Introduction
Perpetual futures are one of the most traded instruments within crypto, with volumes that dwarf spot trading. These instruments enjoy greater parity with spot prices relative to futures and enable capital efficiency through leverage. However, most perp volume resides on CEXs. Despite the multitude of designs to try and bring perpetuals to DeFi, most still lack strong adoption. dYdX is an outlier, but they use a cheat code of sorts – a centralized order book and matching engine rather than an on-chain one.
GMX – an oracle-based spot and leveraged trading DEX – flipped the game by bringing the simplicity of perpetuals to leveraged trading. Of late, GMX has found a strong product-market fit with traders and liquidity providers alike.
GMX’s success has resulted in competitors attempting to replicate it with designs inspired by GMX. Mycelium (previously TracerDAO) and MUX (previously MCDEX) are two protocols designed very
