The future of web3 lies in decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and DeFi with protocols that bring traditional finance products to the forefront. Such protocols have been finding huge public support and adoption as users search for accessible financial products. Derivatives protocols such as GMX have shown admirable growth during these economically uncertain times.
Metavault.Trade is poised to be at the forefront of this movement. Its decentralized, community, and privacy-driven ethos will provide users with a safe and reliable platform alternative to centralized exchanges, making it a clear choice for DeFi users.
In this article, we’ll be covering Metavault.Trade and their efforts to build the next-generation all-in-one trading platform. We’ll discuss how Metavault.Trade distinguishes itself from other GMX forks, the key opportunities and strengths the platform provides as well as the feature-filled future of the platform.
The Metavault.Trade Difference
Metavault.Trade is a DEX, which provides swap, perpetual trading, and Binary options. Users can trade on Metavault with up to 50x leverage on Polygon. It aims to become the go-to solution for traders who want to control their funds at all times without sharing their data.
Metavault.Trade is built by the team behind Metavault DAO, a blockchain-based, community-governed investment platform and decentralized venture capital fund. It allows anyone to participate in the latest and most profitable DeFi projects and strategies and deploys an in-house development team for project incubation.
Metavault DAOs refreshing financial transparency, rewarding community/investor support, and bulletproof tokenomics have made it the DAO of choice for thousands of users.
Innovation
After careful analysis of GMX’s tokenomics and platform, the Metavault DAO team identified some areas of improvement as they started to build a fork. Based on further provided feedback, Metavault.Trade was created with some enhancements that include:
- Part of the liquidity being owned by the Protocol (Protocol-owned Liquidity): The MVX-USDC LP liquidity is provided and owned by the Protocol. 100% of the fees from this trading pair are converted into USDC and deposited into the MVLP pool as Protocol-owned liquidity of the MVX Treasury every Friday during the reward distribution.
- Some improvements in the UX/UI
- Some improvements in Tokenomics.
Metavault also utilizes a Multi-Asset Pool, allowing the platform to have shared liquidity across all the assets it supports. Let’s say the pool is made up of five assets, i.e., BTC, ETH, MATIC, USDC, and DAI, which are in equal proportions in terms of dollar value, i.e., 20% of each. A trader can buy 50% of the BTC supply with USDC instantly at the exact price shown on the platform without any price impact. After the order, BTC is 10%, USDC is 30%, and the rest remains unchanged. The price of BTC on the platform is the same before and after the swap, even though half the available supply has been bought up. To rebalance the pool, liquidity providers are incentivized to deposit in-demand assets and disincentivized to deposit those of which there is an excess.
DEX vs CEX – Why it matters
Decentralized exchanges (DEX) offer the same core functions as centralized exchanges (CEX) with the major distinction being that DEXs are decentralized applications (dapps) that run on a blockchain. This means no one owns a DEX infrastructure or servers; they are just snippets of code running on a given blockchain.
This decentralization allows for two major differences between DEXs and CEXs: anonymity and self-custody.
Anonymity
Metavaut.Trade offers anonymity to users by removing the need for registration or know-your-customer practices. All a user requires to begin utilizing the DEX and enter the traditionally prohibitive derivatives market is a crypto wallet and a small allocation of tokens for gas.
Through this anonymity, users can rest easy that no third parties can impose unfair controls or restrictions on the exchange. Removing the need for surrendering personal details also removes the threat of data leaks and phishing scams. Multiple CEX platforms have been plagued by cyber-attacks directly targeting the personal information of their users. One less thing to worry about for Metavault users.
Self Custody
We’ve all heard the timeless wisdom of “Not your Keys, Not your Crypto.” Users have been the first to suffer from multiple failures of highly centralized and opaque platforms such as FTX and Celcius.
Once a CEX user has sent their assets to the exchange, they relinquish their ownership in favor of the company operating the CEX, which thus becomes “the custodian.” A seemingly harmless arrangement but history has shown us the dangers involved for a user if a CEX platform goes down, becomes a victim of a hack, or the company simply defaults. Such threats can see funds out of reach for thousands of users with often no clear resolution.
On the other hand, DEX traders connect to the exchange through a crypto wallet they own the private key of. They thus remain in full control of their funds all the time and even if the front-end of the DEX is down, they still can interact directly with the underlying smart contract.
Yield Opportunities Abound
Of course, for any platform to succeed stakers and liquidity providers must be appropriately and sustainably rewarded. Metavaullt.Trade achieves this through the use of two tokens MVX and MVLP.
At the time of writing, MVX staking offered an APR of 29% while liquidity providers received APRs of around 56% through MVLP.
But how does Metavault offer such attractive yield opportunities? What methods are in place to ensure stability?
MVX – Governance and Utility
MVX is Metavault.Trade’s governance and utility token. MVX holders are strongly incentivized to stake their tokens on the platform because this gives them three different types of rewards. They get:
- A share of the platform fees – MVX stakers will get 30% of the fees collected from across the platform in the form of MATIC.
- A new token: escrowed MVX (esMVX), which generates its own rewards.
