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

[Tano]

Against, no need to get aggresive and call people out, removing multiplier points was a decision made by the whole community, not only me or Q. So stop targetting specific individuals, cause the changes aren’t going your way.

Removing multiplier points was needed highly and with the community voting in favour of it, I think it’s pretty obvious everyone knew it was becoming a problem.

So I’m very sorry that voting yes to remove multiplier points, made you angry and lose your ivory tower position of keeping receiving extra ETH and removing yield from new users without actively doing anything besides staking GMX.

And please, stay on topic, and let’s keep the discussion going!

[Seraph]

to both Junwei and @russiamanbit
i’ve to admit, when i first across the idea of an expansion of GMX supply for airdrop purposes, i was against it, mostly because I held such a large amount of GMX, and inflationary surely is bad for me.

But i went through the merits of it, attracting traders, gamifying the system with airdrops and etc, and i am a lot less opposing it. I am still opposing it but I am open to hearing what the increase in supply, the increase in activities that it may trigger and etc and compare them before concluding whether its a yes or no.

[0xjunwei]

Hey Seraph,

To this point, the value of minting token supply needs to come from somewhere, and by doing this, if not minting proportionately to users holdings vs gmx giving themselves additional token. It be essentially taking value from current holders to airdrop to new stakers… then it would work on the assumption that newer stakers could cover the loss of current stakers. If proportionate there be no point to mint additional token it be same ratio, working on a 18 decimal erc20 its effectively just padding more decimals and purely psychological factor then 1:10 token split…

Heavy no towards this specific portion, and believe many have voice towards no in minting in telegram and above.

GMX can airdrop through other ways like working with new L2 for points / treasury buyback at current prices twap it or OTC from whales get back a large majority of supply and use it for points competition… through which it should drive prices up, and the airdrop effectively be bigger for them, based on holdings.

[Seraph]

im inclined to agree with you.

when GMX broke below $10 though, i told myself never say no to any idea.
and i’ve been pushing all core contributors, what if GMX is $0 tmr, would you still say no to any idea? (Believe me, we have a lot more ideas that we are debating, from what type of marketing to different visions we have)

I believe the amount of GMX i holding is quite a hefty amount, and i am open to the idea of minting more GMX only if the overall price of GMX will actually goes up
And it may, looking at our biggest competitor now, they have done pretty sure with the lure of more and more airdrops

having said this, again i would oppose to any minting now, but is open to any creative ideas on how minting more GMX will lead to higher yields, higher marketcaps, higher price for MY BAG of $GMX. =)

[siyuan]

gmx price now is 9.55，but it’s not a problem。

Guys, the crypto market is still an emerging market, characterized by high volatility and irrational pricing. My GMX holdings account for one-third of my total cryptocurrency portfolio. I know it’s painful to watch the price drop and everyone is eager for a change, but we just need to keep buying back. Within a year, several times the profit will be generated.

Compared to the traditional stock market, high volatility requires holders to have psychological endurance. It’s like buying a company—if its price keeps falling, that反而 becomes a buying opportunity for me, as long as its business continues to expand.

Our GMX is positioned as a broker (trading) + ETF (GLV). Recently, we have also expanded our trading system to BNB Chain. In the past, on Arbitrum and Avalanche chains, I wasn’t very optimistic about Arbitrum due to its relationship with Ethereum, but I am very interested in Avalanche.

I am not pessimistic about our future. At the current price, I feel incredibly optimistic—especially as the daily buybacks and distributions continue to increase the GMX I hold.

[Saulius]

Increasing the maximum supply of GMX is a terrible idea and should scare every serious holder. Please, let’s even not discuss this any further. We can talk about points, gamification, treasury spending, and anything else, but not about inflating the token supply to infinity.

In fact, I have a perfect idea for reducing the free float of GMX and reversing the downward price trend. Every long-time holder should like and support it. I will post a separate proposal in the next days and push to Snapshot vote myself later.

[0xjunwei]

Agree with Saulius that this proposal on every aspect i would push too with exception of token supply, if ur proposal is sound, i will vote for your’s too @Saulius do hope to see it soon and of course speed of executing it be a factor.

Additional suggestions to proposal:

• Bring back GMX_Intern to reply guy on twitter to gain more mindshare, hire a marketer to shit post and give the reply guy his own special referral code.
• Start buyback at current low prices, even at 5% supply back, you do a points program on top of it, it will push the airdrop value to a sufficient sum. [This be better than expansion of supply, reward long term holders, give airdrop in esGmx if needed allow 0 holding requirement vesting]
• Trading competition statistics do not look optimistic (I suspect due to low prize pool, hold it within the main platform.
• Following Aster and Lighter Trend (Hire girls to shill their ref link), as unethical as it sounds, it seems to work, personally feel unethical but we got to what we gotta do _(--)/

[ShoeStar]

Hello Everyone!

First off thank you nxs for making this post as these posts are what drives and gives GMX it’s strength and edge.

To your point about the floor funding, I beleive we should not worry about this in the short term. Looking at liqudity levels as is, there isn’t that much tbh. When looking at the sell and buy orders on the books theres only so many thousands per dollar level. Why spend precious funds on a floor funding rate and take away yield for stakers? I am in favor of increasing supply as long as it is a coin flip which would sort of defeat the purpose of funding, but I do agree that we need to start a huge marketing campaign, luckily, we have a huge war chest to work with. Roughly 40m in the treasury that we can pull from. We should be focusing on funding more platforms and turn GMX into an everything ecosystem. From perps, to prediction markets, to even an exchange component. I believe that in order for GMX to grow, we have to look past the perp trading and be more creative. I enjoy the idea of running our own prediction markets while using other platforms liqudity.

Furthermore, can anyone expalin why we went from eth rewards to gmx? What was the logic behind this decision? I mean if your a whale, realistically there isn’t enough liqudity to sell the staked rewards without negatively impacting price atelast 2-5%. I keep brining up liqudity because realitistically there IS NOT that much. Knowing this whales will just sell into that liqudity coming in from the price floor funds.

Looking forward I beleive the best way for us to expand is through prediction markets, points, and adding additional services such as defi lending and RWA’s.

ONE NOTE:

I have a question for the community and devs, if GMXSOL were to ever expand do GMX holders have ultimate authority over GMXSOL? For isntance if they catch on, can we mandate a % of their revenue to be paid out to gmx holders? If so, than we should focus on expanding like a corporation and build out these different defi business segments in order to generate yield from them and get paid out.

Bringing this all together I would hope for a future where we have revenue from this DEX through swap fees, funding fees, liquidiation, predicition markets, RWA’s and fees collected from other GMX platforms. We should look at expanding services and not on short term price increases as there isn’t much liquditity to begin with. Thank you.

[yellow]

Imho

• Do not increase supply, that would kill the project long term. People like me are here for a long time, and we stay because we see the future. Minting new tokens to distribute to wash traders will make me leave asap

• instead introduce fee discounts with GMX staking levels: cf. Introduce discount on fees for holding/staking GMX - #33 by jankelux

• (maybe) we could split the 27% to GMX stakers: 15% distributed as yield in maybe in ETH again to GMX stakers, and the rest burned for the benefit of all.

  GMX can win by being the BEST execution and price for perps, attracting pro traders. Also, focus on B2B integrations with fee sharing for partners.

[HanYolo]

Hi all, I would also just like to contribute to the discussion as a long term supporter of GMX and highly liking the protocol as such. I’m also in a loss on the GMX position, but i am trying to avoid the negativity a bit.

I really feel that GMX has a lot going for it and think that we are partly struggling because we don’t market ourselves well enough. More traders, OI and volume would spark growth and we could avoid risky adjustments of tokenomics or even emissions of GMX, which would practically dilute the current holders.

I see several improvements to be made which I think can be done without diluting anyone (not in order of importance or impact, mostly as I also don’t know upfront what will help for sure):

- Marketing really matters I believe, we should define our USPs and market these more effectively. I think part of getting new business is just being “top of mind”. We were back in the days, but the latest thing that caught the news was the hack and that is not really good marketing. If we don’t have sufficient USPs/narrative to market, we should create these. I read that there are initiatives for making our name again, which is really good and I hope this will have its results. My own business only started flying after we started proper marketing and “being out there” too.

- Reduce fees, I believe that reducing fees could attract traders in general as the fees are a direct cost for traders. We could think about using staked GMX as a trigger, but this makes it a lot more complex and simply being cheaper might work in attracting more traders and make current traders do more volume. With fees I mean also borrowing and funding fees as these are also off compared to other platform many times.

