The GMX Flywheel – Reigniting Growth, Volume, and Price Momentum

Proposals
1

TL;DR

GMX has the best technology in DeFi, but the token has been stuck in reverse for two years. Let’s face it, we lost our mojo.

This post kicks off a community-driven plan to turn things around — introducing a Price Floor Fund, an earned airdrop system, and a revived GMX Points program to bring traders, LPs, and stakers back.

I’m personally ready to increase my investment of seven figures if the team and community commit to a roadmap that prioritizes token value, engagement, and sustainable growth.

Let’s make GMX the most talked-about perp DEX again and build a flywheel that drives price, participation, and long-term value for everyone.

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Summary

GMX has incredible technology and community strength, yet its token has been in a prolonged decline.

This proposal introduces initial ideas to reignite growth, reward participation, and rebuild price confidence through a coordinated flywheel of trading, staking, and liquidity incentives.

Key concepts include:

  • Expanding supply to fund an earned airdrop system that rewards real users.

  • Creating a GMX Price Floor Fund that supports price under key technical levels (starting at the 200-day SMA).

  • Reviving GMX Points to gamify participation and loyalty.

  • Launching a major marketing push and community initiatives to make GMX top-of-mind again.

These are starting points meant to spark discussion and gather feedback before formal proposal development.

Motivation

GMX remains one of the most respected decentralized perpetual exchanges, yet the token price has lagged despite ongoing innovation.

As a long-time supporter, trader, and top 1% staker/LP, I believe we can create a sustainable flywheel that rewards loyalty, drives new growth, and restores confidence.

GMX has built trust, product-market fit, and a strong brand — but price performance has discouraged participation. The token is down over 60% year-to-date and trades below its 2022 launch level.

Price drives narrative in crypto. To attract new traders, LPs, and stakers, GMX must actively align incentives with value creation and market psychology. The focus should shift from passive token holding to active ecosystem participation that compounds growth and visibility.

Specification

1. Expand Token Supply Strategically (Incentivized Growth Airdrop)

Proposal: Increase total GMX supply from 13.25M → 100M Max Supply and use new tokens to fund long-term, incentive-driven growth through an non-dilutive earned airdrop.

This creates sustainable, transparent incentives that reward ecosystem participation — not speculation.

Mechanics:

  • Start: Q1 2026 (quarterly distributions)

  • Points Formula (Transparent Option):

    • 1 point per $1 of trading/swap fees generated

    • 1 point per $1 of LP supplied per day

    • 1 point per staked GMX per day

    • User reward = (User Points / Total Points) × Quarterly Reward Pool

  • Vesting: Linear (weekly claims, similar to sENA)

  • Incentive to keep staked

  • Eligibility: 100% community-based (no VC/insider allocations)

This structure ties rewards directly to behaviors that grow GMX’s revenue and liquidity and can be adjusted quarterly to maintain profitability.

2. Establish a GMX Price Floor Fund (Technical Support Zone)

Proposal: Reduce staking rewards from 27% → 20% of protocol revenue and redirect the remaining 7% to a Price Floor Fund that buys GMX on the open market when it falls below key support levels.

Initial Parameters:

  • Dynamic technical floor: Guided by long-term moving averages

    • Start with 200-day SMA, then adjust to 150-day SMA as conditions improve

  • Funding:

    • Seed with 5–10% of the treasury

    • Continue funding with 7% of protocol revenue

Rationale:

Most traders and investors avoid assets trading below the 200-day moving average. Supporting these levels through consistent accumulation signals market strength and confidence, creating a predictable foundation for recovery and renewed interest. I’ve lost a majority of my stake to price deterioration, whats the point if we can create token value.

3. Reinstate and Gamify GMX Points

Reintroduce the engagement-driven culture that made early GMX participation exciting and sticky.

