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An exploration into A trending aggregator, UniDex.

Written by Greythorn Asset Management
19 Apr 2023
31 mins read

This is Part 3 of our Real Yield series, Exploring an AppChain DeFi Trading Ecosystem - UniDex. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Token Summary

Tokenomics

With time on their side, UniDex’s unique token allocation has allowed the supply distribution of its governance token to perforate further than any other web3 project available. With its fully circulating supply, their "all at once" emission has resulted in creating loyal holders after 2 years of distribution between market participants, resulting in positions of its supply to become deflationary post-app chain integration.

Comparables

UniDex ranks much lower compared to their competition, at $31.9M fully diluted valuation, UniDex has room to grow in terms of Market Capitalization, Total Value Locked and Transaction Volume in comparison to their more established counterparts.

Following up our #RealYield 1 & 2 research paper:

Part 1: Greythorn Core Research: dPerps & Real Yield | by Greythorn Asset Management | Medium

Part 2: Greythorn Core Research: Real Yield Part 2 | by Greythorn Asset Management | Medium

Along with the FTX debacle:

A Wake-Up Call for Crypto?. It’s hard to argue against the fact… | by Greythorn Asset Management | Medium

In the Beginning:

Credits to @somniumwave

Building on the Ethereum blockchain since October 2020 and currently live on 14 chains for their Aggregator and 7 for their Perp DEX, UniDex is an under-dog within the #realyield narrative, setting itself out to connect siloed multi-chain liquidity between perpetual DEX platforms (Kwenta, GMX, GNS, LVL, etc.), along with the aggregation of spot trading execution within available aggregators such as DefiLlama Swap, 1inch, Kyberswap, CoW and more.

The project started as an alternative front-end to the now-famous GMX protocol, then called XVIV Finance, focusing on:

“A superior limit order solution, derivates aggregation such as leverage & options, and meta-aggregation between other spot aggregators.”

The team led by Krunal Amin has also played a pivotal role as a front-end partner to XVIV, created their own RPC network called SakuraRPC and continued to utilise cutting-edge EIP improvements and Optimism’s recently launched Super Chain with current and future UniDex implementation.

Ultimately, its main goal as a platform is to become, as @interndao summarises it:

“... the UniDex vision is larger than just that, and if successful, will become the liquidity hub for all DeFi builders to develop on top of.”

V2 Perpetual DEX & Aggregator

In its previous iteration on V2, UniDex allowed traders to speculate on major cryptocurrency pairs, FX, Commodities, and US equities with up to 100x leverage, utilising their own DAI/USDC/FTM pools across a variety of major L1/L2 chains.

In addition, UniDex V2 aggregated and routed orders across various aggregators to ensure the most efficient and cost-effective execution, passing on the benefits to traders via lower slippage and transaction costs. Compared to other products in the space, V2 Unidex outperformed in terms of speed, and MEV protection, as well as only requiring gas for approvals.

Not satisfied, Krunal Amin, Founder of UniDex and SakuraRPC and his team decided to push the envelope of what true aggregation and perp dex integration could transform into.

V3 UniDex

After the much anticipated V3 announcement, on March 18th UniDex, released the first phase of their multi-staged SwapsV3 which added enhancements to their aggregator platform, enabling users (in the future) an omnichain AMM swap.

These are the below updates rolled out:

  1. Trades are settled in batch auctions exactly like CowSwap.
  2. Aggregator of aggregators that V2 supported (Kyberswap, Paraswap, 1inch, Openocean, 0x, and more).
  3. Limit & Stoploss order support.
  4. Offchain order book market makers can tap into.
  5. Multi cross-chain order fills (pulling liquidity from 3+ networks at once to 1 output).
  6. Gasless order creation.
  7. Backward compatible with new meta-aggregators that operate like our older V2.
  8. Percentage of positive slippage is shared & returned to the trader.
  9. MEV-protected orders.
  10. Only needs to approve 1 address to tap into all aggregators at once.

The UniDex Spot Aggregator v3 will allow users to transact and get filled via short-term auction batches from various sources. Cross orders and meta-aggregation strategies, such as CoW orders and community-built routing sources, are used to constantly quote trades in small intervals.

This allows for easy integration of new protocols, as long as they fulfil the conditions required for filling user's transactions. As a result, users can place an order on zkSync and have it filled on Optimism without direct interaction with an AMM, using the gasless trading method.

The third version (V3) of the Unidex protocol introduces a novel feature that enables the platform to capture positive slippage from token swaps, thus creating a new revenue stream for the $UniDex eco-system. This new revenue is then shared equally between token holders and the Unidex team. Another revenue stream generated from the UniDex protocol is the volume routing rewards received from newly onboarded protocols.