- Create a “swap” page in the traditional DEX style to highlight swaps more openly. Currently swaps are kind off hidden on the UI and I think we are one of the few, if not the only platform where you could actually earn on swapping several major tokens. This is a USP and might attract traders to check out GMX. Maybe not the most value, but creating a page should also not be the most risky or difficult, I guess.

- Expand into other businesses like lending, I see other more lending focused platforms build on GMX, while I wonder why this couldn’t be done GMX native. The fees could go to GMX rather than other platforms.

Overall I believe GMX already has some nice things going for it and we could improve doing some “quick fixes” too. I write this without knowing the priorities or size of the team executing so I might recon there are caveats I haven’t addressed. But I wanted to add some thoughts. Furthermore, I will leave commenting on the emissions and mechanics around it for after it becomes a bit more concrete.

Thanks to the team for keeping up the good work and everyone else for the participation in the discussion.

I really feel that GMX has a lot going for it and think that we are partly struggling because we don’t market ourselves well enough. More traders, OI and volume would spark growth and we could avoid risky adjustments of tokenomics or even emissions of GMX, which would practically dilute the current holders

[bparlan]

Just spoke with LLMs about it, here are my conclusions;

Suggestions to Maximize Value Accrual from New Chains

1. Cross-Chain Yield Aggregation (The Real Yield Play)

This addresses the staker reward concerns (ShoeStar/yellow) by making GMX staking yield a superior product compared to any single-chain competitor.

• Suggestion: Programmatically aggregate a portion of the native gas fees (e.g., BNB, ETH, OP, zkSync-ETH) generated on all deployed chains and distribute them as a single, multi-asset yield to GMX stakers on the main chain (Arbitrum/Base).

• Value Accrual: GMX stakers would hold the token that gives them exposure to the entire multichain DeFi economy, directly tying the token value to the protocol’s horizontal expansion success.

2. Implement Chain-Specific Fee Structure Incentives

This aligns with HanYolo’s call for better fee structures and marketing.

• Suggestion: Introduce temporary, highly aggressive fee discounts (e.g., 50% off) for a “Launch Quarter” on each new chain (BNB Chain, Linea, etc.).

• Value Accrual: This creates immediate competitive advantage and massive initial trading volume, generating buzz and bringing a critical mass of users onto the GMX platform, many of whom will likely stay even when fees normalize.

3. Launch the “GMX Trading Infra” B2B Push

This fulfills yellow’s B2B and ShoeStar’s ecosystem expansion ideas.

• Suggestion: Market GMX on new chains as an “Infrastructure Layer” for other DeFi protocols. Offer specialized API access and grant funding for dApps on Linea, zkSync, or BNB Chain that build on top of GMX’s liquidity pool (e.g., structured products, options, prediction markets).

• Value Accrual: GMX becomes the default source of pricing, liquidity, and leverage for the entire ecosystem of the new chain, making its volume growth exponential rather than linear.

Strategic Alternative Chains for GMX Integration

Priority	Chain	Rationale for Integration	Strategic Value for GMX
High Growth Retail	BNB Chain (BSC) & opBNB	Massive, active retail user base accustomed to high trading frequency and low fees. Integration via GMX Multichain is low-friction due to EVM compatibility.	Captures the largest non-Ethereum-native DeFi trading audience, instantly boosting total volume and fee generation.
Technological Edge	Linea & zkSync Era	These are leading ZK-Rollups (zk-tech) for Ethereum. Linea is backed by ConsenSys, appealing to institutional flow; zkSync Era is a major hub for new DeFi protocols.	Establishes GMX as the leading DeFi primitive on the most secure and forward-looking L2 architecture, attracting high-value developers and capital.
Ethereum Blue-Chip L2	Optimism (OP)	A battle-tested Optimistic Rollup (like Arbitrum) with a massive treasury and a strong focus on its OP Stack ecosystem.	A risk-diversification strategy within the EVM L2 space. Provides access to the growing Superchain narrative and its associated liquidity, potentially integrating with other OP Stack chains.
Sovereign/Performance L1	Near Protocol or Sui	Similar high-performance attributes to Solana, but with different scaling or security models (e.g., Sharding or Move language).	Hedges against EVM dominance and attracts users who prioritize maximum speed and low latency (pro traders/bots) but who prefer an alternative architecture to Solana.

[Btcfever]

@bparlan

Just spoke with LLMs about it, here are my conclusions;

….that’s not a promising way to start a post. Also, everything below this is a copy-paste from the response you got from chatgpt or gemini, so is it really “your” conclusions? LLM’s are causing the “delegating of judgement”, and it seems like your post is a good example of that. Like how many of these suggestions that chatgpt spit out did you really examine critically?