- Multiplier Points (MPs) that are yet another way to boost your MATIC earnings even more.
EscrowedMVX is a particularly interesting solution for enticing and sustainable yield on the platform. esMVX is non-transferable and there are only two ways to use it:
- esMVX can be vested to be converted and distributed as MVX. Your esMVX will then unlock linearly over one year and MVX is sent to your wallet at each unlocking.
- esMVX can be staked and will earn the same rewards as staked MVX. Compounding rewards and generating higher APR and earnings.
The third reward MVX stakers get is not a token but comes under the form of multiplier points (MPs). Like in a game, those points give you access to rewards, but you can also lose them if you undertake certain actions. MPs are awarded at 100% APR with each MP available to be staked to earn the same amount of MATIC as a MVX token, increasing your MATIC payout.
In order to maintain these points, users need to keep their MVX and esMVX staked. Unstaking MVX or esMVX will incur a burning of multiplier points proportional to the amount of tokens being unstaked.
The richness of the reward structure allows you to design many strategies depending on your time horizon. But for those who want the greatest share of the platform fees, staking all esMVX is probably the best option because it gives access to a compounding effect. Indeed, since staked esMVX acts basically as staked MVX as far as reward goes, this strategy will accumulate the most MATIC through MVX, esMVX and MP boost.
Metavault users can find real yield opportunities and sustainable APR through this robust model that rewards long term stakers while also offering diverse options for more active traders.
MVLP – Liquidity Provider Token
MVLP consists of an index of the assets used on the platform for swaps and leverage trading. Users can mint MVLP by adding any index asset to the liquidity pool (LP) while MVLP is burned each time a user removes any index asset from the LP.
These assets include MATIC, Lido staked MATIC (stMATIC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), Chainlink (LINK), Uniswap (UNI), Aave (AAVE), USDC, USDT, DAI and Binance USD (BUSD).
MVLP holders earn rewards in the form of MATIC and esMVX tokens.
The MVLP token is designed to supply the liquidity required for leverage trading. As such, MVLP holders are the liquidity suppliers and they make a profit when leverage traders make losing trades. On the contrary, they make a loss when leverage traders make profitable trades.
Metavault.Trade incorporates rebalancing measures to adjust for the varying mint/redeem fees of MVLP. This is based on the protocol’s needs at that time. For example, if the index has a large percentage of ETH and a small percentage of USDC, actions that further increase the amount of ETH the index has will have a high fee while actions that reduce the amount of ETH the index has will have a low fee.
Go Far Together
Metavault has secured several partnerships to improve the platform and introduce new features for traders. Here are just a few partnerships that improved the underlying infrastructure of the platform:
- Metavault has integrated Chainlink Price Feeds and Chainlink Keepers to help secure and automated Perpetual trades.
- Metavault has announced its cooperation with MM Finance. As a result, Metavault’s rebalancing bots can now use the Madmex and MMF pools. MM Finance will rebate a small portion of the fees generated by the MVX rebalancing bots back to Metavault. The MM Finance team will use generated fees to add back into the MLP pool, increasing the value of MLP over time.
- Metavault has integrated Socket infrastructure for a seamless bridging. Socket is an interoperability protocol for secure & efficient data and asset transfers across chains. It is not a bridge or a cross-chain app but an infrastructure that allows developers to build apps with interoperability as a core part of app infrastructure.
A recent partnership with Buffer Finance is behind Metavault’s latest offering on the Polygon network, Binary Options. Binary options are a type of financial derivative that allow traders to bet on the direction of the price movement of an underlying asset, such as a stock, commodity, currency, or index. The traders can either choose to bet that the price of the underlying asset will rise (a “call” option) or fall (a “put” option) within a predetermined time frame.
With this partnership, Metavault will leverage Buffer’s existing contracts and backend infrastructure to provide its users seamless access to Binary options through its interface.
Metavault has also partnered with multiple dashboard platforms such as GeckoTerminal, DefiLlama, DappRadar, Zapper, and TinNetwork to provide detailed analytics for its users.
The Path Forward
The future looks exciting for Metavault as it plans to launch several key features in the near future.
According to the Metavault.Trade and Metavault DAO roadmaps such features include
- Metavault.Trades multi-chain expansion
- Leverage Aggregation with cross-chain support
- Synthetics & forex trading features on Metavault.Trade.
The Metavault DAO has recently passed a new proposal to bridge the DAOs ecosystem token, MVD, to the Arbitrum network. The proposal also seeks to update the staking and earning distribution model for MVD by transferring staking smart contracts to Arbitrum. This will make staking more efficient and cost-effective for users.
The proposal features several other changes to the MVD ecosystem. Be sure to check out the proposal for all the details.
Closing Thoughts
The Metavault team continues to prove itself to be a community-driven DEX that offers revolutionary and consistent revenue streams for stakers and liquidity providers through innovative incentives. They have a clear goal to allow anyone and everyone convenient and accessible access to the growing DeFi ecosystem.
Metavault and its community are an industry leader in what a truly decentralized protocol can achieve and are helping to shape the direction of the DeFi movement.
