Perpetual Markets Arrive on Evmos: Unlocking $40B+ in aggregated liquidity across 160+ sources on over a dozen chains.

We’ve been teasing the idea of a perpetuals market on Evmos for months. However, we haven’t gone into too much detail about the technical details or the numbers. Let's dive a little deeper.

Our partnership with @Unidex is worth far more than smart contracts and UI deployment. We are unlocking a massive ocean of liquidity that power these markets, showcasing the raw strength and depth of a collective EVM ecosystem. And thus by extension, this shared liquidity is now available to the IBC ecosystem.

We often talk about cross-chain, multi-chain, omni-chain, buzzword-chain liquidity, and how account abstraction is going to usher DeFi into the promised land of shared liquidity. Unfortunately, DeFi is often slow to move (and rightly so) as complex protocols are... well, complex. Fortunately, UniDex perpetuals is a platform still relatively new, and they wasted no time jumping head-first into the shared liquidity and aggregated data paradigm.

With over 160 liquidity sources across a dozen chains, the self-proclaimed "Aggregator of Everything" allows traders to tap into a vast pool of $40B, including from other perpetual protocols like GMX and GNS.

The attached screenshot shows stEVMOS on Evmos mainnet being used as the sole collateral for a multitude of diverse positions:

1. A simple 100X ape-leveraged BTC long
2. Positions for asset pair on other Ethereum chains like OP on Optimism
3. Exposure to positions for assets that are non-EVM, such as ATOM, SOL, XMR, and etc.
4. Thematic weighted baskets / indexes, such as TOP10INDEX, LSDINDEX, and more.
5. "Real world" markets like the S&P500 and forex pairs if that's your flavor of choice.

You'd be pretty nutty to rely on stEVMOS as your only collateral for actual positions, but the fact that you can is pretty damn liberating.

Getting Started with Forge Perpetuals (Soft Launch)

We are calling this a soft launch because there are a variety of tasks at hand during this initial phase. For simplicity sake, we'll categorize them into three main focuses:

1. Creation and deployment of additional liquidity pools and markets - to prevent fragmentation of liquidity, we will take this time to conduct research including risk analysis, assessment of market demand, existing depth on Forge DEX, and available bridges for collateral pools. Evmos-specific markets will also be under research during this time.
2. Ideate and propose a one time Kick-Off Incentives Program, but more importantly, Explore Sustainable Long-Term Strategies
3. Feedback Generation - During this soft launch, we encourage users to provide feedback and report any issues they encounter. We value the community's input and want to ensure a pleasant and safe user experience while trading perpetuals on Forge.

Providing Liquidity

For the initial soft launch, only one liquidity pools have been selected for immediate collateral use: stEVMOS. This decision was made purposefully under the guidance of experienced members from UniDex. A secondary collateral asset and pool, USDC, will be created as soon as the stEVMOS pool has captured enough TVL.

Head on over to the Pool Page where you can deposit and withdraw from the token pool, as well as claim any future rewards accrued. We will be tracking early liquidity providers, so retro-rewards are not out of the question but also not guaranteed.

Note: Depositing into a liquidity pool is not putting your asset as collateral to trade. To deposit collateral to trade with, go back to the main trading UI and input the amount there.

Start Trading

For those who have traded on CEX's should be mostly familiar with the trading UI.

1. Select your position side: long (you're bullish) or short (you're bearish)
2. Select trade type (market or limit), adjust your leverage, check estimated liquidation price, and pray to the crypto gods.
3. Approve token transfer, then enter position.

Joking aside, high leveraged trading is extremely risky and should not be used by new traders. In addition, nothing in this post is financial advice; readers are expected to conduct their own independent research. This is not a toy or simulation, do not treat it as such.

Closing Thoughts

Freedom to Innovate

An ecosystem's entire DeFi landscape should not have to be at the mercy of Chainlink oracles -- especially now with the countless alternatives, secure off-chain data retrieval methods, and the mountains of live data available for cross-referencing. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not trying to throw heat at Chainlink, they play an invaluable role in the DeFi ecosystem and will forever be known as pioneers.

But Forge's Perpetuals market will not be bound by any one oracle. This opens up the opportunity for unique markets, as seen in UniDex's implementation of indexes and the stock market. As long as an asset's value can be tracked and verified, a market can in theory be created. And history has shown us that where there's room to innovate, there will be innovation.

Things to Lookout For

• A governance proposal should be hitting Commonwealth shortly; we highly encourage everyone interested to participate and pitch in to the conversation.
• Continuous UI/UX tweaks and new features - as with any new protocol launch, there may be certain functions that are not yet deployed, or UI/UX bugs that needs tweaking. We appreciate your understanding.
• Evmos and Cosmos focused index markets and derivatives 🤔
• Trading competitions and community rewards - more details will be announced when prepared to be proposed.

Aligned with the Evmos Community

As a partner protocol, Forge receives a portion of all trading fees on our Perpetuals platform. Forge (non-perps), the Evmos community owned DEX, has admittedly struggled in certain areas because of its lack of ability to generate revenue. While we are obviously hoping to attract liquidity through this venture, it is equally as important to attract trading volume from other chains as we offer one of the cheapest gas fees within the EVMs. With the proper utilization of the incentives module, transactions have the potential to be negligible.

Most of the revenue will flow directly or indirectly back into the ecosystem, through incentives as well as further development and bounties.