We briefly discuss below the advantages and disadvantages of the GMX protocol for three types of users: users of exchange assets, liquidity providers, and speculative traders. What are the advantages and disadvantages?
Introducing price impact, giving trades that promote balance better pricing and imposing negative price impact on trades that increase imbalance.
Since the GMX protocol is an aggregated quote from multiple exchanges, there is no slippage when trading on GMX, making it ideal for handling large orders. The issue of impermanent losses is also addressed by aggregated quotations, as the assets of liquidity providers placed into the GLP liquidity pool are not converted to other cryptocurrencies with reduced value due to price changes.
An essential aspect of the GMX platform is its dual-token ecosystem, comprising the GMX token and the GLP token. These tokens serve different purposes: GMX as a utility and governance token, and GLP as a liquidity provider token.
The GMX project encourages community engagement with the protocol, this includes facilitating the development of community-developed projects. Some examples of successful projects include:
These features primarily isolate risks among liquidity providers and incentivize arbitrageurs through varying fees to balance long and short positions. Trades that promote balance benefit from lower fees, favorable price impacts, no borrowing fees, and additional funding fee income.
Traders opening positions on GMX trade against the pool, with GLP functioning as the counterparty to traders on the platform. While this poses a risk to liquidity providers in GLP, historically, traders have lost more than they have profited, which results in a net increase in GLP value.
On every centralized exchange, liquidity is achieved from a traditional order book model which is reliant on market makers. An order book lists the quantities of the asset being bid on or offered at each price point, or market depth.
In that case, suddenly, a large number of users in the market using USDC stablecoins to buy LINK tokens in stock, the number of LINK tokens in the GLP liquidity pool will decrease dramatically, and the increased utilization of funds will prompt the contract to go long. The funding rate of LINK will rise rapidly. In other words, the price impact of large transactions on the liquidity pool is still there, but the cost is passed on to traders as funding rates.
One of the DEXs that have surged in popularity due to the shift towards decentralized trading solutions is GMX, with the platform seeing its Completa value locked (TVL) rise from $108M to 501M in 2022, with $90M of this increase in just the last month alone.
This check here advantage is even more pronounced when large transactions are needed and decentralized exchanges such as 1inch have integrated GLP. Other decentralized exchanges, such as 1inch, also integrate liquidity from GLP liquidity pools. Yield YAK offers income products supporting GLP and GMX, and the profits earned are automatically reinvested.
In contrast to traditional decentralized exchanges which use order books, GMX employs a different type of automated market maker (AMM) system. This system is backed by its native liquidity pool, GLP, which also serves to stabilize pricing through its integration with Chainlink oracles.
The advantages of the GMX protocol model for users of exchange assets are apparent. Regarding transaction fee rates, GMX is the same as most other decentralized exchanges, around 0.3% of the Completa transaction amount. Still, regarding exchange rate stability, GMX outperforms almost all of its competitors in the market.
The protocol is able to provide dynamic pricing thanks to Chainlink Oracles, and aggregation of price data from exchanges with high volumes.