📜 Introduction

A war of the trading platforms? GMX (native to Arbitrum) - GNS (native to polygon, but announced will be launching on Arbitrum soon). Both platform native tokens (GMX - GNS) have seen meteoric price growth during a bear market. Since June GNS has gone from $0.68 to $3.68 and GMX has gone from $13.70 to $41.56

In this dashboard we are going to examine GMX and Gains Network and analyze following topics:

• First, we are going to take a general look at both platforms
• In the next step, we are going to study platforms characteristics over time.
• Next, we are going to take a look at the user onboarding on each platform.
• Finally, we will compare the trading activity on each platform with overall network activity.

GMX

GMX is a decentralized spot and perpetual exchange that supports low swap fees and zero price impact trades.

Trading is supported by a unique multi-asset pool that earns liquidity providers fees from market making, swap fees and leverage trading.

Dynamic pricing is supported by Chainlink Oracles and an aggregate of prices from leading volume exchanges.

Gains Network

Gains Network is developing gTrade, a liquidity-efficient, powerful, and user-friendly decentralized leveraged trading platform.

Our uniquely designed synthetic architecture makes gTrade more capital efficient than any existing platform, allows for low trading fees, and a wide range of leverages and pairs (up to 150x on cryptos, up to 1000x on forex, and up to 100x on stocks).

The protocol revolves around the ecosystem's ERC20 utility token (GNS) and ERC721 utility token (NFTs).

📊 Overview

👥 User Analysis

🤔 Approach

Data Source and Tables

To conduct our study, we are using blockchain data provided by Flipside Crypto. From their datasets, following tables are used

• arbitrum.core.fact_event_logs
• polygon.core.fact_event_logs
• ethereum.core.fact_hourly_token_prices

Methodology & Definitions

Currently not Arbitrum nor Polygon have prices tables, therefore we have to use Ethereum hourly price table to access prices, we are looking for symbols that are traded in GMX. please take note that there are two UNI tokens with different prices, to have accurate results, we have to use its token address instead of symbol.

The contract addresses for GMX and Gains Network can be found in the docs: here and here. We only filter for trade related activities.

Study Period

We are conducting our study using data available since launch of each platform.

Daily Trade Count

This chart illustrates the daily number of trades done on each platform.

> It should be noted that for better visibility we use the moving average 5 instead of its exact values.

Before May 10, the number of transactions is close to each other. But quickly GMX takes the lead.

Weekly Average Volume per Trade

The next chart depicts the average volume per trade on each week.

It can be seen that:

• GMX had higher average trade volume on first few days after launch.

Gains was experiencing larger and larger trade sizes, but right after the launch of GMX, their trade sizes dropped.

Daily Volume

The following chart depicts daily volume (in USD terms) for each platform over time.

> It should be noted that for better readability we use the moving average of volume 5 instead of its exact values.

It can be seen that:

• GMX is launched more recently.

• Before May 20 Gains Network had a higher daily average volume, but with the advent of GMX, it has declined.

• GMX has experienced numerous moments of increased volume.

While the volume of GMX increased sharply on several occasions, there was not much change in the volume of the Gains network.

📈 Temporal Analysis

Number of Trades

The first chart in this section shows the total number of trades on each platform.

It can be seen that GMX has almost 3 times the trade count of the Gains Network.

Unique User Count

The next graph in this section shows the unique number of users that have ever used each platform.

It can be seen that GMX have almost 12 times more user than Gains Network.

Volume

The first chart depicts the total volume of each platform in USD.

It can be seen that GMX have around 4.5 times more volume than Gains Network.

Avg. Volume per Trade

The next chart in this section illustrates the average volume per each trade. Both platforms have a approximately similar value, while GMX being a bit higher.

Cumulative Volume

The following chart depicts the cumulative volume of each platform.

It can be seen that GMX total volume increases in a more expansional rate, while Gains network in a linear way with a low slope.

GMX takes the lead just after a few days after launch. Since then, GMX volume has increased more than 7 times, while Gains volume just doubled.

Daily User Count

This chart depicts the daily unique user count on each platform.

It can be seen that on both platforms the average number of users have slightly increased over time.

Unique Users Onboarding

By looking at the following charts we can see the number of daily users that joined each platform, It can be seen that:

• A significant number of GMX users joined between Jun 26 to Jul 4.
• Most Gains Network users joined before Jun.
• During July and June, when GMX user count increased significantly, Gains Network attracted even less users. Any type of promotion that was used by GMX didn’t help Gains Network.

🛰️ Platform vs Network

In this section, the impact of each platform on their hosting blockchain will be measured.

GMX

First, let’s take a look at GMX. It can be seen that almost 3 to 2 percent of the transactions on Arbitrum are related to GMX trading. This number been at its peak during July and has decreased over time.

Around 5 to 2 percent of Arbitrum users are using GMX on daily basis.

Gains Network

Unlike GMX that had a considerable portion of Arbitrums transaction volume, Gains have a very small impact on Polygon.

🔎  Summary

With the advent of GMX, the Gains network was pushed to sidelines. The reason could be that GMX was one of the first perpetual exchanges on Arbitrum. Arbitrum is a layer 2 project with the highest TVL among L2 chains. According to Defillama, Polygon only has 1.3B TVL while Arbitrum has over 2.7B locked up. It can be seen that Arbitrum and all the hype around it as well as programs such as Odyssey have help GMX.

Following are some of the key points found in comparison between GMX and Gains Network:

• It can be seen that GMX have around 4.5 times more volume than Gains Network.
• It can be seen that GMX has almost 3 times the trade count of the Gains Network.
• It can be seen that GMX have almost 12 times more user than Gains Network.
• While the volume of GMX increased sharply on several occasions, there was not much change in the volume of the Gains network.
• Gains was experiencing larger and larger trade sizes, but right after the launch of GMX, their trade sizes dropped.
• Before May 10, the number of transactions is close to each other. But quickly GMX takes the lead.
• GMX takes the lead just after a few days after launch. Since then, GMX volume has increased more than 7 times, while Gains volume just doubled.
• During July and June, when GMX user count increased significantly, Gains Network attracted even less users. Any type of promotion that was used by GMX didn’t help Gains Network.
• Unlike GMX that had a considerable portion of Arbitrums transaction volume, Gains have a very small impact on Polygon.

✍️ Contact Me!

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Twitter: @realAminTakhti