Flash Bounty: GMX Protocol Overview
GMX, a perp protocol, has been attracting attention recently for the massive fee revenue being generated. Examine and compare the protocol over recent days and weeks on Arbitrum. How has the protocol been performing over the past month? Three months? How is it absorbing these massive fees? Note any overarching themes or narratives that you find.
Quick introduction
What is GMX Protocol?
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.
Trading on GMX
GMX is a decentralized exchange allowing trading without the need for a username or password. The platform uses an aggregate price feed which reduces the risk of liquidations from temporary wicks.
Methods
To check the performance of the GMX protocol, I first checked the number of transactions and the number of new users on a daily basis in last month and last 3 month intervals.
For this part, I used the arbitrum.core.fact_event_logs table and applied the following conditions:
> date >= current_date - 90 > and contract_address ilike '0xabbc5f99639c9b6bcb58544ddf04efa6802f4064' > and TX_STATUS = 'SUCCESS'
I also used the following code to display the time periods of the last 1 month and the last 3 months:
> case > when date >= current_date - 30 then 'Past month' > when date < current_date - 30 then 'Past 3 Months' > end as date_type
Note: GMX protocol contract address : 0xabbc5f99639c9b6bcb58544ddf04efa6802f4064
Next, I calculated the fees paid using the tables ethereum.core.fact_hourly_token_prices, arbitrum.core.FACT_TRANSACTIONS and arbitrum.core.fact_event_logs.
And finally, I checked the origins of attracting these fees (==types of transactions==).
:information_source: ==origin_function_signature :
> '0x332e0382','0xc9874170' :arrow_right: Long Position > > '0xe70dd2fc' :arrow_right: Short Position > > '0xf3daeacc','0xef8c5994','0x364e2311','0x53a8aa03' :arrow_right: Stake > > '0x078580d2','0x64f64467','0xabb5e5e2','0x0f3aa554' :arrow_right: UnStake
:green_book: My sources:
:chart: Analyze
One of the most important metrics in evaluating the performance and progress of a protocol is the number of new users. In the graph above, you can see the number of new GMX protocol users daily in the last month (orange bars) and the last 3 months. As it is known, in the ==last few days of June 2022==, unique users using GMX have increased significantly! But after that and until August 18, it was almost constant. But from the last 30 days to today, the trend of the number of new users has increased, and as it is clear, this means that the GMX protocol is alive and popular:grey_exclamation:
:chart: Analyze
Good! As you could guess, the number of unique transactions has a chart similar to the chart of the number of daily new users.
Here we can see that the number of transactions hasimproved in the last month compared to the previous two months. The highest number of transactions is related to June 29, 2022 with 12K unique transactions.
:chart: Analyze
Let's see how much was the amount of fees paid in this protocol on a daily basis and in the last month and last 3 months. Fees are shown in USD on the chart. Users really paid very low fees on a daily basis, and as we can see, although the number of transactions has increased in the last month (previous chart), the fees have not changed much compared to the previous two months, and this is the secret of GMX's success.
:pencil2: Also, in the donut chart, we can compare the amount of fees in the last 30 days with the amount of fees in the last 90 days (minus the last 30 days). It is very interesting! In the last 30 days, only about $4.8K in fees have been paid, but in the 2 months before these 30 days, about $52K in fees have been paid in GMX transactions!
In fact, the fees of the last 90 days are such that 8.4% are related to the last 30 days and 91.6% of the fees are related to the 60 days before these 30 days.
:chart: Analyze
Now we want to check the share of fees for each type of transaction in the GMX protocol.
As it is known, in the last month, the highest fees were paid for long position transactions. That is, about 35.6% of the fees of the last month were for these types of transactions, and after that, stake transactions are in the second place with 22.2%.
In the last graph, you can see the fee paid for each type of transaction based on each day. Also, if you want to compare the fees of each category compared to the others and check their percentage changes, I suggest you run the above timeline chart and enjoy..
Conclusion
- By analyzing the data and information of this dashboard, we can conclude that the GMT protocol has performed very well in the past 3 months, especially the last month, in terms of performance and attracting new users.
- In the last few days of June 2022, unique users using GMX have increased significantly! But after that and until August 18, it was almost constant. And from the last 30 days to today, the trend of the number of new users has increased.
- We found out that the highest number of transactions is related to June 29, 2022 with 12K unique transactions.
- We also saw that the fees of the last 90 days were such that 8.4% of the fees were related to the last 30 days and 91.6% of the fees were related to the 60 days before this 30 days.
- And finally we concluded that in the last month, the highest fees were paid for long position transactions. That is, about 35.6% of the fees of the last month were for these types of transactions, and after that, stake transactions are in the second place with 22.2%.
Thanks for reading!
This analysis was created on 2022–09–19 for a bounty at Flipside Crypto by Hesam to answer the following questions: #Arbitrum - GMX, a perp protocol, has been attracting attention recently for the massive fee revenue being generated. Examine and compare the protocol over recent days and weeks on Arbitrum. How has the protocol been performing over the past month? Three months? How is it absorbing these massive fees? Note any overarching themes or narratives that you find.
All data used are from Flipside Crypto.
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