Pretty disappointing to see a GMX maxi choosing the last moment to drop such a post when both GMX and gTrade both bring such huge value to the Arbitrum ecosystem and should be proud of each other’s contributions instead of trying to cut the other down.
You make it sound like Gains Network simply dumped their entire ARB stack, yet they still have 45% of it. And you allow zero consideration for what it was used for. At the time, the airdrop represented a huge portion of Gains Network’s treasury. To be sure, it was a huge boost to the overall health of the protocol.
Being granted such an airdrop was a testament to the impact gTrade had already made to the Arbitrum ecosystem, despite the fact that it paled in comparison to the budget and revenue of GMX.
It looks like you’re suggesting that the only way Gains Network could show their commitment to Arbitrum would be to sit on the airdrop. A case of 'thanks for the money, but too bad we’re not allowed to spend it"? Kind of a weird strategy if you ask me.
Instead, it gave leeway for Gains Network to use their existing treasury to expand their team, and more rapidly improve gTrade. Which is exactly what they have done. To such great effect that gTrade has been neck and neck with GMX for many days of the last few weeks in trading volume, despite having a much lower TVL (a win for capital efficiency). The team has even more recently been expanded with more FE devs, the fruits of which are already becoming noticeable and will continue to accelerate, which is why you’ve seen recent swaps to help balance the overall holdings between the treasury and the airdrop wallet.
Just because you don’t have the receipts to show ARB was directly being spent on strategic hires, doesn’t mean it was blown on candy while flipping the bird as you’d like to make it out to be. Since joining Arbitrum, gTrade has not expanded to another chain, unlike GMX who has done so.
And for to you pretend that gTrade’s innovation is medium is the biggest joke of them all. GMX is celebrating their new chainlink DON, a technology still inferior to the custom DON gTrade has been running for two years. They are celebrating their now 9 crypto pairs, zero forex and zero commodities, while gTrade offers 81 trading pairs across all 3 asset classes, with a lot more coming soon. They also celebrate how much they spend on the sunk cost of renting liquidity, while gTrade offers 10 times the trading pairs while paying less to rent liquidity per trading volume of any perp DEX. A true innovation. GMX has amazing innovations of it’s own, but to pretend gTrade is of medium innovation only shows you spent more time looking at the airdrop wallet than you have at the protocol itself.
But the truth is, few people know all this. They either don’t know gTrade exists, or have no idea the extent to which it has advanced in UX and UI in the last 12 months, thanks to the rapid development allowed for by the security funds the ARB airdrop has provided. Which is why this proposal and the grant it would bring is so valuable and important. Not to take from GMX users, but to show the users of the countless low effort forks out there, who incentivize poor user experiences by destroying their own token, that between GMX and gTrade, everything a trader could want is on Arbitrum.
If using ARB to improve the protocol is such a disgrace, perhaps you can tell us why GMX needs more ARB, if they didn’t use what they already have?
