Decentralized exchanges (DEX) have become a crucial cornerstone of blockchain applications, providing users with the ability to trade assets without permission or intermediaries. In 2024, the DEX market experienced significant growth, with trading volumes nearly doubling compared to 2023. For example, the Raydium platform achieved an average daily trading volume of $785 million in the third quarter, marking an increase of over 100 times year-on-year.
Source: the 6th annual @ElectricCapital Developer Report
In the new generation of parallel EVM's leading L1 public chain Monad ecosystem, a number of powerful native DEX projects have emerged, utilizing Monad's next-generation performance to offer stronger features and better user experiences. These platforms aim to address existing challenges in decentralized trading, such as capital efficiency, pricing accuracy, and user engagement.
This article begins to introduce native DEX/Perp projects built on Monad as of the end of 2024. By building on Monad's high throughput and low latency infrastructure, these native Monad DEXs are expected to redefine the decentralized trading landscape, providing solutions that combine the advantages of centralized exchanges with the security and composability of decentralized platforms. As Monad's public testnet is about to launch, we have the opportunity to experience the performance of these DEXs firsthand.
1. Kuru
Kuru is the first fully on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) DEX in the Monad ecosystem. By leveraging Monad's high throughput and low latency, Kuru aims to combine the advantages of centralized exchanges with the composability and self-custody of decentralized exchanges to redefine decentralized trading.
I. Why choose CLOB?
Advantages over automated market makers (AMM)
Capital efficiency: CLOB allows market makers to actively quote, thereby providing tighter bid-ask spreads and reducing slippage. Unlike passive liquidity allocation in AMMs, CLOB concentrates liquidity at optimal price points.
Pricing accuracy: Real-time order updates provide accurate price discovery, helping to better align with global market prices.
Market maker flexibility: Market makers can dynamically adjust buy and sell quotes based on market conditions without incurring significant gas fees.
II. Kuru's unique performance
Monad's features enhance Kuru's performance
Throughput: Approximately 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Low latency: 1 second block finality.
Cost efficiency: Low gas fees allow frequent order updates without significant cost burden.
By building on Monad, Kuru leverages these advanced features to enhance its platform performance:
Optimized smart contracts: Designed for market makers to place/cancel limit orders with low and constant gas fees.
Seamless integration: Supports high liquidity and long-tail assets, providing a wide range of trading opportunities.
User-centered design: Integrates searching, researching, and trading into a single interface.
Passive liquidity solutions: Develop mechanisms that allow users to passively provide liquidity for the order book.
In July 2024, Kuru announced the successful completion of a $2 million seed round financing led by Electric Capital, with participants including Brevan Howard Digital, CMS Holdings, Pivot Global, Breed, Velocity Capital, Purple, as well as notable angel investors Keone Hon (CEO and co-founder of Monad), Jarry Xiao, and Eugene Chen.
Kuru uniquely combines the efficiency of centralized systems with the decentralization of blockchain, aiming to revolutionize on-chain trading. By leveraging Monad's infrastructure, Kuru has the potential to become a major liquidity hub for the next generation of DeFi projects. With a clear roadmap, strong technology, and a community-centric focus, Kuru is poised to redefine the next generation.
2. Composite
Composite Labs is building a fully on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) DEX within the Monad ecosystem. As next-generation trading infrastructure, Composite integrates innovative features for spot and derivatives markets (including real-world assets). The project leverages Monad's high-performance blockchain to address longstanding challenges in DeFi and seize emerging opportunities in the field.
I. Why choose Composite?
Composite stands out in the DeFi space for its innovation in decentralized trading. Here are the unique and significant core reasons for Composite:
Integrated order book: Composite combines lending, spot trading, and perpetual contract trading into a fully CLOB-based platform. This integration simplifies user experience and operational efficiency, meeting users' needs for cross-platform functionality.
Portfolio margin: Composite provides top-tier capital efficiency for traders through portfolio margin. Traders can use existing assets (like ETH) as collateral to open positions without needing additional collateral. For example, selling perpetual contracts to generate profit requires no extra collateral.