“Despite the significant growth of decentralised exchanges (DEXs), only a small fraction of the total DEX volume is currently routed through aggregators, estimated to be around 10% to 20%. Moreover, most of the spot volume still takes place on centralised exchanges (CEXs). It is expected that the on-chain volume will increase over time.” - @InternDao

Testing is ongoing for their UniDex PERP DEX v3 with the team constantly providing updates in their Discord channel. Through account abstraction (EIP-4337), users can execute transactions from a single wallet on one chain and have their orders filled on various DEXs across multiple chains without worrying about position routing or liquidity sourcing. This simplifies the user's experience as they only need to manage a single position.

“Orders will be filled in the order of UniDex LPs first > other Perp DEXs > Cross chain orders to other Perp DEXs. The reason we do this is that we’ve realised that idle traders on our platform waiting for either more liquidity or freed-up open interest aren't doing anyone any favours. Traders will simply move onto another platform or will just open another tab to our existing platform to trade on top of GMX or Perpetual protocol.” - UniDex Medium

Appchain Narrative

Finally, The UniDex team aims to increase the adoption of on-chain activity specifically in the DEX sector. They believe that the strongest path forward is a network of highly efficient app chains tailored to an ecosystem of products while leaving the base layers for generalized activity. Hence why the UniDex team is creating their own app chain on top of the OP Super Chain.

Once their appchain is live, the UniDex Eco-system will bring forth a new Era of liquidity in terms of cross-chain capability, diversification of trading execution and seamless interconnection between DeFi platforms in the future.

For those keen on testing the Magma testnet out, here is the testnet info:

UniDex Magma TESTNET

Network Name: Magma Testnet

RPC URL: https://magma.unidex.network

Chain ID: 1317131

Currency Symbol: UNIDX

Block Explorer URL: N/A

For more information, head down to the UniDex Discord.

Current Trend Narrative

With the recent announcement of the $UniDex POL LP deployment on WAGMI’s @PopsicleICE DEX platform on the zkSync ERA L2 mainnet, UniDex will eventually become a token of choice for zkSync Era blockchain users as in the past 3 weeks since the L2’s mainnet launch, they have proven their:

1. Growth in TVL:

Starting at around $600k USDC, their USDC Pool has increased to $1,516,871 USDC and seems to be increasing in amount as the platform currently pays their depositors 22.84% APY on their USDC.

2.Growth in Activity:

Being early to the zkSync Era launch, UniDex positioned themselves to become the go-to zkSync PERP trading platform, as seen in the below daily volume graph that has been increasing since launch:

As we have seen in the cases of @arbitrum’s airdrop expectations and market reactions, we have identified (based on $OP and $ARB), any platform/protocol that is involved with the L2’s growth in terms of TVL, Volume and User Activity, $UniDex is set to become one of the beneficiaries of @zkSync’s current expected Airdrop tutorials, as seen in @Faycy_crypto’s post.

Examples of “farmed” airdrop tokens on OP and ARB Chain along with their capital growth over time:

Dexscreener Graphs (Click Links to see):

1. GMX: PERP DEX

2. JONES: LP FARM AGGREGATOR

3. MAGIC: GAMING PLATFORM

4. PLS: LP FARM AGGREGATOR

5. DPX: OPTIONS PLATFORM

6. GRAIL: DEX LAUNCHPAD

7. LYRA: PERP DEX

8. KWENTA: PERP DEX

9. SNX: SYNTHETIC ASSETS

Based on this and the overwhelming amount of Perp DEX and Derivatives DeFi Tokens that are bidding up during airdrop seasons.

Especially with the current Trading Competition announcement that the UniDex team has announced, the market could interpret the event as a potential future bullish increase as users will begin to trade at an increased amount of transactions as we have observed during the KWENTA Trading Competition and also GMX’s recent AVAXrush Trading Competition.

BKEX Listing

The team at @bkexglobal announced that they were listing $UNIDEX at the time of writing this article.

Material Fundamental shifts may have occurred between the time of writing and to time of publishing.

To Summarise our findings, please find the below Fundamentals to give an overview of UniDex’s current ecosystem and team.

Bullish Fundamentals:

1. Strong Track Record & Dox’d Team:

  • First team to bring the first TSLA synth market into DeFi and further developed 5-6 markets for XVIX Finance (GMX)
  • Created one of the first trading platforms to trade ETH gas
  • Created SakuraRPC
  • Whole team members are fully KYC’d

2. zkSync UniDex Token:

As of 14th April, the UniDex team announced that their $UNIDEX token will be live on zkSync Era with the introduction of their POL that they are to deploy on @PopsicleFinance WAGMI DEX, which will bring added demand for the token as zkSync Era users would increase demand of a robust trading platform on the L2.

