I want to thank X and all the core contributors for their work. I fully support this proposal, and here are my reasons:
1. Gasless Transactions and Cross-Chain Liquidity Reuse
Under the gasless transaction proposal, users can enjoy a completely seamless trading experience on any EVM-compatible chain without needing to pay gas fees themselves. This means that a user on, say, an Arbitrum-based deployment of GMX could access the full liquidity from all chains where GMX is deployed, leveraging the deepest possible liquidity pool and minimizing price impact. Essentially, this solution allows for direct liquidity reuse across multiple chains, ensuring that every user, regardless of which chain they trade on, benefits from GMX’s entire liquidity reserves.
This approach stands in contrast to the traditional model, where each chain hosts its own isolated GMX instance. With isolated deployments, each new chain launch would face a “cold start” problem—having limited initial liquidity and potentially higher trading costs due to smaller pools. Moreover, if the same market exists on multiple chains in isolation, a single market event on one chain can indirectly affect the market on another chain. For example, if the Arbitrum deployment and the Base deployment both offer the same market (e.g., ETH/USD), and Base suddenly gets a liquidity surge that matches Arbitrum’s liquidity depth, then the cost for an attacker to influence prices might plummet. Either the attacker’s cost decreases (making it easier to disrupt the market) or, to maintain security, both Arbitrum and Base would need to simultaneously raise the price impact, thereby harming overall user experience with higher trading costs.
By introducing gasless transactions and unified liquidity, GMX avoids these pitfalls altogether. The result is a genuinely multi-chain integrated liquidity environment, negating the need to scale price impact linearly with the number of chains. This simultaneously improves security, user experience, and capital efficiency. In short, the gasless transaction solution tackles the fundamental challenge of multi-chain deployments at its core, ensuring that adding more chains doesn’t come at the expense of user experience or liquidity depth.
2. Network Cost Subsidies
When the market experiences significant volatility—such as during a major news event or a sudden price spike—network fees (gas costs) can skyrocket due to congestion. During these critical moments, traders are often most eager to adjust their positions quickly to either capitalize on an opportunity or mitigate losses. If traders know they will be confronted with prohibitively high transaction costs at these times (tens or even hundreds of USD in fees), it discourages them from using the platform at all, since they can’t count on stable fees when they need them most.
On the other hand, consider why GMX has attracted a loyal user base so far: GMX does not have “scam wicks” or artificial price spikes that can unfairly liquidate traders. Traders trust GMX because even in extreme market conditions, they can get a fair price execution. This trust in fair pricing and no scam wicks is a major reason traders choose GMX.
By extending this principle to network costs via subsidies—essentially smoothing out or offsetting these transaction fees—GMX can ensure that even under extreme conditions, traders do not have to contend with sudden and excessive costs. This maintains a level of predictability and fairness that can profoundly influence a trader’s decision to stick with GMX over the long term.
3. Multichain Expansion
GMX’s DeFi scalability potential truly emerges when considering multi-chain expansion across various EVM-compatible environments, while GMX-Solana represents a parallel trajectory into non-EVM ecosystems. GMX, initially rooted on Arbitrum, can seamlessly branch out to any EVM-compatible chain—like Base or other emerging L2s—providing the same deep liquidity and unified trading experience that users enjoy on its original deployment. This approach ensures that traders can access consistently robust liquidity and market conditions without the inefficiencies of isolated, chain-specific markets.
In parallel, GMX-Solana would concentrate on entirely different execution environments, such as Solana’s high-throughput, low-latency network. By operating independently from GMX’s EVM focus, GMX-Solana can tap into Solana’s unique technical advantages and user base, all while linking into the broader liquidity network that both GMX and GMX-Solana help cultivate. The result is a wider DeFi trading ecosystem where GMX covers the EVM side of the spectrum and GMX-Solana opens the door to the non-EVM world, together pushing toward the future.
Eventually, GMX could become the universal layer for derivatives trading: no matter what chain a trader is on, or what environment they prefer, GMX would be there, offering any market with significant liquidity. It represents the next step toward making DeFi liquidity and trading conditions universal, borderless, and omnipresent.
4. Cross-Collateral Functionality
Within GMX, there are currently synthetic pools that, for example, track BCH/USD using BTC and USDC (denoted as BCH/USD[BTC-USDC]). Under the current system, if you wanted to maintain a delta-neutral position or conduct funding rate arbitrage internally (i.e., all within GMX), it’s complex and often impossible. You might want to short BCH/USD using BTC as collateral to offset your BCH exposure, but the platform currently does not allow for that kind of direct matching. Instead, you must rely on external exchanges and additional steps, which increases complexity, cost, and risk.