Cost efficiency: Composite charges a uniform low fee for all trading sizes. Whether the transaction amount is $1,000 or $100,000, users pay the same minimum fee, enhancing users' cost efficiency.
II. Key performance achieved by Composite through Monad features:
Scalability and performance: Monad's high throughput and low latency enable Composite to efficiently handle a large volume of trades, providing users with a seamless trading experience.
Cost efficiency: Optimized execution and storage mechanisms reduce operational costs, allowing Composite to offer extremely low trading fees to users.
Security and decentralization: Monad's robust consensus mechanism and fully on-chain operations ensure that Composite maintains high levels of security and decentralization, in line with its commitment to transparency and trustlessness.
By leveraging Monad's infrastructure combined with team innovation, Composite is expected to become the cornerstone of the Monad ecosystem and lead the next wave of DeFi innovation. Composite Labs combines advanced financial engineering with Monad's cutting-edge blockchain capabilities to create a fully on-chain high-performance trading platform.
3. Zaros
Zaros is an innovative perpetual contract decentralized exchange (Perp DEX) that combines liquidity-staking tokens (LSTs and LRTs) with the perpetual futures market, aiming to provide a user experience comparable to centralized exchanges (CEX) while maintaining decentralized advantages.
Why choose Zaros?
Diverse market coverage: Traders can trade 30-40 perpetual contracts including cryptocurrencies, forex, and commodities on a single platform. This diversity supports traders in implementing comprehensive trading strategies across multiple asset classes.
Innovative market making mechanism: Zaros introduces a new market making engine that allows anyone to participate by locking yield-bearing assets as collateral. This approach democratizes market making, enabling liquidity providers to generate Zaros liquidity by lending out their collateral and earning ETH fees paid by traders.
Enhanced capital efficiency: By connecting LSTs and LRTs with perpetual futures, Zaros allows liquidity providers to increase yields through the ZLP treasury. The ZLP treasury is a single contract that locks the base collateral provided by liquidity providers to increase the liquidity ceiling of the Zaros perpetual futures market. This integration promotes real yield generation and capital efficiency, allowing LST and LRT holders to lend out their liquidity.
In May 2024, Zaros successfully completed a $1.8 million financing round. This round was led by SNZ Holdings, with participants including Seven Capital, Cogitent Ventures, DCI Capital, as well as notable angel investors Antony Sassano, Fernando Martinelli, Kieran Warwick, Andy Chen, and Kevin Lu.
By building on Monad, Zaros leverages Monad's core features to provide an efficient, cost-effective, scalable, and user-friendly trading platform. Monad's high throughput and low latency ensure that traders experience minimal delays even during peak trading periods. Cost efficiency translates to lower trading fees for users, making trades easier to execute. Additionally, Monad's EVM compatibility ensures that Zaros can seamlessly integrate with other Ethereum-based applications, enhancing the platform's composability and the overall DeFi ecosystem.
With the support of Monad, Zaros provides a powerful and user-centric perpetual futures trading platform that combines the best features of centralized and decentralized exchanges to create an exceptional trading experience for traders.
4. Drake
Drake Exchange is a fully on-chain perpetual contract decentralized exchange (Perp DEX) positioned to provide a trading experience comparable to centralized exchanges (CEX) while maintaining the transparency and security of DeFi. By leveraging Monad's high-performance infrastructure, Drake offers advanced trading functionalities, deep liquidity, and efficient execution, positioning itself as a leading perpetual contract DEX in the Monad ecosystem.
Why choose Drake?
Hybrid liquidity model: Drake combines a fully on-chain limit order book (LOB) with automated market maker (AMM) backing. This dual-layer approach ensures optimal price discovery, minimal slippage, and the ability to quickly seize market opportunities without requiring immediate market making.
Advanced trading capabilities: Traders can use leverage of up to 50 times on major assets like ETH and BTC, utilizing both full margin and isolated margin accounts. Features such as internal collateral swaps and automated treasury (including funding rate treasury for earning non-directional yields) enhance users' trading strategies and risk management capabilities.
