Can you believe it’s been an entire year since Perp launched on Optimism!? 🥳🎂🎊
We’re grateful for your support and very proud of how far we’ve come. As a thank you to our users, anyone that has interacted with the protocol is eligible for a retroactive NFT airdrop! Past users can now claim this NFT on Galxe.
Note: you’ll need a small amount of ETH on the Optimism network to cover the gas fee to claim.
Looking back over this past year, we have achieved a lot, with the addition of new features, rapid expansion of the ecosystem and major protocol improvements. Some key highlights in terms of usage:
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Generated $14.7 billion in total trading volume
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Trading fees have totalled ~$13.6 million
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Over 90,000 distinct addresses have interacted with the protocol
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And Perp has facilitated over 7 million swaps
Read on for a recap one year in and what the future holds for Perp!
What’s Been Shipped in the Past Year?
Our team has been hard at work these past 12 months! The mesmerizing visualization below shows an entire year of development activity on the protocol’s primary smart contract (perp-curie-contract) in under 60 seconds.
Devs have definitely done something! And along with the support of the business development, data, design, and marketing teams, a lot of incredible work has been made possible to improve many aspects of the protocol.
More partners have been onboarded, we’ve started to push out a lot of educational content on our blog and on YouTube, and our community and social presence is growing ever stronger. Our team members have presented at conferences like ETH Barcelona, DevConnect and Messari Mainnet, as well as participating in online events and various Twitter spaces.
To recap, some of the important milestones we’ve achieved are listed below:
- Perp’s core smart contracts, periphery smart contracts and SDK were all open sourced in March. Following this, we also released three trading bots for anyone to use: one for arbitraging, a liquidator bot and one for makers.
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The multi-collateral feature went live in May with ETH as the first non-stablecoin asset accepted as collateral to trade or market make. Later on, FRAX and Optimism’s OP token were also added.
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A revamp of the liquidity mining program happened in July, which transformed into the Pool Party. With the addition of OP token incentives, Pool Party provides a boost to maker yields and improves depth across the markets available on Perp.
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Advanced order types were also introduced in the same month, giving traders more flexibility with limit and stop loss limit order types.
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Various UI improvements have made the trading experience much smoother (and more fun too!):
Since the last development update in August, we’ve been making steady progress towards achieving the goals from the H2 2022 roadmap. The focus over the past few months has mostly revolved around our new vePERP tokenomic model!
✅ vePERP rollout is complete: The first phase kicked off in August, with a complete overhaul of our referral program. Referral rewards are now paid out in vePERP, with those locking more tokens for longer getting a greater share of rebates. Lazy River, Perp’s staking program on Layer 2, has so far directed PERP emissions to vePERP holders to prepare for the last phase: activating the USDC fee switch to deliver real yield.
✅ A new mechanism for liquidations was implemented, which shifted away from the market selling of positions to reduce the likelihood of liquidation cascades. By transferring instead of market-selling positions, liquidations can happen without affecting the market price.
✅ We’re Perpetually Optimistic: we can’t wait to explore the possibilities of the OP Stack, Optimism’s take on appchains.
⏳More collateral types: Following the addition of OP as collateral, the risk team is looking to include support for other stablecoins and staked ETH (stETH) in the future.
⏳The final phase of vePERP will be the introduction of fee sharing, which is nearing completion. Check out the development of the voting escrow contract since April for yourself!
With the fee distribution implementation complete and testing currently underway, the exact split between vePERP holders and the DAO is currently being discussed by our community as part of the governance process.
Ecosystem Expansion
There’s been tremendous growth in the ecosystem of projects using Perp as a base layer, with our key partners and grantees shown below. A total of $428,000 has been awarded across 41 different grants by our GrantsDAO to projects building with us!
Accessibility
To make onboarding to Optimism effortless, we have integrated three bridging solutions directly into our UI (Biconomy, Li.Fi and Socket). No matter what chain you have funds on, traders can easily move their assets to Optimism and begin trading on Perp.
Be in for a chance to win a share of 25,000 USDT by competing in our trading competition hosted with DappOS, which makes it possible to trade using assets from different chains without ever having to bridge!
Vaults
We’ve also seen the launch of several basis trading vaults: DeCommas, Diamond Protocol and Galleon. Maker vaults are the next focus to boost liquidity, with RoboVault expected to launch soon! Our grant request for proposals for maker vaults and structured products is still active, with more details listed here.
Maker Tooling
Tooling for makers has improved massively, with three projects throwing in their contributions to make LP’ing easier: track your LP positions on Seedle Finance, and simulate your positions with PerpSim or DeFi Lab’s simulation tool.
Others
Some other projects building on top of Perp that deserve a mention:
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Atlantis World is gamifying DeFi with their own metaverse. Check out the Perp building, place some trades, and explore OP City as if you were playing a video game!
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Lemma Finance recently launched their protocol for swapping spot assets using liquidity from our perpetual swaps! Learn more about their offering in this Twitter thread.
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Elixir Finance’s algorithmic market making is helping to build even deeper liquidity and lower slippage for all Perp users.
What’s Next for Perp?
The upcoming activation of fee sharing is the key priority, which gives token holders the opportunity to earn yield in stablecoins based on the amount they lock and how long they lock their tokens for. We’ll also continue to harden the protocol to improve decentralization and enhance the user experience.
After the events of 2022, which have majorly pressured the crypto markets, Perp has held up well in the face of challenging conditions. Going forward, decentralized derivatives and real yield will likely become two of the most important DeFi narratives. Perp is positioning itself to benefit from these narratives and will continue building to deliver the fairest and most transparent trading experience for on-chain perpetual contracts.