Mechanics:

  • 1 staked GMX = 1 point per day

  • Points reduce trading/swap fees (up to 50%)

  • Points qualify users for airdrops, beta access, and exclusive rewards

This rewards loyalty, promotes long-term participation, and makes GMX ownership more interactive and rewarding.

4. Marketing and Awareness

GMX’s brand strength needs renewed visibility and narrative energy.

Proposed Initiatives:

  • Host the World Decentralized Trading Championship exclusively on GMX

  • Partner with top DeFi and TradFi traders and influencers

  • Re-engage early supporters (e.g., Arthur Hayes, early DeFi funds)

  • Launch educational and narrative-driven campaigns highlighting GMX’s strengths

This reestablishes GMX as the leading decentralized trading brand in both DeFi and mainstream circles.

Protecting Long-Term Supporters

These ideas are designed to strengthen GMX without penalizing those who have supported the project since the beginning.

Any future changes or incentives should reward long-term stakers and early contributors through loyalty multipliers or priority access during initial distribution rounds.

Implementation

  1. Community Discussion: Begin with an open discussion phase to refine parameters and gather feedback from stakers, LPs, and traders.

  2. Modeling & Simulations: Form a working group to model treasury impact, simulate airdrop mechanics, and test the Price Floor Fund logic using historical data.

  3. Proposal Refinement: Incorporate community feedback and release a finalized version for DAO review.

  4. On-Chain Vote: Submit the refined proposal for Snapshot and eventual implementation after consensus.

This phased approach ensures that every step is transparent, data-driven, and aligned with the long-term interests of the GMX ecosystem.

Measuring Success

The effectiveness of these initiatives can be measured through key metrics over time:

  • Growth in trading volume and open interest

  • Increases in TVL across GMX pools

  • Higher staking participation and retention rates

  • Price stabilization above the 200-day moving average

Tracking these metrics will help the DAO evaluate whether the proposed flywheel is strengthening GMX’s fundamentals and restoring confidence.

Feedback Requested

These concepts are meant to spark discussion and gather ideas from the GMX community.

Feedback is welcome on:

  • The airdrop formula or points system

  • The price floor fund structure and SMA integration

  • Any other growth or incentive mechanisms to strengthen GMX

Please share thoughts, critiques, or alternative approaches to help refine these concepts into an actionable DAO proposal.

Closing

GMX has the technology, trust, and user base to remain a category leader.

With coordinated action and thoughtful incentives, we can reignite growth, attract users back, and make GMX the benchmark for decentralized perpetuals once again.

Let’s build the flywheel together.

— B

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why you are so crazy，let gmx from1300w to100000000？？？

you know the price will to the hell。

and decrease gmx buy back asset from 27 to 20，is nut a good idea to construct community，especially at this time which gmx in low price。

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I hear you — expanding supply sounds drastic at first glance, but let’s look at where GMX stands versus its peers.

Most leading decentralized exchanges already have hundreds of millions or even billions of tokens in circulation:

  • HyperLiquid (HYPE): 336M

  • Aster (ASTER): 2.0B

  • dYdX: 790M

  • Avantis: 258M

  • Synthetix: 343M

  • GMX: just 10.3M

GMX has one of the smallest circulating supplies in the entire perp DEX sector. At today’s $10 price, that’s only a ~$110M market cap — smaller than even mid-tier competitors. The proposal to expand supply isn’t about dumping tokens; it’s about funding growth, creating engagement incentives, and reigniting network activity like every other successful protocol has done.

The new tokens would be distributed gradually, earned through real trading, staking, and LP participation — not handed out or sold. The goal is to make GMX competitive again, not inflate away value.

And the Price Floor Fund doesn’t remove buybacks — it redirects part of them into a smarter, technical-based accumulation system that actually supports GMX when it’s weak (below the 200-day SMA).

Doing nothing keeps us where we are — undervalued, under-discussed, and under-incentivized. This plan is about building a path back to growth.