• Doing a “B2B Push” of launching on new chains has already been largely solved via the multichain upgrade (so it’s doubly weird you listed Optimism on there). And “chain expansion for the sake of chain expansion” has yielded terrible results so far (arguably including AVAX chain, but that’s debatable). Launching on Solana resulted in a new price suppression mechanism for $GMX token as we now have to pay Q a $100k a month salary. Launching on Botanix had the dual negative impact of taking up Devs/Contributors time (zero-sum game since time is a limited resource), and exposing how corrupt/hypocritical some of the leadership in GMX are (employed mods spend years downplaying the notion of “chasing the hot new chain” for launching GMX, only to then support one that hadn’t even launched yet because they were financially invested in it).
• The “aggressive fee discounts” idea punish the already heavily-punished stakers by lowering the APY, thus incentivizing more to finally abandon ship, driving down the $GMX price more. And it would disincentivize anyone else from buying the token, which at this point is just a bot anyway.
• Taking a “tax” on the gas fees to pay stakers would send the remaining traders to whichever competitor (whether it be hyperliquid, jup, aster, etc) is offering lower fees.

If you’re going to outsource your judgement to LLM’s, then you should at least be asking it the right questions. You likely didn’t explain to chatgpt that it’s not 2022 anymore, and that the perps market is crowded with competitors coming up with incentives that non-bots actually want.

$GMX would be at $150 per token right now if we hadn’t implemented Q’s proposals. But we did. Want the protocol and token to rise up again?

• Institute a proven success strategy - a points system with meaningful rewards (like say, adding a multiplier for apy. Wasn’t the protocol doing really well with that in place?)
• Get rid of BB&D. Unlike the MP Burn, this one was a “forgivable blunder” because it made sense on paper, just not in practice. It’s impossible to successfully market a token/protocol as offering “real yield” when that yield is in a depreciating asset. Change it back to ETH, or wBTC, or hell even USDC. Unless they were converting their $GMX staking rewards into eth every day, everybody lost a ton of unrealized gains as ETH went up 50% while $GMX continued to crab down.

These two actions would put us back in a “virtuous cycle” incentivizing actual people to use the product. But the idea isn’t from Q so it likely can’t happen. Instead, we’re now toying with autocompounding/autostaking GMX rewards as a means of protecting stakers from having to see the token price due to the emotional toll it takes on long–term holders.

That’s how low we’ve sunk by following Q’s disastrous ideas.

[Seraph]

GM saulius love to hear your idea

Sorry to push you a little bit as we are having back to back meetings on revamping gmx and would love to hear your idea asap!

[Seraph]

I disagree strongly with many of your takes.

Q has been a huge GMX token holder, and beyond buying up the tokens, he has also contributed significantly with his money, energy and time, even now. He has back to back meeting with gmx solana team and gmx solana team is still delivering

it is indeed true gmx solana marketing has not been doing good, which we at gmx marketing is discovering too, marketing to both institutions and retailers is difficult and full of obstacles, even when you have budget to spend.

And Q has a team building on this now, with he paying from his own pockets till gmx support him, which is a fair task as both gmx and gmx solana are pushing each other up

in any case, hope you can stop looking at the past and stuck at “we should have done this we should not have done that” and support those proposals u agree and voice out concerns of those proposals you do not

[HanYolo]

I don’t think fee discounts would have to hurt, I actually think they could earn us money. I would probably easily triple my volume if fees were half of what they are now, and I guess I’m not the only one.

Looking at the fee structure of Hyperliquid with volume tiers and GMX staking tiers would be most logical for GMX too I believe.

It is nice to have more chains and net OI and stuff, but I believe currently we are not even using the TVL that we have. We need more traders coming in and for that we need to have attractive fees, easy UI, proper marketing, etc.

[0xjunwei]

Think the discussion has reached a general consensus on:

• GMX fee’s staking discount
• Buyback and conduct an Points / airdrop program
  Main important aspect is to attract more traders through (Fee reduction / trading incentives)

Do believe we should act with haste, to prevent TVL from going lower, as OI dips further, fee drops and lp will leave :\ just my main concerns.

[yellow]

Especially if people would have to accumulate certain amounts of GMX to get more fee discounts, that would do good for the token price and of course no change in supply, etc.

