2022 Q4 Protocols & Tools

Protocols

Caution should be exercised when interacting with any smart contract or blockchain application. This post is not intended to be financial advice but rather an informative post for coreDAO community and devs.

Last Update: Nov 5 2022

Derivatives

From Defillama protocols for betting with leverage. An older DeFiLlama definition was “smart contracts that gets its value, risk, and basic term structure from an underlying asset”.

GMX – Arbitrium & Avalanche

From their main page: Decentralized Perpetual Exchange. Trade BTC, ETH, AVAX and other top cryptocurrencies with up to 30x leverage directly from your wallet.

From DefiLlama – 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, leverage trading (spreads, funding fees & liquidations) and asset rebalancing.

Oct 31 2022 TVL According to DeFi Llama
$486M Total
$420 M in Arbitrum
$66.45 M in Avalanche

GMX Token
Utility Governance token that accrues 30% of fees generated in platform.

GLP Token
Liquidity Provider token that accrues 70% of fees generated in platform. This is a fractional token having ETH (33%), BTC (17%), Link, UNI, USDC (38%), USDT, DAI, FRAX. It can be minted using any index asset and burnt to redeem any index asset. GLP are specific to the network they are minted on. Token weights are adjusted to help hedge GLP holders based on the open position of traders.

Other Tokens

sGMX – Staked GMX | Arbiscan | Snowtrace
esGMX – Escrow GMX | Arbiscan | Snowtrace
vGLP – Vested GLP | Arbiscan | Snowtrace
fsGLP – Fee + Staked GLP | Arbiscan | Snowtrace

Fees & Rewards

GMX: earns ETH / AVAX, esGMX, Multiplier Points when staked
esGMX: earns ETH / AVAX, esGMX, Multiplier Points when staked
Multiplier Points: boost ETH / AVAX APRs when staked
GLP: earns ETH / AVAX, esGMX, automatically staked on mint

Compound rewards are available. After depositing GMX you receive esGMX. esGMX can be staked to receive rewards like regular GMX or vested to become actual GMX tokens over a period of a year. esGMX cannot be bought on the market if you want to vest them. To initiate vesting you need to reserve the amount of tokens used to generate the esGMX. Reserve tokens cannot be unstaked or sold. vesGMX does not generated rewards but the staked tokens reserved for vesting do continue to earn rewards.

Multiplier Rewards – you receive MP by staking GMX and they increase APRs like regular GMX tokens. When the GMX or esGMX are unstaked the proportional APRs are burnt.

Floor Price Fund
GMX Token has a floor price in ETH and GLP that grows via GMX/ETH liquidity provided by the protocol. 50% of funds received from Olympus bonds ( olympusdao.finance ) are sent to the floor price fund. Floor is maintained by these contracts ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). More info in docs.

Trading
DEX style token swaps and options for short and long positions available. Stop-loss & Take-Profit order styles available. 0.1% fees proportional to the size of the position are taken. Keepers execute these transactions

Other Details:

Pricing supported by Chainlink Oracles
Latest Official Road Map released in May 20 2022
They have a Dune Dashboard Competition
Referral system
Has an ecosystem page which shows all of the community projects.

Forks
MetaVault Trade – DeFi Llama – Site

dYdX Exchange – ETH, Starware L2 & Cosmos (in-dev)

Nov 2 2022 TVL According to DeFi Llama
$381.74 M Total

From DefiLlama : The most powerful open trading platform for crypto assets. Margin trade, borrow, and lend cryptocurrency.

From their site: Trade Perpetual Contracts with no fees, deep liquidity, and up to 20x more Buying Power.

Robust exchange that includes chart prices, various order types and many financial instruments such as perpetuals, margin, spot trading. Runs on L2 based on Starware which uses ZK proofs. Off-chain order books with on-chain settlement.

All perpetual contracts are settled and margined in USDC.