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Thank you for your response. I understand your point—distributing buyback funds to a price support fund to make purchases below the moving average. However, this is more likely to incentivize arbitrage bots rather than genuine buyers. These bots would immediately sell for profit once the price moves above the moving average, which does little to sustainably increase the price and would only cause GMX to hover around the 200-day moving average.

In contrast, under our current buyback and distribution model for stakers, over 90% of the repurchased GMX is not sold but continues to be staked. This year, we have bought back 20% of GMX, and currently, only 30% of GMX remains in circulation. Can you imagine? In at most one year, only 10% of GMX will be left circulating. In 1.5 years, if the GMX price remains unchanged, there will be virtually no GMX left in circulation—which is impossible. Therefore, the price of GMX will inevitably rise to a level that captures the entire market’s attention.

Bro, we all know that in the cryptocurrency world, the best marketing isn’t about repeating promotions a hundred times—talk is cheap. It’s about driving up the token price. Have you noticed? Projects like ASTER and HYPE gained attention because their token prices surged, attracting more people to trade and creating a flywheel effect.

When our GMX soars, the entire market will take notice. At that point, issuing a small portion of additional tokens at higher prices would achieve twice the result with half the effort.

I’ve participated in similar deflationary marketing before—OKB last August. I observed its 30% deflation rate and the prediction that its circulating supply would be depleted within a year. After I got involved, OKB rose from 45 to 245. GMX is in a similar situation. The only difference is that GMX tokens are transferred to holders instead of being burned, meaning that when GMX multiplies in price, some people will sell. Therefore, GMX may not see a 5x increase like OKB, but a 2-3x rise is highly possible.

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Yeah, that should happen after the next “big thing” is added. Thankfully we now have even more data to explain the situation, although it won’t make a difference.

  1. Saulius provided data during the MP burn talks (March-April, 2024) to indicate that “Other people having 200% added APR dissuades new entrants” was never the case. Now, after over a brutal year of very few new buyers, the 0% added APR didn’t bring in the hordes of people that was expected. The main argument has been proven wrong.

  2. At one point Q’s only defense of his token-destroying idea to eliminate MP’s was that “Hey at least it decoupled $GMX from ETH.” ETH went up by 50% this summer, while $GMX flatlined and crabbed downward. I’d give my left arm for us to be “coupled” to ETH.

  3. We have enough data now to know that getting $GMX token as the real-yield output from staking GMX does not incentivize anyone to buy $GMX. People want their direct and immediate staking rewards to be ETH, WBTC, or USDC. Hell, how much gains did everyone lose changing the real-yield from ETH to GMX tokens? The only realistic solution would be for someone to convert their gmx rewards to eth every day, and by that point they’ll just use a different protocol. Every $GMX staker lost a ton of gains due to Q’s 2nd worst idea, changing the yield to $GMX tokens. Now all of our buying pressure is from a single bot. No humans!

I appreciate your optimism siyuan, and your enthusiasm NXS. And I whole-heartedly support your positions. But the people you need to convince in order for $GMX to ever again see positive momentum aren’t open to listening to you.

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ETH staking rewards was the reason I first joined the project. Is the team open to brining back real yield or maybe a mix of options? Or is this a non-starter like everything else that is proposed?

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Price creates the narrative, that we can agree. Low supply has not helped over the past 2 years when decentralized perps are having one of it’s biggest growth time in years and we are not in the conversation. FDV is a meme in crypto. Sometimes all you need is a spark. So something needs to be done. Status quo is unacceptable. I posted my ideas, I’d honestly like to hear from the team on how they think they can grow the protocol but i was told to write a proposal.

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I’m sorry to hear that. It’s truly irresponsible that the team members did not voice their opinions. However, if you need something drafted, GPT might be able to assist.

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There has already been multiple proposals from other community members as well, so I suggest to discuss a proposal which combines all of the efforts. There are a few community members eager to work on this.

@Btcfever will also be removing your post where you are talking about GMX contributors as third-worlders, as you cannot do anything else besides attacking people and recycling the same old bullshit as always, thanks.