3. Aggregator of Aggregators:

  • Shared liquidity within a single pool enables structured product offerings and highly efficient market-making.
  • The game execution system allows precise order fills, guaranteed execution, and highly flexible order types.

4. Unified Cross Chain Perp Dex Layer:

By unifying siloed multi-chain liquidity across multiple perpetual DEX sources, UniDex would benefit on the backs of larger and more established Perp DEX volume whilst providing the best trading execution, slippage and liquidity across all supported chains for its traders.

5. No staking needed for revenue sharing:

Rewards are automatically distributed to all EOA accounts holding $UNIDX every Saturday. Holders get 50% of extractable protocol fees paid in their selected, whitelisted ERC20 (Default is USDC on Optimism). This allows users to maintain access to their liquidity as well as increase the aggregate liquidity of the token on the secondary market.

6. AppChain narrative:

The future UniDex Appchain narrative will eventually result in the deflationary pivot for its token supply. Not only that, UniDex tokens will arguably be classified as a “public system” token based on the Token Mapping exercise with the Department of the Treasury due to its “gas token” specification.

7. Fully Circulating Supply:

With a fully circulating supply, no supply shock would hit the market through VC token unlocks, inflationary rewards or team allocation to alter the course of UniDex’s price discovery phase.

8. Low FDV compared to competitors:

At its current FDV of $37.63M, UniDex has the largest room to grow to capture market share from its competitors.

9. Active Community & Dev team:

Krunal and other mods are always active in keeping the community updated. Due to their proactive channels of communication between SNS networks, a thriving crypto community has surrounded the project - spearheading a strong direction in the utilisation of UniDex’s DeFi ecosystem.

Bearish Fundamentals:

1. Illiquid Secondary Market:

The token is relatively illiquid on the secondary market for institutional position sizing.

2. High concentration of Top Holders ownership of Tokens:

Being a 2-year-old project, UniDex has one of the strongest holders in the space. This is a by-product of a strong community however, is a bearish fundamental as the market continues to reprice the project upwards.

Closing Remarks

UniDex is a decentralised platform that aims to revolutionise the DeFi space by bridging the liquidity gap between siloed multi-chain perpetual DEX platforms and spot liquidity aggregators. It serves as a liquidity hub for DeFi builders to transact and get filled via short-term auction batches from various sources. With the introduction of the UniDex V3, the platform now captures positive slippage from token swaps, creating a new revenue stream for their DAO users and community members.

The UniDex PERP DEX V3 is also currently being tested, enabling users to execute transactions from a single wallet on one chain and have their orders filled on various DEXs across multiple chains without worrying about position routing or liquidity sourcing. UniDex's potential to transform true aggregation and perp dex integration is immense, and its growth is expected to increase as on-chain volume increases over time.

Special Thanks to @somniumwave for the UniDex Logo artwork, @Faycy_crypto & @interndao for permission to cite and @0xChiRho as an editorial contributor to the research piece.

References

Important notice and disclaimer

This presentation has been prepared by Greythorn Asset Management Pty Ltd (ABN 96 621 995 659) (Greythorn). The information in this presentation should be regarded as general information only rather than investment advice and financial advice. It is not an advertisement nor is it a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any financial instruments or to participate in any particular trading strategy. In preparing this document Greythorn did not take into account the investment objectives, financial circumstance or particular needs of any recipient who receives or reads it. Before making any investment decisions, recipients of this presentation should consider their own personal circumstances and seek professional advice from their accountant, lawyer or other professional adviser. This presentation contains statements, opinions, projections, forecasts and other material (forward looking statements), based on various assumptions. Greythorn is not obliged to update the information. Those assumptions may or may not prove to be correct. None of Greythorn, its officers, employees, agents, advisers or any other person named in this presentation makes any representation as to the accuracy or likelihood of fulfilment of any forward looking statements or any of the assumptions upon which they are based. Greythorn and its officers, employees, agents and advisers give no warranty, representation or guarantee as to the accuracy, completeness or reliability of the information contained in this presentation. None of Greythorn and its officers, employees, agents and advisers accept, to the extent permitted by law, responsibility for any loss, claim, damages, costs or expenses arising out of, or in connection with, the information contained in this presentation. This presentation is the property of Greythorn. By receiving this presentation, the recipient agrees to keep its content confidential and agrees not to copy, supply, disseminate or disclose any information in relation to its content without written consent.

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