GMX has recorded approximately 250k unique users in total, but daily active user counts (like much of DeFi) is significantly lower. Per TokenTerminal, DAUs on GMX have been growing steadily since September 2021 but still sit under 3,000 as of 2023. The majority of user activities on the GMX platform have stemmed from swaps and margin trading.
?Since the GMX platform’s inception in September 2021, the exchange has amassed over $100 billion in total volume and collected over $150 million in total fees as of Q2 2023. Its 24-hour volume is over $5 million, which can be compared to other centralized and decentralized competitors.
Total Value Locked and Market Share
GMX joins an Arbitrum ecosystem that also has just over $2 billion in total value locked (TVL). GMX leads all projects on Arbitrum with ~$855 million in TVL. GMX is followed by Gains Network, SushiSwap, Uniswap V3, radiant, and Curve. GMX holds 35% of the TVL on Arbitrum as of 2023. In addition to the $550 million TVL on Arbitrum, GMX also has another $83 million locked on Avalanche.
Ecosystem
There are several projects building on top of GMX’s unique technology to take advantage of the available GLP real yield. This concept, similar to that of Curve, has begun to spark what’s been referred to as “GMX Wars.” Generally speaking, protocols building on top of GMX aim to acquire their own GLP treasuries to become key LPs on the network, benefiting from the exploding revenues in 2023.
following are protocols being built on top of GMX:
- Rage Trade
- Bond Protocol
- Blueberry.club
- Tender.fi
Protocols are currently battling to build automated DeFi strategies to take advantage of the yields associated with GLP. Each individual strategy varies depending on the protocol, but all are set on increasing their market share over the multi-asset pool and compounding staking rewards over time. This, in theory, will allow these projects to amass significant shares of the overall revenue from GMX, helping to insulate them from periods of pool losses in the event that traders begin to win consistently on their trades (i.e., in the next bull market).
There are several different strategies that fit into the following categories for existing projects in the GMX ecosystem, including:
- Delta Neutral
- Gamma Neutral
- Yield Aggregators
- Lending Protocols
Social Media and Online Reach
GMX holds a presence across many different public mediums where project updates, discussions, and announcements are shared with the broader community and public. By far, the largest of these is the GMX Twitter which has over 111k followers as of 2023.
Additionally, GMX has a Discord server with ~12,600 members, a with ~10,700 members, a Medium page with 1,800 readers, and the GMX governance forums with over 2,000 readers.
The GMX project also has a website at gmx.io that has accumulated over 1 million visits per month since October 2022. The majority of these visitors are from the U.S. at 20% of all visitors. Website visitor demographics are primarily from the U.S., France, Spain, Brazil, and Malaysia.
Core Report Roadmap
The official GMX roadmap is loosely defined as the project continually moves forward, generally relying on the community’s guidance in addition to facilitating ecosystem growth overall. Following the initial merger of the Gambit and XVIV projects, GMX has released four different project updates
These updates mostly covered the launch and progress of key milestones for the project. In September 2021, GMX announced the introduction of the GMX Community Developer Program, the GLP100 crypto index, and the coming release of the vesting mechanic. In Update 2 for GMX, the project announced its ambitions to expand to an additional chain, Avalanche, in November 2021April 2022, GMX introduced the concept of dynamic fees. This officially separated GMX from traditional AMM models and outlined the direction of the project’s economic model. Finally, Update 3 showcased GMX’s intentions to ease into the synthetics market via a PvP AMM model. The ambition here was to capitalize on the adoption trend of blockchain-based synthetic assets. This was released in May 2022 via a governance proposal (Task Prioritization 2022) by xdev_10.
GMX has a public repository covering the project’s progress on introducing synthetic assets to its ecosystem. This repository is seeing pull requests and commits from GMX contributors in February 2023. There are several listed issues that contributing developers are working through in Q2 2023.
In addition to synthetics, community members are also proposing that GMX launch on the Binance-led BNB chain following the release of synthetic assets. This was submitted on January 5th, 2023 and has since gathered widespread discussion. There are several other proposals being discussed in the GMX governance forums but are not currently being worked on in the GMX Github. For the time being, it appears that most project updates and future milestones will be a product of ideas introduced either directly by the community or via developers and approved by the community.