So please keep it friendly and immediately stop with those racists comments, or I will IP ban you.

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I like a lot of the elements you’ve proposed, nxs. It dovetails with quite a bit of what’s being worked out internally. Particularly regarding reintroducing an engagement-driven culture, and rewarding the various user groups that add value by contributing to GMX.

There are some potential tangles. Any buyback based on a moving average is likely to be gamed by arbitrage bots, as @siyuan noted. And such a radical supply expansion will be a tough sell for many.

As Tano mentions, I think the aim here should be to combine the best elements from the proposals that have been developed, internally and externally.

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While there are many topics in the above post, I’d like to focus on one in particular. I believe there are different approaches to consider, and I’ve been in discussions with several other protocols who are also reevaluating their tokenomics.

There’s definitely merit in maintaining a connection between our buybacks and distributions, though it doesn’t need to be as directly linked as our current BB&D (Buyback & Distribute) mechanism.

Buybacks serve an important purpose by removing tokens from circulation, especially during periods of low token prices. Meanwhile, the distribution function allows us to reward long-term token holders. The key question is whether we need to automatically distribute our buybacks every week at full capacity. I’m comfortable saying we don’t need to maintain this rigid schedule and should explore our alternatives.

We could implement a more strategic mechanism where distributions are triggered based on specific conditions, such as:

  • Trading below certain technical indicators (as mentioned above)

  • Fundamental disconnects between protocol performance and token price

  • Other market-based or protocol-specific metrics

This approach would allow for more thoughtful and impactful use of our buyback and distribution capabilities.

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The thread is incredibly active—great to see the community’s enthusiasm. Thank you, everyone!

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I’m happy for you siyuan - Good luck reigniting growth. FYI, as of today, EVEN metamask is using a points scheme for perps trading using their platform.

…At this point GMX has to be the only one that isn’t. Thanks Q! Even more insane, GMX is the only platform that thought getting rid of points would spur growth. How did that work out, Tano? You were the one that was adamant getting rid of points would take $GMX value to new heights.

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Maybe Points are good, just not infinite multiplier points. Maybe there is a happy medium. Points can reward behavior, loyalty, and adoption.

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Thanks for sharing. I just put some ideas down, I was curious to see what the community reaction was. I put a 100m just to see what people would say. Obviously it could be any number. Do you think there is any appetite for any supply increase? Also, how do we see any internal elements that have been discuss? I’d like to work with the other folks to continue to refining their ideas and the community ideas and create 1 proposal.

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What is the best way to talk to those folks that created a proposal and get a working group going? Telegram?

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Hi NXS,

First of all, thank you for this. I’d like to take this opportunity to use this thread as the mother of all proposal threads, since there are currently five or more active proposals of various kinds in the forum. I’ll also be commenting on each of those proposals to redirect readers here — as this one is the latest and, in my view, the most comprehensive.

A Quick Reflection

I’d like to highlight what I see as a small “weakness” among GMX contributors: a lot of great work happens behind the scenes, but it’s not communicated quickly enough to the community.
This usually comes from our cautious approach — we prefer to underpromise and overdeliver.

However, I call it a weakness because I believe the community deserves more uplifting updates from us, and we should be more proactive in sharing progress.

Work That Has Been Done (But Not Widely Shared)

Before diving into the main proposal, I want to first acknowledge some work that’s already underway but hasn’t been publicly detailed enough.

a) Marketing Efforts
We’ve launched two marketing initiatives:

  • One agency began a little over a week ago, focusing on attracting audiences from DEXs and wallets. After fine-tuning based on their feedback, it’ll take about 1–2 months for the algorithm to reach optimal performance.

  • The other agency represents a larger-scale marketing campaign, which is now in its final stages.

Most of these efforts might be invisible to GMX stakers (especially if you’re not actively trading), but they’re happening quietly in the background. ^.^

b) Expanding the Contributor Team
We’ve onboarded several new contributors over the past week, continuing our steady expansion over the last 24 months.

