What is GMX?

GMX is a decentralized exchange that offers a low fee for perpetual futures and spot trading. It runs on Arbitrum and Avalanche. It allows users to borrow up to 30x their initial margin to amp up futures betting. GMX receives aggregated prices for its assets using Chainlink price oracles.

GMX has been attracting attention recently for the massive fee revenue being generated.

Questions:

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.

Solution:

To answer this question, I used arbitrum.core.fact_event_logs table. The contract of GMX swaps is 0xabbc5f99639c9b6bcb58544ddf04efa6802f4064. we need to filter event_name = 'Swap' to find only swaps transactions.

In this table, the value of swaps is in token amount so we need the token name and decimal. I used akbaridria#6908 query for this purpose.

The left chart show swap pair along their volume and the right chart along their count.

The top swap pairs based on volume is WETH to USDC. 43.7% of swaps are related to this swap pair. 23.7% are related to USDC to WETH, and 5.36 is related to WBTC to USDC.

The top swap pairs based on count is WETH to USDC. 37.7% of swaps are related to this swap pair. 24% are related to USDC to WETH, and 7.39 are related to DAI to USDC.

This chart show a lot of spike on average daily swap size. This show a whale activity in some days.

The left chart shows the number of daily swaps in the last 90 days.

There are some spikes on the daily chart.

• Jun 20th with 12.16K transaction.
• Sep 6th with 6.69K transaction.
• Sep 10th with 4326K transaction.

As you can see, the jump in June is much bigger, but there are more jumps in September.

The right chart shows the percentage change per month.

The green columns next to each other are a sign that the number of swap transactions on this platform is increasing in the last two months.

The left chart shows the number of daily unique swappers in the last 90 days.

There are some spikes on the daily chart as same as the previous chart.

The right chart shows the percentage change per month.

The red columns next to each other are a sign that the number of unique swappers on this platform is decreasing in Jul and Aug.

But their count increased 159% than Aug in Sep.

The left chart shows the volume of daily swaps in the last 90 days.

We can see a huge spike on Sep 7th with more than 17.5M dollars.

The right chart shows the percentage change per month.

There are three green columns next to each other that show the volume of swap transactions on this platform is increasing over these last three months gradually.

The above chart show daily volume of each swap pair.

Conclusion:

• the number of swap transactions on this platform is increasing in the last two months.
• the number of unique swappers on this platform is decreasing in Jul and Aug. But their count increased 159% than Aug in Sep.
• the volume of swap transactions on this platform is increasing over these last three months gradually.
• The top swap pairs based on volume is WETH to USDC. 43.7% of swaps are related to this swap pair. 23.7% are related to USDC to WETH, and 5.36 is related to WBTC to USDC. The top swap pairs based on count is WETH to USDC. 37.7% of swaps are related to this swap pair. 24% are related to USDC to WETH, and 7.39 are related to DAI to USDC.

References:

We can see the following metrics in this dashboard:

• Number of daily swap transactions
• Percentage change in the number of swap transactions
• Number of daily unique swappers
• Percentage change in the number of unique swappers
• Daily volume of swap transactions
• Percentage change in the volume of swap transactions
• Average daily swap size
• Daily volume of each swap pair
• Total volume of each swap pair
• Total number of swap transactions of each swap pair