Automated yield strategies: With features like funding rate treasury, users can earn non-directional yields on USDC deposits, achieving continuous returns without active management. This dual-layer liquidity system ensures deep liquidity and optimal price execution even during periods of high volatility or low order book depth.
Monad Madness NYC 2024 finalists: Drake is recognized for its innovative features and user-friendly design, highlighting its potential as a native perpetual contract DEX of Monad.
By building on Monad's efficient infrastructure, Drake offers gas-free trading, enhancing user experience by lowering trading costs. With Monad's unique features, Drake's performance and functionality can compete with centralized exchanges. Its innovative liquidity model, user-friendly design, and commitment to transparency make it an ideal choice for traders seeking secure and efficient on-chain perpetual contract DEX trading.
5. Bean
Bean Exchange is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that offers spot and perpetual trading with features such as low swap fees, zero price impact trading, and multi-asset liquidity pools, benefiting liquidity providers.
Why choose Bean?
Low swap fees and zero price impact trading: Bean ensures trading cost-effectiveness by reducing swap fees and eliminating price fluctuations, achieving zero price impact trading.
BLP token: Liquidity providers can participate in BLP pools to earn returns through leveraged trading (including spot and perpetual), borrowing fees, and swap fees. Fees from leveraged trading and swaps automatically increase the price of BLP tokens.
Advanced position management: Traders can adjust positions by adding collateral to current positions to prevent liquidation or fine-tune leverage ratios. Additionally, refined trading features such as modifying take-profit and stop-loss levels can be adjusted during active trading.
By leveraging Monad's infrastructure, Bean Exchange is expected to provide a powerful and user-friendly decentralized trading experience that meets the needs of DeFi traders seeking efficiency and reliability.
6. Ammalgam
Ammalgam is an innovative DeFi protocol that integrates lending and trading functionalities into a single platform to become a decentralized lending exchange (DLEX). This innovative integration improves traders' capital efficiency and provides a better user experience.
Why choose Ammalgam?
Permissionless over-collateralized peer-to-peer lending: Allows users to conduct over-collateralized lending without intermediaries.
Decentralized lending exchange (DLEX): Ammalgam combines lending and trading functionalities into a single contract, achieving seamless interaction between these functions and improving capital utilization.
Enhancing capital efficiency: By lending out unused assets typically locked in AMM pools, Ammalgam increases returns for market makers and enhances yields for liquidity providers by up to 20%.
In September 2024, Ammalgam announced the successful completion of a $2.5 million seed round financing. This round was co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Framework Ventures, with other participants including Robot Ventures, Bodhi Ventures, NGC Ventures, DeWhales, Blockchain Founders Fund, and notable angel investors Kain Warwick (founder of Synthetix), Anton Bukov, Spencer Noon, and Jordi Alexander.
With the support of Monad, Ammalgam combines its innovative DLEX model with blockchain infrastructure designed for speed, efficiency, and compatibility, becoming a strong competitor in the DeFi space.
7. Monorail
Monorail is an innovative DEX aggregator designed to optimize trading by integrating the liquidity of AMMs and CLOBs. By leveraging Monad's high-performance blockchain, Monorail offers users greater price efficiency and advanced trading features.
Why choose Monorail?
Excellent price aggregation: By integrating the liquidity of AMMs and CLOBs, Monorail ensures users trade at the best prices. The platform aims to route large orders from Ethereum and L2 networks to Monad for settlement, leveraging Monad's scalability and low fees.
Advanced features: Monorail offers limit orders from the start, providing traders with greater control and flexibility compared to traditional DEXs. Its aggregation model optimizes trade execution by combining multiple liquidity sources, reducing slippage and improving trading outcomes.
Experienced team: Monorail is developed by a team incubated by Delphi Labs, known for successfully launching Astroport in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Monad Madness BKK 2024 finalists: Monorail is the next innovation in the aggregation space, merging order book efficiency with AMM liquidity into a personalized order book for traders to achieve the best trading experience.
Monorail showcases Monad's high-performance features, providing a next-generation DEX aggregator that combines the liquidity of AMM and CLOB for optimal trading efficiency. With a strong team, innovative features like limit orders, and strategic partnerships within the Monad ecosystem, Monorail is poised to become a key player in the DEX space.
