The DeFi industry has come a long way in just a short period of time. Just this week, Elon Musk, who has long tweeted about Dogecoin, and whose company Tesla just bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, tweeted “Don’t defy DeFi.” Trading activity reportedly surged across DeFi tokens following the tweet.
Mark Cuban has also told people of his interest in the lending and borrowing aspects of defi and crypto: ″[T]o borrow money, I have to be overcollateralized with my bank. I’ve got to call somebody. I’ve got to do a DocuSign, or sign something, [and] it’s got to get approved at multiple levels — unless I’m putting it against a credit card, or just writing a check, it’s a hassle. The [bank] fees are ridiculous as a percentage,” Cuban said. ”Owning a crypto asset, whether it’s bitcoin or Ethereum, I can do my own banking and it’s very friction-free, very straightforward and fast. That lack of friction is the game-changer.”
Bank of America came out and confirmed what many of us have already suspected: that DeFi could challenge traditional finance. Indeed, the total value locked in DeFi apps stood at less than $1b in January 2020. It now stands at more than $40 billion. Yield farming and liquidity pools have led the way. But, now NFTs have appeared in headlines across the world, as athletes, sports leagues, and celebrities look to get involved in blockchain technology.
From MakerDao and Compound to Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, the world of crypto is changing, and DeFi apps are front and center. The space has come a long way since The Washington Post wrote a primer on decentralized finance in July 2020. In September, Bloomberg claimed DeFi composed two-thirds of the cryptocurrency market in terms of price changes. Venture capitalists see the promise, with Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, and Michael Novogratz all staking a claim in DeFi.
Here at ChartEx, we’ve had our heads buried in code as we continue to respond to user feedback, building the industry’s leading analytics platform for decentralized exchanges (DEX). Here’s just a little preview of what we’ve been working on.
The ChartEx Journey, 6 Months On
What a journey it’s been. The ChartEx product continues to be refined, our user numbers have grown steadily and organically, and we see evidence of people using our product everywhere across social media.
We’re welcoming upwards of 380,000 visitors every month, serving more than 1.7bn requests across our infrastructure. As a team, it fills us with great pride that we are delivering something people actually use and value.
With more than 5000 token holders, we are the largest token-based premium trading analytics tools for DEXs, ahead of competitors like Dextools, Astrotools and Moontools in terms of adoption of premium products.
We’ve achieved this by focusing on our product and focusing on our users and we’ve remained true to this vision every day.
Metamorphosis Test Platform Update
We’re very pleased to see the adoption of our test platform, Metamorphosis, with 4160 wallets currently connected. We’ve received overwhelming support and feedback on the responsiveness and accuracy of the data, as well as on the superior user experience.
After months of development effort to bring real multi-chain support to ChartEx for the markets it supports, including analytics and trade data for Binance Smart Chain, which was previously only available on Uniswap WETH markets.
The Metamorphosis platform makes available 242 different Automated Market Makers across Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum, capturing 1.1m trades on nearly 7000 pairs with a cumulative volume of over $2.34bn every day. We don’t rely on APIs or subgraphs for our data, we capture and process every trade ourselves, direct from our blockchain nodes.
The total balance of these soft-locked and active users is over 26.4m CHART representing 36.1% of our circulating supply (Circulating supply is calculated to be ~73m CHART as at 24th March 2021).
Liquidity Provision
According to Investopedia, liquidity refers to the efficiency or ease with which an asset or security can be converted into ready cash without affecting its market price. The most liquid asset of all is cash itself.
In our case, the quote asset Ethereum is cash. Over the last few months we’ve seen a great increase in the liquidity provision from our community.
We’re pleased to see that over half a million dollars in equivalent liquidity has been deployed to the CHART market. We’re working on a new set of incentives to encourage liquidity provision to make it even more robust.
Token Burn
We’ve burned 9.1m CHART to date, taken them out of circulation. Recognizing that our tokenomic model planning assumptions at the time of launch were no longer optimal, and we had been consistently operating underneath those planning assumptions, we restructured our tokenomics model. As a long standing commitment to our community, we have ensured these funds never enter circulation. Over the last 6 months this has removed $869,000 of potential sell pressure from the CHART market at today’s prices.
Additionally, we’re pleased to confirm that we have burnt a further 5m in CHART from circulating supply (https://etherscan.io/tx/0xb062529ca7a537f867a046297d8172554d847e2081bef0433311037648643a3c) as well as deploying additional ETH liquidity from our liquidity reserve to help better facilitate an orderly trading environment.
The remainder of our liquidity reserve will continue to exist, not within circulation. Any future token movement will be to bootstrap either a CEX listing, new markets on other AMMs on Ethereum or potentially other chains.
14.1m CHART or 5.65% of our entire supply is now locked at the Ethereum Burn Address, permanently.
Documentation and FAQs
Perhaps one of the more surprising parts of our journey has been the familiarity our users have with the TradingView platform. We chose their charting library to deliver a consistent experience for what we assumed to be a user base that largely crossed over and therefore would know and have hands-on experience with their tools. It’s been made clear however that for many new users to ChartEx, they’d not come across or needed to use TradingView in the past.
One of our immediate focuses therefore is shifting toward education — how to use our platform, how to use the charting functions and to address some of the more frequently asked questions. The first of our contributions towards this is our introduction and user guide to the ChartEx platform hosted on Gitbook: https://chartex.gitbook.io/chartex-faq/
We’ll expand this as we come across new questions as well as build a library of general education content on using the charts themselves in the near future.
Future Plans
We’ve been quite open and honest about our view that roadmaps in a fast-paced environment such as Defi provide little value. For the first quarter of 2021, there has been no roadmap in place for ChartEx. We firmly believe in being held to account, but what better way to achieve this than to deliver features into our working product based on your own ideas and suggestions.
We’re working entirely from user feedback on Github. We are also working to ensure our Metamorphosis platform is ready for production use. Bringing the bot and alerting ecosystem across to support Binance Smart Chain and other Ethereum based AMMs beyond Uniswap has proven to be our biggest challenge to date, but nonetheless we’re entirely confident we will overcome this.
The data pipeline behind Metamorphosis is robust and performing well. We’ve yet to find another product in the space that matches ChartEx’s performance. Our direct-from-chain data collection infrastructure provides CHART holders access to premium market solutions.
Beyond getting Metamorphosis battle-ready, we’re actively exploring other chains for both their data capabilities and ease of bringing our current data pipelines up and running. We are also exploring the viability of deploying the CHART token elsewhere, too.
Whilst we appreciate the frustrations some users express with transaction fees on Ethereum, we will not compromise on a shortcut to launching on another chain that introduces attack vectors on things like lock contracts or the potential for minting tokens beyond our current supply. We will find ourselves on alternative chains soon, but it will not be rushed. We’re currently engaged with a number of different solutions providers to achieve this.
A Small Teaser
It was clear from user feedback that our current layouts, with their focus on charts, were just one way that people could use our tools to support their trading style. Others preferred a more data-heavy style, where raw trades took focus. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:
We spent a lot of time working with UI/UX experts and award winning designers 15000v on delivering a fresh, but still concise and user-friendly experience that focuses on putting the right data in front of our users — it doesn’t compromise on advertising or sponsored promotions, the latest IDO or paid-for news placements — it focuses on what our users expect, a superior, high performance data-led experience. We’re really pleased with the results, and we’ll be taking it into alpha testing with a small number of users soon.
Website: https://www.chartex.pro/
Discord: https://discord.gg/UH8sEhk
Telegram Group: https://t.me/ChartExCommunity
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/ChartExAnnouncements
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChartExPro
