self-sustainable. We effectively stopped the majority of liquidity mining incentives more than a year ago, yet we keep seeing constant capital and user inflow despite other chains spending millions of dollars in liquidity mining.
Biggest distribution and dApp discovery pathway: Users on any platform enable more volumes, and more volumes generate more revenue for the protocol. To make protocols successful on Polygon DeFi, web2 giants like Robinhood have chosen Polygon to build their non-custodial wallet to enable dApp discovery and enable dApps to capture more users (1.5M+ signups) on Polygon.
Marketing Support: Polygon brings one of the most vibrant marketing support to help you showcase the product and capture a large audience base. Through this support, we can help GMX establish a global brand presence.
Easy Access to GMX: Through robust infrastructure support, more than 19 of the top 50 exchanges offering on-ramps, and multiple other partners to help on-ramp on the chain, it becomes effortless to access GMX, enabling it to capture more users.
Polygon PoS is battle-tested and long-term aligned with Ethereum and its values.
GMX on Polygon bull thesis:
Returning DeFi to its original vision - With the recent collapse of FTX and its contango effect on others, there is a massive outcry to restore DeFi to its original vision. Perpetual futures are one of the hottest commodities in DeFi, and due to the lack of trust in centralized exchanges, this is the best opportunity for decentralized perpetual exchanges like GMX to leverage the same and return DeFi to its original path and vision. Polygon has the [most significant number of active users] in DeFi and can help GMX achieve this feat.
Increase Fees - Currently, GMX generates around 550k$ fees daily for its users from 2 chains, of which 80% is generated from arbitrum and 20% from avalanche. Launching on Polygon with its cheap gas and huge user base would be ideal as it can add additional fees accrual to the protocol and $GMX holders. Polygon has the third-highest dex volumes after Ethereum and BSC, and GMX could capture a large chunk of the market due to its unique design. The Polygon community is also no stranger to perpetual exchanges as there are 8,200 individual users, and over $21b in notional value of trades have already been done on Gains Network. These numbers would greatly benefit GMX and help the protocol run smoothly with all expectations of the various stakeholders (GLP, GMX, and Traders) met.
Large users base - Polygon currently has over [500k Daily active users] (highest after BSC). This reflects GMX’s new deployment, which will use GMX to trade assets. As a result, more users mean more trading volume and value for $GMX holders.
GMX dex - Dex’s on Polygon have had massive success due to the low fees and high user base, such as Uniswap, Curve, Balancer, QuickSwap, etc. Having GMX on Polygon with zero impact price trades combined with low polygon gas fees will be the perfect catalyst for GMX to become the liquidity hub of Polygon.
stMatic as GLP asset - GLP can include the staked version of Matic. The underlying yield will inherently be 5%, which the whole basket will get over the last six months. Liquid staking on Polygon has grown from 5m $MATIC staked to 90m and continues to grow as more and more use cases arise for $MATIC liquid staked derivatives (LSDs).
Resilient and sticky liquidity -Polygon natively has Resilient and sticky liquidity - GLP will have deep liquidity and no need to worry about porting liquidity from arbitrum. This Report from Messari gives an in-depth overview of the state of Polygon and Liquidity. https://messari.io/report/state-of-polygon-q3-2022
Conclusion:
The synergies between the two projects are apparent for all the reasons explained above, and it makes much sense for the GMX community to support deployment to Polygon.
We have been highly interested in GMX and its ecosystem, and this is the best time to propose as we are keen on ensuring that the proposal passes. Polygon is convinced that this deployment is an obvious win-win and firmly believes that now is the best way to restore the original and core value of DeFi with the GMX community.
We are looking forward to your questions and feedback. Happy to discuss with the community more ideas on how specifically Polygon ecosystem can support.
Super excited to see this. The derivatives ecosystem has been growing extensively on Polygon due to better connectivity and a full-fledged DeFi community. The addition of GMX’s hedging opportunities are immense, especially when you consider the other derivatives protocols that GMX can work with!
• Polygon reaches a different segment of users, different countries as well. Arbitrum seems US-centric, Polygon BSC etc have more users from China India etc
• GLP on different chains is isolated, no chance for anything going wrong on another chain touching Arbitrum. GMX holder base seems mature, there was no capitulation after the AVAX exploit.
• Re: latency being a detriment to UX, most polygon power users have custom gas setting on metamask, hasn’t been too much of an issue unless using default gas.
• Polygon BD is godlike — Having GMX alongside bluechip web2 SaaS and media is a very good move (Reddit, Robinhood, Youtube? ).
