Decentralized crypto exchange starts the competition in search of real alpha

Decentralized exchange dYdX Trading on Wednesday started its first trading competition on the cryptocurrency protocol – with the aim of putting an influencer against a trader with their money, literally, where their mouth is.

Competitors must buy in with $ 2,500 worth of stablecoin USDC, an amount they get back – along with any profits – after the event. There are also exclusive non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cash prizes, denominated in stack coins.

The founder and CEO of the Decentralized Stock Exchange (DEX), Antonio Juliano, told Blockworks that many traders are hyping up their ability to derive alpha via Telegram groups and Twitter, but it is not necessarily a public “good way to objectively measure how well” people perform. “

Rankings for the most knowledgeable traders will be measured in both dollars won and lost and percentage gains and falls. The latter is an attempt to eliminate whales that enter and park their voluminous assets in safe play to generate a medium return on a large amount of cryptocurrency.

The idea is for participants to test their ability across a wide range of floating cryptocurrencies, including DeFi digital assets.

DEX also plans to hold a series of Twitter rooms to guide the public into how the best traders “think about market movements”, as well as delve into relevant macro themes.

The launch comes as crypto markets continue to falter, having lost trillions of dollars in market value since record highs, following the demise of Terra stablecoin UST and, more recently, the collapse of insolvent crypto lenders, including Celsius and Voyager.

However, it can be argued that traders – and especially those of the retail trade – are now more than ever hungry for access to reputable information.

Juliano’s team – which has added employees, although a number of high-profile crypto companies have been forced to make sharp cuts – has an iPhone app and is now working on an Android sister product. The ultimate goal is to make the experience of buying and selling digital assets on dYdX as seamless for traders as it is to log on to centralized exchanges such as Coinbase and execute a transaction.

Although DEXs have come a long way in terms of usability and accessibility, say industry participants, in the eerie, difficult to understand world of DeFi (decentralized finance), there is still a lot of work to be done.

Despite the market downturn, Juliano said he is optimistic that DeFi is here to stay.

“How does DeFi win?” he asked. “It’s about creating a product that people actually want to use.”

The stock exchange also has its own DAO, complete with a native management token that dictates how DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) works on a daily basis.

On the whole, DEXs like dYdX have cut into the trading volumes of centralized titans, including Coinbase and Kraken, in a remarkable way. But in Juliano’s mind, the “most likely scenario is that the two exist together for a while.” And some DEXs have lower fees than centralized market makers – another potential boon for traders.

The team is also working on the next iteration of the original protocol, an experiment that is expected to take six months or so that would ideally result in a fully decentralized platform, where the company largely takes a back seat to the community.

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