In 2024, Bitcoin broke through all the way, setting new highs in the fourth quarter, successfully breaking through the $100,000 mark, and detonating the crypto market. People exclaimed, "The familiar taste is back!"
Although we have not yet seen the spectacular market of "thousands of coins rising simultaneously", with the reshaping of global geopolitical relations, improved U.S. regulatory expectations, and traditional finance accelerating the inclusion of leading tokens such as BTC in its balance sheets, it can be confirmed that the "wealth codes" will soon appear one after another. The author found through combing through the recent TGE project tokens that with the popularity of the blockbuster derivatives protocol Hyperliquid, the derivatives track may lead this round of "wealth narratives."
Leading the 'derivatives wealth narrative', Hyperliquid and MYX Finance are on-chain 'land grabbing'.
From the perspectives of macro regulation, market space, and protocol fundamentals, we can conduct a simple analysis and find that the decentralized derivatives trading track is undoubtedly one of the most promising tracks.
First of all, with the Trump administration taking office in January next year, crypto regulation will welcome clear regulatory rules and a relaxed market environment, accelerating mainstream institutions' entry into the crypto trading market, which will elevate the overall trading volume of spot and derivatives. Based on overseas users' preferences for security and privacy, especially after the FTX debacle in the U.S., on-chain decentralized derivative protocols, with their transparency and security, undoubtedly have more appeal compared to CEX.
Secondly, based on the existing funds data in the crypto market, crypto users have approximately $31.59 billion in assets in CEX, accounting for only 12.6% of total assets, while this group of users has a monthly spot trading volume of $38.7 trillion on CEX, accounting for 93.4% of total trading volume—on the contrary, crypto users hold $281.74 billion on-chain, accounting for 87.4% of total crypto assets, but the monthly spot trading volume on-chain is only $273 billion, accounting for 6.6% of total trading volume. The 'mismatch' between assets and trading volume shows that CEX remains the main battlefield for crypto users, while DEX is more positioned as a 'testing ground'—if DEX can achieve breakthroughs in throughput, user experience, scalability, etc., optimizing user trading experience, on-chain assets will inevitably avoid the redundant steps of withdrawing to CEX for trading, trading directly on DEX, and decentralized DEX can realize the potential trading market of massive on-chain assets, ushering in a wave of significant growth.
From the product experience of DEX, in the past few years, DEX and derivative protocols have made significant progress in product form and functional experience, addressing the traditional pain points of CEX. For example, the already listed Hyperliquid, Synfutures, and the yet-to-be-listed MYX Finance have all nailed down their product positioning and provided a high-level user experience, attracting users in the on-chain world, reminiscent of the land grab during the domestic internet era.
For instance, the popular Hyperliquid, by building a high-performance Hyperliquid L1, attempts to create 'CEX on-chain', once becoming the hottest Perp DEX in the English-speaking region, poised to compete with dydx. After TGE, the total market value of the HYPE token once soared to $4.91 billion, surpassing the market value of the top CEX platform token OKB—while the highly anticipated project MYX Finance is said to be breaking liquidity within cross-chain scenarios, linking isolated ecosystems and multiple chains, through the creation of 'chain abstract liquidity layer' and its unique MPM mechanism, greatly amplifying asset liquidity by dozens of times, thus sweeping on-chain trading users and becoming the fastest-growing multi-chain Perp DEX in 2024—my mention of these two projects aims to explain through further analysis that HYPE and MYX may continue to ignite the derivatives track and bring a strong wealth effect.
Average airdrop of $84,300 from Hyperliquid's 'wealth effect'
Against the backdrop mentioned above, derivative protocols such as Hyperliquid and Synfutures have subsequently TGE, achieving striking market performance, with Hyperliquid's market performance being particularly outstanding.
