Introduction

Arbitrum is one of Ethereum's most promising layer 2 solutions. It is a protocol that uses optimistic rollup technology to perform complex operations allowing the Ethereum network to be more scalable and efficient.

GMX is a perpetual, decentralized exchange project, and then successfully developed within the Arbitrum platform, completely changing operations on Arbitrum . One of the first perpetual contract exchanges on Arbitrum, GMX gained many users and then continued to expand to Avalanche. It provides traders with a complete set of tools for spot and long/short trading, with a strong focus on cost savings, no arbitrage, no financing fee and minimal settlement possibility.

GLP is the GMX Liquidity Provider token. GLP stakers receive 70% of the platform fees in ETH and esGMX. This is a token that incentivises users to deposit their assets as liquidity on the GMX exchange and in return they mint GLP. Once a user returns their GLP to redeem their tokens, the GLP will be burnt.

Staking GLP on GMX

When you enter the amount of GLP you wish to buy into that chart, the price of GLP will vary according to the asset you use to buy it – this is because each asset in this index has a target weight, and the tokens weights are decided by the open positions of traders.

If a specific asset goes above its target weight, then the fees for buying GLP with that token will increase to disincentive users from depositing further. The same is true for assets in the index that are underweight compared to their target weighting in the basket. For example, if people are long AVAX then a greater index weight will be given to AVAX to encourage lower fees and incentivise further AVAX deposits. The same is true if traders are net short, a greater weight will be given to stablecoin deposits. In this way, a trader can deposit assets s/he does not wish to sell into the collateral vaults, and then borrow GLP against it to earn a very handsome yield.

Using Arbitrum as an example, when you buy GMX, you can choose to store your share of protocol’s tokens within its distributed network, effectively known as staking.

Methodology

The intention of this dashboard is to provide the performance of GMX traders, not only in general terms but also taking into account each swap pair used to take some profits. As well, a comparison between the traders’ activity and the liquidity providers has been done takin into account data from the past month and from the past three months.

For the first approach, I have used the Arbitrum core ez_token_transfers table by filtering the event_name as Swap to consider only the swaps and I have used the inputToken and outputToken metrics to get what swap pair is being used. The main statistics analyzed are:

• The number of traders by profitable and non-profitable users
• The top 5 traders that have earned the most so far
• The evolution of the top 5 traders’ profits
• The trade profits by swap pairs
• Distribution of profits by swap pairs
• The top 5 traders’ profits by swap pairs
• Distribution of top 5 traders’ profits by swap pairs

For the second approach, I have used the data obtained previously and I have filtered the rows by where contract_address = lower('0x908C4D94D34924765f1eDc22A1DD098397c59dD4') and ORIGIN_FUNCTION_SIGNATURE = '0xf3daeacc', referring to GMX staking contract address and origin staking function. For the GLP, I have filtered the data by where contract_Address=lower(’0x1aDDD80E6039594eE970E5872D247bf0414C8903’).. In this case, the metrics compared have been the following:

• Daily transactions
• Daily active users
• Daily volume in both directions
• Cumulative values for the aforementioned variables

In the first graph we can see that GMX traders have more profits than losses, specifically they have 30k profits and 17k losses. Next, we have analyzed the top 5 profitable traders. We see a clear difference between the first one and the other four. The first trader has a profit of 335k approximately, while the others have an amount very similar to 70k.

We have analyzed the profit performance of the 5 GMX traders from June to today. We can see that there are months with less activity and there is a specific peak with profits, specifically on September 7, with a user who had a profit of 250k. Even so, the profits are quite stable.

We can say that the swap pairs with more profit is WETH-USDC, with a 49,1%. The second one also has a large amount of profits, the USDC-WETH swap pair, with 22.9%. The others have a percentage below 7%. Finally, the same swap pair distribution has been analyzed but with the top 5 GMX traders profits. It can be clearly seen that the first swap pair with the highest profit was the same as the one mentioned above, the WETH-USDC, with 52.5%. In second and third place we find two swaps with very similar amounts. In second position we see WETH.USDT with 11.6% and USDC-WETH with 11.5%. The rest are below 8.5%.

As we have analyzed, both swaps on GMX and liquidity actions tend to be stable. In addition, swaps are higher than liquidity actions. In both cases they have peaks on different days.

In the case of traders and liquidity providers we see that they also have very stable trends with different peaks in both cases. As it happens with liquidity actions, in liquidity providers there are users who make more stakes than unstakes.

We can see that the volume received and spent have quite similar amounts. The same is happening for the staked and unstaked volume. They tend to have a similar trend. There has been more volume moved by swaps than by staked and unstaked volume. In the case of the spent and received volume there was a very heavy peak during the first week of September, reaching 17M.

If we look at the cumulative volume, we see that there is more volume spent than received. There is half a million difference between one and the other. In addition, we see that there is more cumulative volume in stake than unstake, but with a very small difference.

Key insights

• GMX traders have more profits than losses, specifically 30k profits and 17k losses.
• The first trader has a profit of 335k approximately, while the others have an amount very similar to 70k.
• The swap pairs with more profit is WETH-USDC, with a 49,1%.
• The second one has a large amount of profits, the USDC-WETH swap pair, with 22.9%.
• The first swap pair with the highest profit is the WETH-USDC, with 52.5% and the second one is WETH-USDT with 11,6%.
• Swaps on GMX and liquidity actions tend to be stable. Swaps are higher than liquidity actions.
• The volume received and spent have quite similar amounts. It happens the same for the staked and unstaked volume.
• It has been more volume moved by swaps than by staked and unstaked volume.
• There is more cumulative volume spent than received and there is more cumulative volume in stake than unstake.