SECTION 1: APPLICANT INFORMATION
Applicant Name:
Murad Mahmudov
Project Name:
STFX
Project Description:
STFX is a social trading platform that allows users to trustlessly delegate their capital to other traders onchain. The platform is composed of managers (users who deploy and manage trades) and investors (users who subscribe capital to managers). Managers receive a share of the profits they generate for investors. The platform combines unique gamification and socialization elements to facilitate a fun and immersive user experience.
Team Members and Roles:
Murad : CEO
Archer: Operations/Marketing
Biqo: Engineering Manager
Abi: Smart Contract
Marcos: Backend
Pavlo: Backend
Nat: Fullstack
Andy: Fullstack
Anche: Frontend
Vibin: Frontend
David: Design/UX
Eric: Marketing/Growth
Project Links:
Website: https://stfx.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/STFX_IO
Discord: Discord
Docs: https://docs.stfx.io/
Stats: https://stfx.io/stats
Github: STFX-IO · GitHub
Contact Information
Point of Contact
Murad Mahmudov
Point of Contact’s TG handle
@MustStopMurad
Twitter
https://twitter.com/MustStopMurad
Email
murad@stfx.io
Do you acknowledge that your team will be subject to a KYC requirement? :
Yes
SECTION 2a: Team and Product Information
Provide details on your team’s past and current experience. Any details relating to past projects, recent achievements and any past experience utilizing incentives. Additionally, please provide further details on the state of your product, audience segments, and how you expect incentives to impact the product’s long-term growth and sustainability.
Team experience
The background of the STFX team combines experience from several DeFi protocols, Lyft, Audi, Origin Protocol, Goldman Sachs, Princeton University, and Columbia University. STFX’s founder Murad Mahmudov is a notable figure in the crypto industry, and currently advises a number of DeFi projects including IntentX, Capswann, and RareRound.
STFX mainnet launched on Arbitrum in late 2022, and has remained there since initial deployment. Our team has been shipping improvements and new product features since inception. The cadence of historical releases are documented on our Medium
What novelty or innovation does your product bring to Arbitrum?
STFX was the first protocol to facilitate leveraged copytrading onchain. It unlocks the following benefits to its users:
- Investors can outsource their trading to more skilled counterparties
- Managers can expand their capital base (effectively cost-free additional margin)
- Users can discover, connect and invest alongside (or into) their friends and known peers
- Completely transparent and documented trading environment: managers can’t falsify their performance history
STFX has pioneered two novel primitives, which when combined, provide an unmatched user experience for both managers and investors:
- Single Trade Vault (STV)
- Decentralized Subscription Copy Trading
Legacy copytrade platforms work as follows: a user locks capital into a particular vault, managed by the vault’s operator. The operator is expected to continuously manage a basket of positions, using the capital deposited by investors to fund these trades. Capital cannot exist in two places at once, so depositing into Vault A incurs the opportunity cost of not being able to deposit into Vault B.
This leads to some negative outcomes:
- Capital deposited into vaults has high turnover, as depositors constantly jump ship to the latest shiny object (in this case, a different vault that recently booked some large PNL)
- Vault operators are pressured to constantly deploy new trades in order to utilize TVL deposits, even if the market opportunities are suboptimal. Again, this stems from the opportunity cost of capital dilemma. No one wants to have money locked up with a manager that is sitting idle.
- Vaults become competitive with one another, because it is a 0-sum game fighting to attract TVL.
STFX solves the capital efficiency problem by breaking vaults down into individual trades, hence the name Single Trade Vault (STV). The STV only consumes liquidity from investors at the very moment the trade is opened, and distributes it all back to investors immediately after the trade is closed.
We’ve paired this with our subscription copy trading model, where investors can choose managers to allocate funds towards. Those managers will be able to call on the amount allocated to them at the time they decide to open their STVs, pulling the capital from their investors’ wallets into the STV.
As a result:
- STFX remains hyper capital efficient; money is never locked up by an idle manager
- Investors can assemble a “fantasy football” lineup of traders, with each individual trader contributing to the investors overall PnL. Dynamic shifts from competitive to complementary.
- No pressure for managers to constantly deploy new trades. Similar to Uber, managers can clock in and out on frequency of their choice, without being punished for passivity.
Is your project composable with other projects on Arbitrum? If so, please explain:
Since its inception, STFX has been composable and allows its users to utilize a number of Arbitrum Perp DEXes to route trader liquidity. We’ve already integrated GMX, Cap.io, Vertex, and soon will be adding Hyperliquid.
Do you have any comparable protocols within the Arbitrum ecosystem or other blockchains?
Similar offerings include Hyperliquid Vaults, Perpy, Vaultus and Valio
How do you measure and think about retention internally?
We track high level metrics on our stats page. These include:
- Weekly Trading Volume
- Number of Unique Users (traders, subscribers)
- Top Trader PNL
- Active Managers
- Trade Count
- Vault Duration
We also track other, more granular KPI data internally. This includes standard retention metrics like DAUs, WAUs, retention %, etc.
While STFX had high attrition rates in our early months, with the addition of recent features such as subscriptions - we have seen our retention rates increase sharply since October 2023.
Do you agree to remove team-controlled wallets from all milestone metrics AND exclude team-controlled wallets from any incentives included in your plan : [Yes/No]
Yes
Did you utilize a grants consultant or other third party not named as a grantee to draft this proposal?
Yes, our team has been consulting with Shogun for advice and feedback on our proposal. Shogun is a member of Castle Capital.
SECTION 2b: PROTOCOL DETAILS
Provide details about the Arbitrum protocol requirements relevant to the grant. This information ensures that the applicant is aligned with the technical specifications and commitments of the grant.
Is the protocol native to Arbitrum?
Yes, STFX protocol contracts reside natively on Arbitrum
On what other networks is the protocol deployed?
The core protocol contracts reside entirely on Arbitrum.
However, the primary Uniswap LP for $STFX token resides on ETH Mainnet. A secondary pool for $STFX exists on Uniswap Arbitrum chain.
What date did you deploy on Arbitrum mainnet?
14th October 2022 1:16 PM UTC
Do you have a native token?:
Yes, $STFX is the native token of the project. More details can be found in the docs
Past Incentivization: What liquidity mining/incentive programs, if any, have you previously run? Please share results and dashboards, as applicable?
Following mainnet release in Oct 2022, STFX launched a 1-month trading competition, with a collective $92,600 in prize money, and additional disbursement of $5,000 for users. More info can be found here
Competition Summary Stats:
- $1.2m traded volume
- 1,456 participants
- $150,000 of margin raised
The trading competition was successful in bootstrapping immediate traffic and interest to the STFX platform upon mainnet launch. Unfortunately, it lacked retentive properties to keep users long term engaged. Of the original competition participants, only 1.68% are active STFX users today. It’s apparently clear that we need to improve stickiness for future incentive programs.
Current Incentivization: How are you currently incentivizing your protocol?
In May of 2023, monthly incentives were introduced for the three best performing investors and managers. Since then $40,000 rewards ($4,000 per month) have been dispersed to top traders on the leaderboard.This program is ongoing.
Additionally, the STFX DAO recently approved 2 major governance proposals that will initiate a 12-month incentives program, which will distribute native STFX protocol tokens as reward. Collectively, these programs will amount to 3.5% of total $STFX supply ($1.5m+ rewards at current market price) and will commence sometime in April.
Manager Incentive Program
As a measure to recruit high caliber managers onto the platform, the STFX DAO passed an incentive mechanism that will disperse 25,000,000 STFX (2.5% token supply) tokens to the top 25 managers over a 12-month period.
The aim is reflexive in enticing a broad host of new platform volumes: recruiting high caliber traders onto the platform (supply side) will naturally attract more capital inflows from the investor base (demand side) who want exposure to these elite traders.
Investor Incentive Program
As a measure to support Investors and their subscription usage, the STFX DAO passed an incentive mechanism that will disburse 10,000,000 STFX (1% token supply) tokens to platform subscribers. The criteria for these rewards will primarily be a function of:
- How much capital the user subscribes to the manager
- How early the user subscribes to that manager
- The PnL return of the manager that they are subscribed to
Have you received a grant from the DAO, Foundation, or any Arbitrum ecosystem related program?
No
Protocol Performance:
- $129m+ in cumulative volume traded
- $1,529,802 of active subscriptions
- $15,000,000+ of margin raised
- 2,547 unique users
- 941 active subscriptions
- 5,978 total vaults created
Over the past year, STFX has added 758 new users. We qualify a user as someone who has deposited capital onto the platform, invested in a vault, or deployed a vault. On a month-by-month basis, these users have been growing at a steady pace:
While growth has been accelerating, more importantly we need to analyze retention of these users, and ensure that they stay engaged with the platform on a continuous basis. The results have been impressive.
While a natural recency bias in the data exists for recent months, it’s overwhelmingly apparent that retention rates have skyrocketed since the end of October, clocking in consistent ~50% retention figures. It’s not coincidental- that timeline coincides directly with the period in which subscriptions were released. Subscriptions have been the killer feature that are sending our platform volumes, capital utilization, and retention rates skyrocketing.
Protocol Roadmap:
- Revised trading engine - this week
- Landing page overhaul - March 2024
- Privy Integration - March 2024
- Hyperliquid Integration - March 2024
- PWA Mobile App (Phase 1) - March 2024
- CEX deposit via Mesh - March 2024
- PWA Mobile App (Phase 2) - April 2024
- Embedded Chatrooms - April 2024
- Battle Royale Trading Competition - April 2024
- Crosschain abstracted deposits - Mid Q2
- Perennial Finance Integration - Late Q2
- Spot market integrations (alternative EVM, Solana, Cosmos etc.) - Q2/Q3
- Composable Crosschain Accounts (backend routing + bridging under a single wallet, no bifurcation of perps + spot wallet) - Q3/Q4
- Sportsbook protocol integrations - TBD
Audit History & Security Vendors:
2022 Certik Audit
2023 Zellic Audit
Security Incidents:
No, our protocol has never been exploited to date
SECTION 3: GRANT INFORMATION
Detail the requested grant size, provide an overview of the budget breakdown, specify the funding and contract addresses, and describe any matching funds if relevant.
Requested Grant Size:
300,000 $ARB tokens
Grant Matching:
N/A
Justification for the size of the grant
For the past ~1.5 years, we’ve been persistently improving the product and intentionally kept platform traffic organic and uninhibited. Incentives can be a productive growth hacking technique but they can also be a dual sword and send false signal of PMF that isn’t actually present (we experienced this first hand).
There is plenty of objective data signaling that STFX has found definitive PMF. We think now is the optimal time to begin layering incentives into the platform to hyper compound growth, and believe the $ARB from LTIPP would assist greatly in this regard.
Objective: add an additional 1600 DAUs to get to a net total of 2,000 on the platform
300k ARB / 2,000 DAUs = 150 ARB/user
It’s a fairly simple marketing narrative: subscribe a net total of $200 to STFX managers, and earn 150 ARB ($300 USD) in rewards.
Projected Impact to Subscriptions Count:
Projected Impact to USD Value of Total Subscriptions
Grant Breakdown:
We plan to use the LTIPP $ARB rewards to incentivize new and existing users to subscribe capital to managers, and in exchange, get boosted yield on top of their trading profits.
High Level Overview:
- Every week, 25,000 $ARB will be distributed pro rata to qualified investors
- To become qualified, an investor will need to maintain a $500 net deposit balance over the life of the program
- Additionally, the investor will need to subscribe $100 to at least 2 managers on the platform
- To prevent short term gamification and maximize the chance of user retention, fresh weekly $ARB distributions will be subject to a rolling 1 month vest before becoming claimable by the end user
Funding Address:
0x145F43a2bFB5915Dc39b83a499A8db19686cD46c
Funding Address Characteristics:
3/5 multisig wallet composed of core team members
Treasury Address:
0x83C190dF7BA769E78390C6d93A351EA53258C3eb
Contract Address: N/A
SECTION 4: GRANT OBJECTIVES, EXECUTION AND MILESTONES
Clearly outline the primary objectives of the program and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), execution strategy, and milestones used to measure success. This helps reviewers understand what the program aims to achieve and how progress will be assessed.
Objectives:
The primary objectives of the grant are twofold:
- Expand our investor base, and grow our platform subscription count. Our target is to reach 2,000 active users by the end of the program
- Grow our cumulative trading volumes by attracting both new investors and managers to the platform
Execution Strategy:
- Investor must maintain a (net deposit - net withdrawal) balance of at least $500 in their STFX account.
- Investor must subscribe at least $100 to a minimum of 2 managers
- The manager must take >6 trades over the life of the LTIPP program, and those trades must be held for at least 6 hours (to prevent gamification)
- The 300,000 $ARB request will be segmented into 25,000 weekly allotments. All accounts that meet the qualification criteria ($500 net deposit, $100 subscription to 2+ managers) will hold claim to a pro rata share of the 25,000 weekly $ARB rewards.
- Existing STFX users who meet the criteria will be auto enrolled to the program
- Accrued $ARB will appear in the user’s STFX balance at the end of each week. However, there will be a rolling vest window of 4 weeks before that $ARB liquefies
- If a user unsubscribes prior to the termination of the 12-week program, they will still keep any liquid $ARB that has unlocked, but will forfeit any actively vesting $ARB that has yet to unfreeze. Those forfeited rewards will be returned to the Arbitrum Foundation.
- STFX contracts will escrow the weekly $ARB distributions, and automatically filter user balances who unsubscribe prior to the vest period.