On November 29, the decentralized derivative protocol Hyperliquid announced the genesis event for its native token HYPE. After HYPE went live, its price skyrocketed from $2 at the opening to $14.86 on December 7, achieving a staggering increase of 643% in just one week. Subsequently, the price continued to rise, reaching a high of $28.91 on December 17, with an increase of 134.55%. According to statistics, the Hyperliquid genesis event distributed a total of 310 million tokens; even at the opening price of $2, the airdrop scale reached $620 million; if calculated at the price on December 17, the total scale of the airdrop reached $9.325 billion. The actual airdrop quantity of Hyperliquid was about 274 million tokens, with 94,000 addresses receiving the airdrop—meaning that each HYPE airdrop recipient got an average of 2,915 HYPE, worth approximately $84,300, exceeding 600,000 RMB!
Based on strong product capabilities, user base, and reasonable token economics, HYPE created a wave of 'phenomenal' growth, but unfortunately, prior to and after the airdrop release, the Chinese community did not give it the attention it deserved. Many KOLs and retail investors focused on 'opportunism' also missed this wave of 'wealth codes'—this wave of 'missed opportunity' for HYPE makes us have to carefully scan the derivatives protocol track to avoid missing the next wealth code.
「Chain Abstract Liquidity Layer」MYX Finance: The Most Anticipated Derivatives Wealth Code of 2025
The wealth effect of Hyperliquid has indeed brought a wave of 'tremendous traffic' to the derivatives track, with many previously unheard-of DEX and other track protocols trying to ride this wave of popularity for some exposure for their projects, but this has also brought a lot of distracting information to investors. I hope to comprehensively sort out the comprehensive strength of leading derivative trading protocols, including Hyperliquid, dYdX, Synfutures, MYX Finance, GMX, etc., from the dimensions of product positioning, growth potential, trading performance, and token economics, to determine whether a project is worth anticipating—overall, MYX Finance may be the most likely to take over HYPE and become the derivative protocol for the wealth code of 2025.
Many CEX users might not be familiar with MYX Finance—MYX's founding team comes from the top 3 CEX, traditional financial institutions, and VCs. The project received investments from several top VCs, including Redshirt, Consensys, and Hack VC, in last year's seed round funding. In February of this year, the project officially launched its mainnet, currently deployed on Arbitrum, Linea, and opBNB, supporting derivatives trading of over ten assets including BTC and ETH—this also leads to a point I want to emphasize, without looking at funding and endorsements as 'abstract' gimmicks—everything serves to enhance the user's trading experience.
I have been trading on MYX Finance for over half a year now, and since May, my perception as a user on the product side is still quite strong—it can be seen that MYX Finance is a very down-to-earth team that is willing to listen to user feedback—especially in the second half of 2024, while optimizing the protocol and products, launching the Telegram trading mini-program, they have also advanced product cooperation with protocols like Particle, zkPass, OKX Wallet, Halo Wallet, achieving social media/mobile login to automatically create wallets and seamless cross-chain trading, providing on-chain users with a trading experience equivalent to CEX.
(1) Product Advantages: Trading Scenarios
In terms of product positioning, MYX Finance aims to create a 'chain abstract liquidity layer' protocol to solve the two major issues of DEX: 'liquidity' and 'usability', providing a CEX-level trading experience while retaining the composability and scenario innovation potential of DEX.
To solve the liquidity problem, the leading dYdX and the well-known Hyperliquid both adopt the traditional Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) model. Although this model provides trading depth and user experience close to CEX, it requires a large number of market makers to provide liquidity, and the fragmented liquidity of market makers locked at different prices leads to very low capital utilization efficiency and relatively high data storage and computation costs—this clearly does not align with the ideal product form of DEX; while GMX V2, GNS, and other protocols adopt a hybrid mechanism of P2Pool, integrating the advantages of order books, AMM, and virtual AMM, offering a good user trading experience, but due to the system's complexity and high requirements for development and operation capabilities, and the diversity of LP compositions, differing interests also pose significant governance challenges.
