GMX, a decentralized spot and perpetual exchange, has outperformed rival exchange dYdX in terms of total value locked (TVL) despite low trading volume compared to dYdX.
As per the data provided by Artemis, GMX’s TVL increased substantially over the last week with the total value locked on the protocol jumped from $550 million to $648 million. Due to the exponential growth in TVL, the amount of revenue generated by GMX also witnessed an uptick. According to token terminals data, the revenue generated by GMX increased nearly 7.6% in the last week.
.$dYdX has 4x more trading volume than $GMX
… but GMX has nearly 2x the TVL of dYdX 👀 pic.twitter.com/aa5WRI9A0h
— Artemis ➡️ ETH Denver ⛷ (@Artemis__xyz) February 25, 2023
GMX Rides the Wave
This comes hot on the heels after the perpetual exchange generated fees of almost a whopping $5 million in just over 24 hours, temporarily making it the largest revenue generator in decentralized finance (DeFi), earlier this month. The move catapulted GMX even ahead of the Ethereum blockchain in daily fees.
Recently,blockchain activity tracker, Lookonchain, took to Twitter claiming Amber Group, which acts as a liquidity provider, miner, and validator on more than 70 exchanges, applications along with crypto-focused asset management firm Arca have been accumulating GMX tokens, the native cryptocurrency of the DEX.
1/ We noticed that @ambergroup_io and @arca are accumulating $GMX.
Amber Group received 122,144 $GMX($9.8M currently) from #Binance and Arca bought 66,448 $GMX($4.4M currently) from DEX.👇
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) February 21, 2023
Moreover, on January 26, Forbes Advisor, a global platform for finance related news, had listed GMX token as one of the best cryptocurrencies to watch out for in 2023. The media house further noted the digital token is in a formidable position to continue performing well into 2023 as users can trade a variety of cryptocurrencies with minimal fees and quick transaction times on the GMX platform.
These factors may have triggered a GMX price rally over the past day. According to CoinMarketCap, GMX is up more than 3% in the last 24 hours to trade at $74.42. The token pumped a staggering growth of almost 500% over the past seven months after experiencing a brutal turbulence in 2022. More recently, Arthur Hayes, the co-founder and onetime CEO of the centralized derivatives exchange BitMEX who also happens to hold the largest individual stash of GMX tokens said,
“GMX is the 2nd largest DeFi derivatives platform by trading volume. Most importantly, the tokenomics offer an attractive yield, which is another reason why I like this token for my portfolio.”
All That Glitters is Not Gold
Despite the tremendous growth, the trading volume on the GMX protocol was crucially low. In addition, over the past 24 hours the number of daily active users on the platform dropped by 13% signalling a tough phase for GMX. If the number of daily active users continues to decline, GMX would lose out on revenue and volume that would be detrimental to the perpetuals exchange’s health.
As per reports, the velocity of GMX also decreased implying a significant drop with which the token was being traded. Furthermore, based on Santiments data, it was observed that the overall development activity of GMX fell significantly.