This might sound like boring “behind-the-scenes” stuff, but the new talents have already brought fresh ideas that are keeping our devs busy again.

c) Trading Competition: StimPak Duels
A new trading competition has kicked off — StimPak Duels — with a small but creative concept.
If it proves successful, expect more events to follow soon.

d) Referral Redesign
The referral system is being redesigned with a renewed spirit and vision (this probably deserves its own dedicated discussion thread).
Thanks to Rob for pushing this forward — it’s on track!

e) Multichain Expansion
Multichain efforts have begun — which is also why some marketing activities were held back until recently.

The new EARN page now includes more detailed information, and bridging of $GMX to Solana is live, along with other technical upgrades.

If you haven’t already, I encourage everyone to follow our updates:

f) Meetings with LPs, Whales, and Funds
There have also been ongoing discussions with large LPs and institutional participants — meetings we obviously can’t disclose in detail.

GMX has continually proven that our pricing accuracy is strong — even outperforming some major CEXs (for example, our Oct 11th liquidation wicks were significantly better).

Still, big LPs and funds are always cautious, and it takes continuous effort to maintain their confidence and bring in fresh liquidity so our traders can thrive.

g) Upcoming Features for Traders
To wrap up this section, here are some exciting updates currently in progress for traders:

  • JIT (Just-In-Time) execution

  • Net OI (Open Interest) metrics

  • Market groupings

  • Cross-margin functionality

These features are under development and will be rolled out over the next few weeks and months.

(Continued in my next comment on the main proposal.)

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For all your points — and the other points raised in proposals by other well-loved GMX community members —

we’re organizing a series of Zoom sessions and intimate meetups for hours and days of brainstorming soon. This series of meetings has been planned for a while, and we’ll be putting in real effort to discuss everything in depth.

GMX Price Flood Fund:
Our BD, Coinflip, has written a reply here:
:link: The GMX Flywheel — Reigniting Growth, Volume, and Price Momentum

Gamifying GMX Points:
I think it’s an interesting idea — and I’m quite sure that adding a referral component would be a great way to enhance the gamified experience.

Expanding Token Supply:
There are several community members who share this view. Let’s work on tokenomics that can support this expansion while ensuring that the market cap continues to rise.

Protecting Long-Term Supporters:
Yes, we absolutely need to do this — both to support price and to reward loyal supporters. This can also be tied into your proposed gamification system.

Marketing:
As mentioned in my previous comments, two major marketing campaigns are currently being executed. Your ideas, such as a World Centralized Trading Competition, are valuable.
I floated the idea of a $1M trading prize earlier, but based on trading competition statistics, the results might not be as impactful as expected. We’re still monitoring initiatives like StimPak Duels closely.

Additional Ideas I’d Like to Discuss:

1. Evolution of DAO to Committees
To help us move faster and more effectively — without compromising on security — we should consider evolving the DAO into specialized committees.

2. GMX x Prediction Markets
Here’s an idea I’ve been exploring with my friends from Polymarket and Betmore.fun:
What if GMX developed a prediction market front, but instead of using our own liquidity, we leveraged Polymarket’s liquidity pools (their order books)?

This would allow both sophisticated and retail traders to hedge their perp positions using Polymarket’s crypto-related prediction markets.
Even if it’s not directly profitable for GMX, it could give us massive mindshare — especially since prediction markets are gaining momentum (see the involvement of CZ and Trump Media recently).

Telegram Group:
I’m happy to set up a group chat for this proposal.
I’m active on the GMX Telegram — please DM me there :slightly_smiling_face:
(Just a reminder: admins will never DM anyone first, as there are many scammers.)

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Personal opinion is dont expand supply, but use funds to conduct points program etc or buyback and airdrop.

Other points i would agree

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Expanding GMX total supply is “stop word” for me guys.

Dont do that. I believe there is many other smart ways around. Just dont freakn do THAT.

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