To address the liquidity issues in on-chain trading, MYX Finance's answer is the MPM (Matching Pool Mechanism) market-making mechanism—MYX Finance introduces liquidity pools, using funding rates and Maker rebates to balance the interests of both long and short positions—under the incentive of funding fees, the ratio of open positions for both sides often approaches 50:50 to solve the long-term holding imbalance. Through Maker rebates, MYX also addresses the imbalance caused by medium to high-frequency users.
The innovation of MYX Finance's market-making mechanism demonstrates higher capital efficiency than traditional P2Pool. In an environment where long and short positions alternately increase, MPM can support a holding scale dozens of times its own with limited funds, significantly improving LP's capital efficiency and returns. In times of market imbalance, LPs on MYX Finance can clearly manage their exposures and flexibly choose to hedge passive positions in other markets or assume the gains and losses resulting from position fluctuations, gaining greater strategic space and risk control elasticity.
The MPM mechanism is not only extremely friendly to LPs but also provides traders with a trading experience that surpasses CEX—robust liquidity not only brings a zero-slippage seamless trading experience but also reduces user trading costs to an extremely low level—whether compared to the top 3 CEXs or DEXs like dYdX and Hyperliquid, MYX Finance's trading fees are significantly lower. Coupled with recent VIP benefits activities, high-frequency traders can save tens of thousands of dollars in fees each month.
(2) Product Advantages: Cross-Chain Scenarios
In cross-chain trading scenarios, MYX Finance leverages the chain abstract architecture to resolve CEX's liquidation issues and composability limitations, greatly enhancing the utilization efficiency of single-chain assets, obscure assets, and illiquid assets through account abstract wallets, releasing the potential of various assets and further optimizing the trading experience brought by the MPM mechanism.
Specifically, suppose we open a contract for an obscure asset/restaking token/asset with low liquidity on CEX, and this trade unfortunately gets liquidated due to specific on-chain rule restrictions/insufficient liquidity/imperfect cross-chain technology, the cleared assets may not cover the debts incurred. MYX Finance leverages the chain abstract architecture to facilitate asset liquidity across multiple chains. Whether you hold isolated single-chain assets or obscure assets, you can make full use of them by collateralizing on MYX Finance—this greatly amplifies asset utilization efficiency and liquidity, significantly improving both LP and asset utilization efficiency by dozens of times.
Based on the MPM market-making mechanism and chain abstract architecture, MYX Finance provides a seamless cross-chain trading experience with zero slippage, ultra-low fees, and multi-asset transactions. This user experience, combined with a series of airdrop and reward activities, has allowed MYX Finance to achieve remarkable growth in user base and trading volume since its mainnet launch in February—within just 36 days, MYX's daily trading volume reached $100 million, while it took dYdX 184 days and GMX 86 days to achieve similar figures. Since then, MYX Finance's daily average trading volume has remained above $100 million.
(3) Product Advantages: Social + Trading
To further enhance the horsepower of the 'growth engine', MYX Finance launched a Telegram mini app last month—currently, Telegram has a huge user base of 800 million, with 90% of crypto users using Telegram for socializing. By integrating 'social + trading', MYX Finance's TG mini-program greatly shortens the 'trading path' for Telegram users. After entering the MYX mini-program, users can log in using their Twitter, Facebook, or phone/email accounts, automatically creating wallets for users, significantly lowering the learning and usage costs for Web2 users on Telegram. According to the subsequent product plans announced, MYX Finance will welcome a group of trading KOLs to settle in and launch the 'copy trading feature', truly bridging 'social + trading' on-chain. Users can follow big trades after discussing market trends, boasting, or listening to analyses from KOLs.
(4) Token Economics: Benefiting the Community and Users, Maximizing Appreciation Expectations
It can be seen that compared to the recently listed Hyperliquid, Synfutures, and other derivative protocols at the same time, MYX Finance is very competitive on the product side. However, historical experience tells us—no matter how powerful the product is and how large the user base, if the token empowerment is not done well and cannot incentivize users to buy and hold the tokens, the market performance of the tokens usually does not meet expectations.