Other details

Uses oracles for asset prices.
Has an NFT collection called Hedgies that gives perks to holders like trade discounts on the protocol and some form of governance. Synthetix explains that the artist receives the trade fees and not them.
Future plan is that “Traders will not pay gas fees to trade, but rather pay percent based trading fees similar to normal exchanges. These fees would accrue to validators and their stakers”

Gains Network – Polygon

Nov 3 2022 TVL According to DeFi Llama
$20.45 M Total
$8.2 M Additional in Pool

Their products include gTrade , Staking pools , Polygon Bridge . Forex & stocks are available.

They have utility NFTs (ERC721) which are designed to be used in the platform. NFT holders getting reduced spread and boosted rewards, as well as NFT bots executing limit orders and liquidations. Uses Chainlink. NFTs boost staking APY of GNS.

GNS – GNS holders receiving platform fees through Single Sided Staking, burning of GNS using platform revenue. Overall net deflationary, has a softcap (38M) and a hardcap (100 M). Staking rewards paid in DAI for GNS staking.

Synthetics

From DefiLlama Protocol that created a tokenized derivative that mimics the value of another asset.

Synthetix – Ethereum, Optimism

Nov 2 2022 TVL According to DeFi Llama
$435.41 M Total
$294.66 M ETH
$140.75 M Optimism

From DefiLlama : Synthetix is a derivatives liquidity protocol providing the backbone for derivatives trading in DeFi.

From their site: THE DERIVATIVES LIQUIDITY PROTOCOL. Synthetix is a new financial primitive enabling the creation of synthetic assets, offering unique derivatives and exposure to real-world assets on the blockchain.

This protocols allows issuance and trading of synthetic assets sTokens (a.k.a. Synths). Each synth is an ERC20 token that tracks the price of external tokens. Synths values are underpinned by the value of the SNX token which acts as a collateral when minting Synths. Everytime a synth is minted they incur a debt and in order to repay it they must burn their proportion of the Synths they minted. Stakers of SNX tokens are then rewarded for supporting the system with a pro-rata share of the fees generated by the protocol and the value of SNX is directly connected with the usage of the network it collateralizes. The liquidity tradeable in the ecosystem is limited by the size of the collateral pool.

Staking rewards are escrowed for a year. Full overview of incentives here .

SNX supply: “Synthetix’s original monetary policy featured a fixed supply. A new monetary policy was introduced in 2019. This new policy introduces an inflationary supply to reward active stakers. Each year, for 5 years, the total rewards will be cut in half, starting at 75,000,000 SNX for the first year. The total supply will eventually reach 245,312,500 SNX by 2024.”

Governance
Very robust and complicated governance method composed of a various combination of community members, core contributors and elected committees and councils which are voted on by SNX stakers. At least 4 different governing councils: Spartan Council, Grants Council, Ambassador Council, & Treasury Council. Synthetix Improvement Proposals Explanations & Archive of SIPs.

Products that use Synthetix Liquidity

Kwenta – Ethereum, Optimism
DOCS |

From their site Trade with 10x leverage and simulated liquidity for the best price fills. Protocol that uses Synthetix to trade perpetual futures and normal Swaps of Synths.
Uses IPFS. Unlike typical futures, perpetual Futures do not expire and remain effective until the trader closes their position. Futures traders can be forced to exit positions when their losses bring their margin balance equal to their maintenance margin requirements. Has it’s own DAO system

Lyra
DOCS |

From their site: The first completely decentralized options protocols.
AMM for European options. Competition Vaults.
You can integrate with Lyra’s AMM to build vaults, hedging tools, arbitrage bots, algorithmic trading strategies and more.

Protocols Built on Lyra – Polynomial & Brahma

Thales
DOCS |

From their: site A parimutuel Markets protocol for trading on price action, sports, and other events.
Thales provides users with the ability to purchase positions with a specific strike price at a predetermined expiry date for any integrated asset with available ChainLink data feeds
Binary options markets leveraging Synthetix. Offer extra rewards to SNX stakers and uses SNX for incentives.

