Dear Bankless Nation,
It's been a quiet summer for DeFi, but even as TVLs stagnate, protocols are shipping new functionality to their users.
Today, we're sharing new Bankless Guides to the GMX, Synthetix and Yearn Finance dapps. These join our ever-expanding list of free guides to crypto's most noteworthy apps and networks! Click through below to learn 🫡
- Bankless team
The Bankless Guide to GMX
GMX is a decentralized derivatives exchange currently deployed on the Arbitrum Layer 2 (L2) scaling solution and the Avalanche blockchain.
The protocol offers spot trading for a handful of top cryptocurrencies and stables, namely ETH, WBTC, LINK, UNI, DAI, USDC, USDT, and FRAX. However, GMX’s main claim to fame is its perpetual swap markets, which allow traders to long or short major tokens with up to 50x leverage. For now, GMX offers perpetual swap markets for ETH, WBTC, LINK, and UNI on its Arbitrum deployment.
GMX’s bread and butter are perpetual swaps. This kind of financial offering is like a futures contract that has no expiry, meaning the instrument can be held indefinitely. In DeFi, perpetuals are used to speculate on crypto price action and require little capital upfront to support very leveraged positions.
As for GMX specifically, the project provides non-custodial perpetual swap trading with an emphasis on a friendly user experience. On GMX, traders can make longs and shorts with rapid transactions and low fees, while liquidity providers (LP) can earn by providing assets to the protocol’s multi-asset pool system to support leverage trading and swaps...
Read on for a detailed history, token breakdown and steps to getting onboarded!
The Bankless Guide to Synthetix
Synthetix is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that provides the infrastructure for derivatives trading in the cryptoeconomy. It allows users to mint, trade, and manage synthetic assets, which are “onchain” representations of real-world assets like currencies, commodities, stocks, and indices.
Synthetix facilitates the creation of synthetic assets, or Synths, which are tokens that track and provide the returns of another asset without requiring the holder to own that asset. For example, synthetic USD (sUSD) is designed to track the value of the US dollar.
The Synthetix Protocol itself is powered by the Synthetix Network Token (SNX), which is a governance token and is used as collateral to mint Synths. To account for price fluctuations, creating Synths requires over-collateralization, meaning the value of staked SNX must be higher than the value of minted Synths. Users also earn a cut of transaction fees generated by the protocol and SNX rewards for staking.
Read on for a detailed history, token breakdown and steps to getting onboarded!
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The Bankless Guide to Yearn Finance
Yearn Finance is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that serves as a yield aggregator. Its suite of products offers a way for individuals, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and other protocols to deposit digital assets and earn yields accordingly in a streamlined fashion.
Yearn’s aggregator system operates on the principle of pooled funds, with system participants depositing their cryptocurrency into a shared pot. Yearn's smart contracts then allocate these pooled funds to different DeFi lending protocols with the aim of automatically maximizing APY.
Yearn’s flagship offering is its yVaults series, which is often described as savings accounts for crypto assets. When you deposit tokens into a Yearn vault, they are put to work within the DeFi ecosystem, returning yields back to you over time. The assets are routed through strategies which seek out the highest yield available, and unlike traditional finance, all of this takes place on public blockchains, meaning you are in control of your assets and can see where they are at all times.
Read on for a detailed history, token breakdown and steps to getting onboarded!
Action steps
- 💸 Click through the DeFi guides above!
- 👁️ Check out the rest of our Bankless Guides content
- 👨🏫 Read The Ethereum Q2 2023 Report
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