Example1 : Alice Unsubscribes Early
In this situation, Alice would keep (Week 1,2) = 375 ARB, but would forfeit (Week 3,4,5,6) = 530 ARB
Example 2: Alice Stay Subscribed Through Entire Program
In this situation, Alice would accrue weekly rewards on a 4 week time delay, but at the termination of the program, would receive the entire amount at once.
What mechanisms within the incentive design will you implement to incentivize “stickiness” whether it be users, liquidity or some other targeted metric?
Subscriptions have been our killer feature to date. We’ve found that once an investor subscribes to a manager, that capital tends to be extremely sticky to the platform (assuming the manager is demonstrating relatively sound trading performance).
The pull nature of the product means that it is a completely passive interaction from the investor’s side. There is no sign off or approval required by the investor when the manager deploys a new trade. This automatically converts an investor into a DAU/WAU without them necessarily even logging into the dapp.
The integration of social features (Twitter integration + chatrooms), combined with a native mobile experience via PWA will hopefully drastically increase our manual daily retention. Being able to serve push notifications to users when a manager they are subscribed to deploys a new vault, when someone replies to their comment in a chatroom, or when someone they follow on Twitter joins STFX for the first time is very powerful advantage vs other Web3 applications that are strictly desktop centric.
Specify the KPIs that will be used to measure success in achieving the grant objectives and designate a source of truth for governance to use to verify accuracy.
- Cumulative trading volume
- Number of active subscriptions across the platform
- Total registrations, and long term retention of those users (i.e. when the LTIPP rewards terminate, are those investors still sticking around?)
- Number of WAUs
- Avg USDC value per subscription
KPIs be tracked via Dune Dashboards, as well as the STFX stats page
Grant Timeline and Milestones:
- We want to expand our weekly active userbase to 2,000 investors, utilizing LTIPP rewards as a primary driver of this growth. Given our current count of 388, this would be a ~4x in our numbers over the 12-week distribution period.
- Additionally, we’d like to hit an internal target of $225,000,000 in cumulative trading volume
Checkpoint Milestones:
These targets are ambitious, but for the past 4 months, we’re seeing WAU retention at or above the 50% ranges totally organic. Ideally, we can hit the 75-80% range during LTIPP. We think this is plausible because many of these new users will be gravitating to STFX initially for the rewards, and to collect the first batch of weekly ARB harvests, they’ll need to keep those subscriptions live for at least 4 weeks. At 80% retention, that would require onboarding 2,500 new investors to reach our terminal goal of 2,000.
Lastly, we’ll have exogenous forces beyond LTIPP contributing to new user acquisition during this 12 week stretch. 2 other major protocol releases (our PWA mobile app and launch of SIP-010) will be going live in coming weeks. We think the combination of all these concurrent efforts will help us achieve these KPI targets.
How will receiving a grant enable you to foster growth or innovation within the Arbitrum ecosystem?
CEX copytrading is a multi billion dollar vertical, currently dominated by walled garden operators. As these businesses continue to see increased headwinds (regulatory pressure, listing limitations, KYC crackdowns, custodial concerns etc) we expect continued mass migration of users away from CEX perps offerings towards DEX alternatives. Our goal is to capitalize on these trend migrations and continue siphoning CEX copytrade users to the STFX platform, and by extension, the Arbitrum ecosystem.
Growing the Arbitrum Ecosystem:
-
Launching our PWA with Privy wallet will help us build a seamless onboarding experience for new users – enabling us to expand outside of the regular pools of crypto natives. Our dApp is very consumer-oriented and mae to appeal to the retail participant. We’ll be well positioned to service the new people entering the space, quickly onboarding them on to Arbitrum.
-
STFX is a unique dApp in the Arbitrum ecosystem, there isn’t anything like it. We’re attracting a certain subset of users that may not otherwise be participating on Arbitrum (e.g. traders from ByBit/Binance, users copy-trading on CEXs)
-
We’re a DEX aggregator, all volume we generate is net positive for the Arbitrum ecosystem. As we see growth, so do these other Arbitrum projects we’re integrated with (GMX, Cap.io, Vertex, etc.)
Do you accept the funding of your grant streamed linearly for the duration of your grant proposal, and that the multisig holds the power to halt your stream?
Yes
SECTION 5: Data and Reporting
Is your team prepared to comply with OBL’s data requirements for the entire life of the program and three months following and then handoff to the Arbitrum DAO? Are there any special requests/considerations that should be considered?
Yes
Does your team agree to provide bi-weekly program updates on the Arbitrum Forum thread that reference your OBL dashboard?
Yes
Does your team agree to provide a final closeout report not later than two weeks from the ending date of your program?
Yes
Does your team acknowledge that failure to comply with any of the above requests can result in the halting of the program’s funding stream?:
Yes