ZKX, a decentralized derivatives trading platform, will soon launch its beta version on StarkNet.
The company is looking to break down barriers to using DeFi and build an exchange that makes it easy for anyone in the world to trade derivatives of assets. It will offer a dynamic trading UX geared towards both retail and institutional traders. ZKX aims to provide an improved trading experience, with a governance structure that gives users more control over their actions and risk.
The team decided to build on top of StarkNet because it providesa more curated community of developers within Starkware’s ecosystem. The increasing popularity of StarkWare along with the great technical capabilities are going to allow ZKX a quick and stable growth along each axis. StarkNet, a ZK-Rollup Ethereum scaling solution enabling any dApp to achieve unlimited scale for its computation without compromising Ethereum's composability and security.
As per ZKX, the problems they’re solving are:
Lack of permissionless listing of derivatives for upcoming projects within Web3. Dependencies on oracles, market makers and centralized listing mechanisms.
Difficulty in bootstrapping liquidity and depth of market for new assets that want to be listed as derivatives. No native liquidity incentives for derivatives protocols, traders and market makers
Current offering of swaps is limited to perpetual swaps, which have Product Market Fit, but retail and institutional traders have the need for more sophisticated tools of investment within crypto.
The five essential properties that differentiate the ZKX protocol from others are :
Powered by a DAO: A novel architecture where the DAO is placed on top of the open-source protocol to coordinate growth, enabling DAOs and projects to list derivatives markets for their tokens and offer incentives for the community to trade them.
Decentralized Limit Order Book (DLOB): A unique node network that will help scale the derivatives exchange with a permissionless node client. The node network will provide price feeds directly to the exchange to improve efficiency for both retail and high-frequency institutional traders. The consensus algorithm will enable trust and security within the network while custody of funds will always remain with the user (fully non-custodial).
Financial Innovation: A revamped funding rate will adapt to the underlying asset's volatility, providing a premium on riskier assets to incentivize stakeholders to maintain balance in the orderbook. This allows us to offer perpetual swaps with innovative payoff structures inspired by well-known option strategies, like the Straddle, Strangle, and Butterfly Spread.
Swap Liquidity Mining: DAOs, protocols, and community stakeholders will be able to list new assets and offer incentives to trade these new perpetual swaps with any ERC-20 pair of their choice. By enabling a native liquidity bootstrapping mechanism, ZKX's open-source derivatives protocol can grow along with the community.
L2 scaling: Our simple trading interface is powered by StarkNet, StarkWare's ZK rollup. We're talking low fees, instant settlements, fast withdrawals on the platform, and the support of the ever-growing StarkWare ecosystem.
Investors
ZKX announced a closing of a $4.5 million seed funding round from investors including StarkWare, Huobi, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon; Ashwin Ramachandran, general partner at DragonFly Capital; and Steven Xu, founder of Crypto.com
The Team
The team behind this project is without a doubt very skilled and competent. Eduard Jubany Tur, Naman Sehgal, and Vitaly Yakovlev founded the company in 2021. Prior to founding ZKX, Eduard and Naman held leadership positions at SOSV, one of the world’s top VC firms managing $1.2 billion USD worth of assets. The 30+ person remainder of ZKX team includes top talent from Flipkart, PayTM, and Byju’s, with decades of shared experience in venture building and technology startup scaling across eight countries.
Eduard Jubany Tur
Founder and CEO
Vitaly Yakovlev
CTO
Naman S.
Co-founder and COO
Community
The team understands community building is one of the crucial aspects of a project's success, and they’ve done a solid job so far. ZKX has a huge community of over 60 thousand supporters across Discord, Twitter and Telegram eagerly waiting for the beta version to drop and give it a go.
Roadmap
2021
Team Formation
StarkWare Grant
│
2022
Q1
PoC on ZK-Rollup
Q2
Raised Seed Fund of $4.5m
Q3
Nethermind Smart Contract Audit
│
2023
Token Launch
Mainnet
Q4
Technical Papers
TestNet Launch
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