I am not a trader myself (lost a lot for the benefit of the protocol ) but I know some traders and they would buy GMX if it leads to greater discounts as I proposed earlier.

[EruditePepe]

I get the frustration. But these won’t work.

(Ask ChatGPT to TL;DR this if you don’t want to read the whole thing)

Expanding the supply is a terrible idea. It won’t generate sustainable growth. Extractive farming while the campain lasts and that’s it. It is 100% cope.

Then in hindsight, people will say ‘oh it was so obvious expanding the supply drastically would have that effect on token price’. GMX has been around for a long time, everyone knows about it. We’ve had trading competitions, esGMX incentives, ARB incentives, for both liquidity and trading activity. They have had the desired effects, at the time, but those aren’t real, long-term solutions for a mature project.

Friendly reminder that Not A Single Person voted against Q’s ideas. It was a good idea in theory to capture value from inactive accounts. In practice, it gave whales more liquidity to exit large positions. Funny to see so many ‘told you so’ now …

Same story for stopping MP tokenomics.

Low FDV + controlled emissions through esGMX to reduce sell pressure was a smart direction, especially for token holders that were initially interested in finding a way to make a deflationary token.

It’s been clear for a while now that without things like cross-margin, 0-fees in high demand period, the trading experience is not comparable to CEX and private chains for retail traders. Since the protocol is actually decentralized, these things take a long time to implement or may actually be structurally infeasible. Hot take: GMX should cater to whales & institutions that value self-custody and smart contract safety; NOT retail traders.

So what can we do? Stop trying to tweak GMX’s tokenomics or asking ‘wen marketing’. Focus on the actual product, and perhaps discuss strategic redirection to pivot away from the ‘DEX’ discourse as it’s clearly not working right now and no amount of FDV increase & point farming is going to change that.

1- Incentivize programmatic and algorithmic volume (Easy)

This can be done by rebates for GMX holders (similar to Binance rebates for BNB holders).

Special fee rates could be offered to well established DeFi aggregators and bridges, to get a higher percentage of ‘routed’ traffic. GMX’s ancestor, Gambit, used to be an aggregator powerhouse. We can achieve this again.

2 - Revisit the floor price concept. (Medium)

Fees collected by the treasury were initially meant to be a ‘floor price fund’. The price sky rocketed on launch so it seemed better to use these funds for different activities. Perhaps being a ‘deflationary’ or ‘floor priced’ token might give GMX a new wind in CT mindshare - cause the DEX one isn’t really working out right now. If you really really want to toy with tokenomics, do this. Not points or supply increase.

3 - Stock “mirror” tokens, Gold, Forex. (Medium)

GMX could have been a leader in this area since we’ve had all the required wiring set up. I understand legal gray areas and risks from non-247 markets, but those are manageable. We managed higher risks with oracle exploits (eg: the AVAX manipulation incident). I’m sure we can manage Tradfi related risks.

This has been discussed as being ‘in the works’ a lot in the past but never actually took off. Maybe the core contributors have better insight on why this can’t be implemented, but the community hasn’t really heard the reasoning yet.

4 - PvP AMM, Custom pools behavior (Hard)

Basically go the pump.fun/Uniswap route with GMX PvP AMM. Perhaps fully ‘bonded’ tokens could be allowed a bit of leverage.

If there’s one thing that was clear this cycle - people love memecoins. I think GMX should create it’s own lane based on it’s strengths instead of trying to compete with PERP CLOB chains & CEX. Bring something novel, but that has clear demand, to the crypto markets.

5 - All the good Dev work actually going on (Hard)

This is work intensive and long-term with audits and all that, so I try to avoid the current development roadmap, especially multichain, cross-token and cross-margin. These should be the main focus of the core devs in the long term. Tried to focus more on stuff that was quicker to implement.

[russiamanbit]

@Seraph

attracting traders, gamifying the system with airdrops and etc

this gaming tricks will attract short term`ers, the players who seeking for free money. not those who looking for good trading platform (long termer`s)

So I am SURE we cant solve our issue (lack of awarness from new traders small and especially big) by giving out free 10-20-30$ for each.
The players we really need - they already HAVE money. And we just need to provide them nice and fun and THEIR_NEEDS-oriented environment so they can put their bets here.. instead of other /casino/.

imho.

[russiamanbit]

I like these ideas btw.

Provide landing service to our traders looks really interesting.
Its complicated for sure, but can be developed further as an idea.