The token economics disclosed by MYX Finance locks the secondary market after TGE by restricting the allocation and release of tokens for projects and institutional investors, protecting the interests of retail investors and community airdrop recipients—the total fixed supply of the project tokens is 1,000,000,000 MYX, with the team retaining only 20% that will be unlocked one year after the token goes live and allocated monthly over two years; 20% of the tokens are owned by institutional investors, locked at TGE, and distributed monthly over 18 months starting six months after TGE—by limiting the unlocking time for institutions and the team, MYX Finance maximally locks in the selling pressure from private placements and the team after the token listing, fully maintaining the trading environment of MYX tokens in the secondary market.
In addition to 10% of the tokens as initial liquidity and 5% as reserve funds, MYX Finance will airdrop 45% of the total project tokens, or 450,000,000 MYX, through various operational activities to community users, incentivizing users to trade, provide liquidity, and participate in various platform activities on MYX—compared to projects like Hyperliquid, MYX Finance has the lowest airdrop acquisition cost, and due to the project's high 'usability', even newcomers in 'opportunism' can complete a series of interactions without any tutorial.
For instance, MYX Finance's largest airdrop event, the 'Origin Plan', will airdrop 20% of the total MYX token supply to early participants. Users typically only need to complete social media tasks and trade normally (enjoying extremely low transaction fees during the period) to win the airdrop—currently, nearly ten thousand users have participated in the three phases of the 'Origin Plan': 'Cambrian', 'Ordovician', and 'Silurian'. Although uncertain, based on the scale of rewards, the ongoing 'Devonian' event is likely the largest phase since the start of the 'Origin Plan' and might be the last large airdrop event before the project TGE. If the opportunists have not participated yet, they can complete tasks to secure airdrop qualifications.
(5) Market Value Management and Investor Background
From the strength and background of the team and investors, the MYX Finance team members come from large firms, top VC, and established financial institutions, and their currency management capability is undoubtedly expert. In the seed round funding, they naturally received investments from Redshirt, Consensys, Hack VC, OKX Ventures, and GSR, and later became one of the first projects to receive investment from the Linea ecosystem investment alliance. With the strong support from top VCs and ecosystem backing, it is clear that the resource foundation behind MYX Finance is very solid, and both capital and the ecosystem are very optimistic about its growth potential and performance in the secondary market.
Among the derivative protocols that have been listed this year, Hyperliquid's market performance is the most remarkable, while Synfutures' market performance fell short of expectations, failing to continue the 'derivative heat' ignited by Hyperliquid. According to internal news, MYX Finance is very likely to conduct its TGE in Q1 of next year. Considering the product strength, user base, capital strength, and future vision mentioned above, MYX Finance indeed has the most hope of taking over among the derivative protocols listed next year—missing Hyperliquid can be understood, as we were indeed caught off guard; but with the derivative market continuing to heat up, missing out on MYX should not be the case.
After the DeFi Summer of 2020 cooled down, the on-chain world fell into a silence akin to 'engine stalling', with many developers and crypto players losing direction and entering a 'crypto winter'—in 2024, driven by BTC's nurturing, the crypto market has returned to 'spring'—with derivative protocols such as Hyperliquid, Synfutures, and MYX Finance shining brightly one after another, during the winter, developers were not 'hibernating' but cultivating the on-chain ecosystem, broadening application scenarios, strengthening grounding, and enhancing interaction experience—following this series of actions, the user base of the on-chain ecosystem is rapidly growing!
For investors, especially those who have experienced this long bear market, what they should do is to maintain a mindset of 'having passed through a thousand sails' and actively embrace a new round of bull markets, recognizing that 'the on-chain world is the true form of crypto products'—projects like MYX Finance and Hyperliquid not only represent a new round of 'wealth codes' but also embody the infinite possibilities and application values brought by innovations such as 'chain abstract liquidity layer', 'seamless trading', and 'MPM'.
This article comes from a submission and does not represent BlockBeats' views.