By introducing cross-collateral capabilities, a trader could directly use BCH as collateral when taking a position in the BCH/USD[BTC-USDC] market. For example, you could open a 1x Short BCH/USD position using BCH itself as collateral. This dramatically simplifies constructing delta-neutral or risk-managed positions and makes it easier for traders to engage in funding rate arbitrage strategies. This leads to improved stability in OI balances, since maintaining a balanced OI distribution becomes more straightforward and less costly. Essentially, cross-collateral functionality removes a key barrier that prevents the internal ecosystem from self-correcting, thereby stabilizing the markets.
5. Capped (Post-Position) Price Impact
This concept focuses on shifting how traders perceive price impact costs. Currently, GMX applies “pre-position” price impact, meaning traders see an immediate negative price impact when they open a position. For example, imagine that opening a position comes with a -5 bps negative price impact. Traders often mentally double this cost, assuming that when they close the position, they’ll experience a similar penalty, effectively treating the total cost as -10bps. This is not actually correct, but it’s how the cost structure is commonly perceived.
In reality, when the trader closes the position, the impact might be reversed, partially offsetting the initial cost. Suppose the closing price impact is +4bps. The net price impact over the entire trade (open and close) is actually just -1bps, not -10bps. On an order book exchange, a -1bps total cost is like a combined opening/closing spread of -1bps, which is very competitive. But because GMX currently shows that initial -5bps cost up front, many traders get the wrong impression and believe GMX’s cost is significantly higher than it really is.
Switching to “post-position” price impact means that traders would see near-zero price impact at opening and only realize the net cost when closing. Here’s a simplified scenario:
• With pre-position price impact: You open a position and see -5bps immediately, so you think you’ll pay another -5bps when closing, totaling -10bps in your mind.
• With post-position price impact: When you open a position, you see 0bps. Only upon closing do you see a final calculation of (for instance) -1bps overall. Traders pay attention mostly when they open positions. By the time they close, they are more focused on whether they made a profit or loss. Thus, a one-time -1bps adjustment at the end feels more natural and far less intimidating than a perceived -10bps at the start.
This subtle shift changes trader psychology dramatically. It reduces cognitive friction and confusion around GMX’s fee mechanism without actually altering the underlying economics of price impact. This encourages more trading since traders won’t be scared off by what appears (but isn’t) a hefty upfront cost.
6. Net OI
The current system caps OI at a level roughly equal to the total pool value, assuming a reserve factor of 1. This is an underutilization of capital. In fact, GMX’s liquidity is already substantial enough to rival the order book depth on major centralized exchanges like Binance in some markets. For large, liquid markets, GMX even surpasses the depth of some Binance perpetual pairs. As the GMX virtual order book goes live, this advantage will become even more apparent.
However, limiting the OI to the pool’s total value is far too conservative and doesn’t reflect the true risk exposure. The actual net risk to liquidity providers (LPs) is much smaller than the raw OI number might suggest. For example, consider a pair like OP/USD. Even though the OI might appear large, the net utilization—i.e., the actual risk after offsetting longs and shorts—is often extremely low (e.g., 0.01%).
By focusing on net OI—considering long and short positions together rather than simply adding them up—GMX can safely support an OI that’s multiple times (or even tens of times) greater than the pool value. This would massively increase capital efficiency and trading volume without significantly increasing LPs’ actual risk.
This approach matches how traditional order books function. On Binance, you might only see a few hundred thousand dollars of liquidity within ±2% of the mid-price, and yet the market supports huge trading volumes without collapsing. GMX can mirror and even outperform that model, providing deep, stable liquidity without “using up” all the capacity just because one side of the market took a big position.
Ultimately, this change would transform GMX from a simple DeFi perpetuals platform into something that truly competes with traditional order book exchanges—offering deep, stable liquidity, minimal price impact, and massive scalability. It redefines market-making by decentralizing it, making it DeFi-native, and allowing it to scale globally across chains and environments.
Conclusion:
These six proposals—ranging from gasless transactions that unify liquidity across chains, through network cost subsidies that smooth out extreme fees during volatile periods, to multichain expansions and cross-collateral features that simplify delta-neutral strategies—are not merely incremental improvements. They collectively represent a foundational shift in how GMX can scale, improve trader experience, maintain OI balance, and handle price impact perception. The use of detailed examples, such as the difference between pre-position and post-position price impact, the complexity of delta-neutral setups without cross-collateral, and the capital inefficiencies of focusing on absolute OI rather than net OI, underscores how these changes directly address key pain points in the current model.
Glory to GMX!
Q