Lending

From Defillama Protocols that allow users to borrow and lend assets

Folks Finance – Algorand

From their site: The Leading Capital Markets Protocol for borrowing and lending built on top of the Algorand blockchain.

From DefiLlama Lending and borrowing protocol with innovative features built on Algorand Blockchain.

Nov 2 2022 TVL According to DeFi Llama
$112.25 M Total
An additional $3.28 M in Borrowed Assets.
46.3 M in Deposited Assets
66.84 M in Algorand (Algo Gov)

fTokens
LP Tokens which can be used to withdraw the deposited assets, or lock them as collateral for receiving a loan. Deposits into the protocol become their respective fToken (i.e. fALGO, fUSDC, fUSDt, frgoBTC, frgoETH) and start to accumulate interest instantly.

frTokens – Folks Reward Tokens. Minted when an user repays loan & interests, and when they provide liquidity through lock and earn.

fStaking – Users can stake their fTokens and earn additional yield.

Lock & Earn Deposits
The User locks their assets for a fixed duration and cannot use their respective fTokens until the designated term. As a reward frTokens are generated. Only Stablecoins can be used in the lock and earn.

Rewards Aggregator
Users can choose to exchange frTokens for fTokens: 1. instantly at a fixed rate ; 2. better rate by vesting over a 2 week period.

Other Details:

Algo Liquid Governance – allows users to participate in the Algorand Blockchain Governance whilst maintaining their liquidity.
frTokens are intended to reward good users that repay loans in exchange for lower rates.
UI is extremely simple and elegant.
Detailed Community Treasury.

Cross-chain

From DefiLlama Protocols that add interoperability between different blockchains

Stargate

DOCS | Gitbook Technical | List of Contracts | Github | DefiLlama | Medium | Messari

From DefiLlama Stargate is a fully composable liquidity transport protocol that lives at the heart of Omnichain DeFi. With Stargate, users & dApps can transfer native assets cross-chain while accessing the protocol’s unified liquidity pools with instant guaranteed finality.

Synapse

example of cross-chain liquidity. Top 2. Most amount of chains.

o3 Swap

example of cross-chain liquidity. look at the pools. initially i was under the impression that the apy was also distributed cross-chain. although this sounds like a wild idea to stabilize apy idk if feasible. Top 10.

Reserve Currency

From DefiLlama OHM forks: Protocols that uses a reserve of valuable assets acquired through bonding and staking to issue and back its native token

Olympus DAO – Ethereum

From their site Olympus is building OHM, a community-owned, decentralized and censorship-resistant reserve currency that is asset-backed, deeply liquid and used widely across Web3.

Tools & SDKs

LI FI – LI.FI is a cross-chain bridge aggregation protocol that supports any-2-any swaps by aggregating bridges and connecting them to DEX aggregators. Robust SDK used by other protocols like Alchemix.

CosmWasm – Multichain dAPP SDK on Cosmos

CosmosSDK – for building applications in Cosmos.

The Graph – Open APIs to display blockchain data in GraphQL API. Used by many protocols. Ecosystem still growing rapidly.

Grafana – Make Dashboards.

Alethio – Data Visualization.

Llamapay – automate salaries & stream salaries from cVault Deployer or any multisig gnosis.

Taiko zk EVM – github

Ethereum Frameworks:

Truffle – A development environment, testing framework, build pipeline, and other tools.

Hardhat – Ethereum development environment for professionals.

Ape – The smart contract development tool for Pythonistas, Data Scientists, and Security Professionals.

Brownie – Python-based development environment and testing framework.

Embark

Web3j – A platform for developing blockchain applications on the JVM.

OpenZeppelin SDK – The Ultimate Smart Contract Toolkit: A suite of tools to help you develop, compile, upgrade, deploy and interact with smart contracts.

Create Eth App – Create Ethereum-powered apps with one command. Comes with a wide offering of UI frameworks and DeFi templates to choose from.

Scaffold-Eth – Ethers.js + Hardhat + React components and hooks for web3: everything you need to get started building decentralized applications powered by smart contracts.