8. Nitro
Nitro Finance is an innovative DeFi protocol that integrates the functionalities of decentralized exchanges (DEX) and money markets into a unified platform, aiming to address common challenges such as impermanent loss, bad debt, low capital efficiency, and market fragmentation.
Why choose Nitro?
Fused Trade Ledger: Nitro introduces a single paired asset pool (e.g., ETH/USDC), allowing users to seamlessly perform swaps, borrow, and lend within the same pool. This design enhances capital efficiency and integrates DeFi operations.
Price Bin Mechanism: Unlike traditional models, Nitro adopts a price bin system where each asset has multiple bins. A bin's liquidity must be exhausted before activating the next bin, providing a structured solution for liquidity provisioning and utilization.
Reducing bad debt: An automatic debt recovery mechanism combined with fixed debt periods effectively reduces bad debt by absorbing collateral assets at the borrowed price upon maturity.
Nitro Launchpad: An innovative token issuance model that provides customizable allocation curves for efficient price discovery and initial token liquidity guidance.
By leveraging Monad's advanced blockchain infrastructure, Nitro Finance enhances the platform's performance, security, and user experience, enabling users to perform swaps, borrow, and lend from the same asset pool. This integration improves capital efficiency and reduces fragmentation in the DeFi ecosystem.
9. Narwhal Finance
Narwhal Finance is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform based on Monad, characterized by the integration of AI-driven trading and gamified trading experiences, allowing users to trade various leveraged trading pairs, including cryptocurrencies and forex, without KYC, geographical restrictions, or high fees from centralized exchanges.
Why choose Narwhal?
Making trading as easy as playing a game: Narwhal launched a gamified copy trading platform, allowing users to easily follow the strategies of top traders and enjoy the same returns. This feature lowers the entry barrier for novice traders while fostering a community-driven trading environment.
AI-driven trading platform: The Narwhal platform integrates AI-driven trading bots, providing users with advanced tools to optimize trading strategies and enhance trading performance.
Synthetic leveraged trading: Narwhal adopts a synthetic trading model, eliminating the need for traditional order books or independent liquidity for each trading pair. Profit and loss calculations are executed in smart contracts and settled with the platform's liquidity token NLP, simplifying the trading process.
Multi-asset selection: Through the synthetic asset design provided by Pyth, Narwhal offers deep liquidity and minimal slippage, allowing users to trade across asset classes beyond cryptocurrencies, including stocks, indices, and forex.
In March 2024, Narwhal Finance completed a $1 million seed round financing led by Animoca Ventures, with multiple top investors and several angels participating.
By building on Monad, Narwhal Finance combines innovative trading features with robust and efficient blockchain infrastructure to offer users a decentralized trading experience that rivals traditional centralized exchanges.
Summary
The Monad native decentralized exchange (DEX) ecosystem is rapidly developing, thanks to Monad's advanced technology. The aforementioned DEX projects aim to address the shortcomings of traditional centralized exchanges (CEX) and existing DEXs. By emphasizing user experience, capital efficiency, and innovative trading mechanisms or user experiences, these projects will play a key role in shaping the future of DeFi. These emerging ecosystem projects may attract traders seeking more efficient, transparent, and secure trading platforms. Continuously leveraging Monad's high throughput, low latency, and cost-effectiveness demonstrates Monad's significant role in driving innovation in this field.
This article introduces native projects built on Monad that are publicly available as of 2024. More builders are welcome to learn about Monad's technological innovations and join our ecosystem. Below are relevant links and communities for Monad, and feel free to contact us at any time.
Gmonad
Official Links WebOfficial Links
Website: https://monad.xyz/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/monad_xyz
Substack: https://monadxyz.substack.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/monad
Developer Discord: https://discord.gg/monaddev
Jobs: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/monad.foundation
Monad Chinese community Twitter: https://x.com/monad_xyz
Monad Chinese TG group: https://t.me/Chinads
Monad Chinese developer TG group: https://t.me/+UE_dh4BNHIxhMjY1