Questions

Let’s look into Gains Network vs GMX. Both platform native tokens (GMX - GNS) have seen meteoric price growth during the bear market.

• Observe Trading volume. Has one platform absorbed more volume than the other?

• How impactful is GNS volume to polygon?

• How impactful is GMX volume to Arbitrum?

• Are there any insights that can reveal why Gains Network wants to move into the Arbitrum ecosystem?

Introduction

What is GAINS Network?

Gains Network is a decentralized derivatives trading platform built first on the Polygon network and expanding to other decentralized networks. On the Gains platform, crypto derivative traders are allowed up to 150X leverage and up to 1000x for forex trades. The GNS token is the native token of the Gains network and supports its financial system. It will be used for DAO Voting when GNS's decentralized government goes live. (Source)

What is GMX?

GMX (GMX) is a decentralized spot and perpetual trading crypto exchange whose users can benefit from its low swap fees and zero price impact trades through leverage trading and market making. GMX offers levels up to 30x. The GMX token is used on the exchange for governance and staking purposes. Holders of the token can vote on a variety of proposals concerning the platform’s operations. (Source)

Methodology

• In this dashboard, the two popular derivative trading markets ( GMX and Gains Network) have been compared and analyzed in 4 Sections:

  • Users Comparison
  • Transactions Comparison
  • Volume Comparison
  • Main Chains activity

• This dashboard uses the Arbitrum, Ethereum and Polygon databases an,d the following tables to extract information:

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

• The Max time frame provided in this dashboard:

  • From October 2021 until today

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Gains Network vs GMX: Users

Insights:

• GMX is the winner here in this comparison. Almost 90% of users in these 2 apps have chosen GMX. There have been more than 43k unique users on GMX so far while only around 4700 users have been trading on the Gains network app

• June 28 and June 29 were 2 days with the peak user activity on GMX. Around 14800 users traded on GMX on these 2 days. This is almost 34% of total GMX users.

• While the growth in new users in the Gains network was steady over time but the growth rate is way too low compared to GMX. There is huge popularity around GMX since the day 1 of the lunch and not even one day has been seen with a higher user count for the Gains network compared to GMX

Gains Network vs GMX: Transactions

Insights:

• In terms of the number of transactions in these apps, GMX is the winner again. More than 560k transactions have been recorded on the GMX protocol while 200k have taken place on the Gains. This means more than 73.6% of the total TXs are related to GMX ( Almost 3x compared to the Gains network)

• On the number of transactions side of this comparison, we can see a very huge difference between the growth rate for GMX and Gains. While the Gains network is older than GMX but the growth rate is much bigger for GMX. Gmx has been launched around mid-April and after almost 70 days the cumulative number of transactions exceed the Gains network number of transactions.

• While there was no hype period around the Gains network there are multiple hypes around GMX. The biggest one occurred at the end of June when more than 29k transactions took place on these 2 days. On the other side, the Gains network is almost in the same range each day, Most days between 500-1500 transactions with some overshoots on some days

Gains Network vs GMX: Volume

Insights:

• GMX has more volume overall! Volume metric shows that GMX has done a better job to attract user volume. More than 82.9% of the total volume in these 2 apps are related to GMX protocol which is close to 1.2 billion Us dollar. Gains network has a share of 17.1% of the total volume which is equal to 246 million Us dollar

• Although the Gains network is older than GMX, the cumulative chart shows a small growth in trading volume compared to GMX. GMX Volume exceeded the Gains network volume 3 weeks after GMX lunch and starts to go parabolic since then

• There is no big hype around the Gains network trading volume. No day has been seen with over 5 million Us dollars in trading volume. This is while we have seen several hypes periods around GMX volume which led to days above 20-25 million Us dollars in trading volume

• There is no sign of a slowing down in trading volume for GMX. This is while we are deep in the 2022 bear market and trading volume is not at ATH for all crypto assets.

Gains Network and Polygon

Insights:

• The Gains Network does not have a big share in the Polygon ecosystem. More than 99.9% of the Polygon users and transactions are happening outside of the Gains Network app.

• While 2-5 million transactions are taking place on Polygon each day, there are only a few thousand transactions on the Gains Network app at most

• On days with the highest volume on the Gains app like Aug 18, we don't see any meaningful full impact on Polygon transactions which confirms the fact that the Gains Network is a small part of the Polygon ecosystem

GMX and Arbitrum

Insights:

• Arbitrum growth can be seen as being impacted by GMX growth. While 1.59% of all transactions in Arbitrum are GMX related but more than 11.6% of users in the Arbitrum ecosystem are interacting with GMX.

• From around 1.5 million users on Arbitrum there are 169k users on GMX ( Huge!)

• Since April we have seen that daily transactions on Arbitrum increased from around 50k daily TXs up to around 350k daily TXs. At the same time, TXs on GMXs have been increasing as well. The same is true for the GMX volume. All these metrics show that GMX is an important part of the Arbitrum

Conclusion and Personal thoughts

GMX is outperforming the Gains network in all metrics. It has more than 9x Users, more than 2.8x trades, and more than 4.8x in trading volume compared to Gains Network. This is while I see the Gains Network as a better product with better features like higher leverages and lower fees ( Polygon compared to Arbitrum). With that said there must be a desire for the Gain Network to join the Arbitrum ecosystem and catch up with GMX Protocol. Arbitrum has been more user-friendly for derivatives and leverage markets as we can observe from the data in this dashboard. Also, users might be more willing to hold ETH and have more trust in ETH compared to the Matic token as the native tokens of those chains to pay fees and trade on these apps. The Gains network knows this very well and by adding Arbitrum will have a shot to attract GMX users from the Arbitrum chain to lead the decentralized derivatives on both chains

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