But pre synths I don’t think deploying on polygon is worth the increased dev time. Polygon already has Gains trade and at the moment they beat us on assets listed and max leverage by quite a wide margin.
GMX
5 crypto assets
0 stocks
0 forex
(max leverage 50x)
GNS
38 Crypto assets
20 Stock assets
10 Forex assets
(max leverage 150x on crypto 1000x on forex)
We should prioritise development time to get our product offering where it needs to be, then we can compete with strength in this new market.
lets not forget Gains is coming to Arbitrum so prioritising synths would help protect our home base too.
We’re already on the best chain. Look at how Gains are moving to Arbitrum from Polygon; why are they so excited about that? Because Arbitrum is where the action is. Every chain we add is a new attack vector and security risk, not to mention the dev time/resources it takes to deploy on a new chain.
We should focus for now on improving the core product. Once Gains is on Arbitrum, GMX will have a significant competitor and will need to improve quickly to maintain its position as the #1 DEX on Arbi.
In short, deploying on new chains when we’re already on the best chain is a distraction from the real dev work that needs to be done (synths, X4 etc).
Excellent proposal by @Hamzah. I have been a long time user of GMX and would love to see GMX deploy on Polygon PoS.
Potential usecases like integration with Robinhood and access to the largest userbase in DeFi is a definite win for the community especially after all that has happened with the CEX shitshow.
Polygon and GMX can help DeFi return back to its original path
I am not in favour of this proposal, I prefer that GMX focuses on the current roadmap
These are all exciting features that should have full focus without any distractions for new chain launches, the chain launches should only be considered when these implementations are added
with a focus on ZKSync/Starknet
As long term GMX user and holder, I strongly support the proposal.
Polygon currently has bulk of retail flow when it comes to spot trading, which directly benefits GMX, thousands of users there for the taking.
The biggest catalyst for GMX growth can be the Robinhood non-custodial wallet. Which is already using defi infra as settlement instead of cefi. These users can potentially native use GMX in that wallet, which will be big driver for fees.
Polygon was my first love in early 2021 and as an average poor, the cheap tx fees meant I could play around with DeFi without losing all my capital to gas fees.
Other chains have come and gone, some retain some shine but I’ve been super-bullish on Polygon since learning of it. The user growth is amazing to see, even in a bear market. Their integration of NFT platforms (Reddit, Instagram etc) has begun to onboard the masses and introduce them to it’s ecosystem while the dev tooling and support available to new projects is top tier and will continue to grow native projects or ports from other chains.
We’re seeing a lot of Solana now moving to Polygon as well. zk rollups will dominate.
Let Polygon BD team do the work for GMX. Top tier founders, pumping all projects, cant ask for more. Users from Reddit, Robinhood and even Instagram. Why not ,GMX needs 10 mil users not 100k on arbitrum
I’m 100% for this proposal and fully agree with it. Polygon opens a lot of oppurtunities for GMX. However, I believe the main focus now should be building GMX’s core product (e.g increasing listed assets and leverage) to better compete with GNS because they are competing with GMX very actively. Once the synths roll out, I believe an expansion into Polygon would be massively benefitial to both the Polygon ecosystem and GMX.
Def. do not appreciate all the Matic maxis who are brigading GMX proposal, also lying and pretending to be a long term GMX holder, and wanting dev resources to be spent on moving to Polygon, just so it can “pump their bags”.
We have an ambitious roadmap with regards to X4, and do not want any unnecessary distractions.
We have had a discussion in regards to whether we will launch on AVAX or Polygon, pre AVAX launch and we settled on AVAX due to X mentioning concerns regarding the trader performance on Polygon and some RPC issues occurring constantly
I have suggested polygon as an option around 1st september on TG as well as in DM of X.
I am also user of GMX and I can see that the dev team is pretty occupied for X4 as X mentioned at that time.
Here I can propose one thing.
I have already deployed all necessary contracts on Polygon mainnet.
I have deployed subgraphs as well.
I am ready to change the ownership of all contracts to GMX team.
This way the dev team will not need to put any efforts on launching on polygon.
Intent always has been to ship more products, help more builders, and strive for global mass adoption, not pumping bags. The dev resources which would be spent for deploying would already be breakeven in few weeks due to newly generated fees.
Since contracts are already, relatively not a heavy lift.
Pleasant surprise, @dex_bruce already has everything ready, so resource allocation would be quite extremely low.
While it can be tempting to stick to tribalism, looking at big picture and incoming mass adoption would be a better and clear headed approach.
Not possible to rationalize not deploying, given Robinhood wallet is already live.
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