Recently started using Paradex, a dex with zero-fee perps with deep liquidity and privacy which is backed by Paradigm. 100M in TVL, 30+ billion in monthly perps volume with 22M annualized revenue. Supports 15+ chains and has just 13,7K monthly users (still underfarmed). So with the ongoing perp DEX wars, let’s have a look at how Paradex stands out, and how you can best farm it. First of all, Paradex offers perps, perpetual options, and tokenized vaults all under one roof with universal cross-margin. Paradex recently slashed their fees down to zero (they are now one of the few perps dexes alongside Lighter to offer no fee trading). So in other words, retail pays zero maker/taker fees, and market makers pay fractional access fees for high-value, non-toxic liquidity. The outcome is zero-cost retail trading with market makers' funding platform revenue. This is completely different from how CEXs run their business, which rely on high taker fees to bankroll KOL referral payments and kickback programs, often extracting up to 80-90% of retail fees to pay influencers. Okay, so I am not going into more technical details here. I’ll rather recommend some good writeups in the end, if you want to deep dive into the tech. I was one of the early Lighter users, and in many ways @tradeparadex gives me many of the same feelings (+ you’re actually early here). Also worth noting that the platform held up really well on Oct 10 (no downtime and platform remained solvent). So Paradex is a perps platform built on its own EVM Layer 2 with a web dAPP & mobile app. Experience Points (XP) are Paradex’s universal reward system. Every contribution to the platform earns XP. XP will later be converted to DIME on TGE. 4 million XP are given to the traders every Friday, depending on several factors, but in my experience what gives the most points are: -trading volume (more XP on low OI/smaller alts) -holding positions longer, 10 sec scalps might not give much XP -trading daily -trade on new listings (why → to bring liq to new pairs) -liquidations -TVL in the vaults So, how do you create volume besides directional trades? A very popular strategy is to be delta neutral. Either hold spot in your wallet + short 1x on Paradex. Or you could use another perp dex (eg. Lighter because of zero fees). In the latter, you won’t earn funding fees, but at the same time, you could increase capital inefficiency. Ok, let’s do some easy calculations here. We know that the airdrop will be in the DIME token and that 5% will go to season 1, 15% to season 2 and that the team has teased that there will be more. So in total maybe 20-25%? I am going to use 20% as an estimate. For FDV, I think 500m - 3b is a reasonable estimate; let’s use 1b. At the end of S2 there will be 226m XP (see the table from @swannycrypto below). There’s a lot of assumptions here, but assuming the airdrop is in 10 weeks, we end up at approx. 1 per XP. As of now, 1 XP = 1-5k volume on alts (3-10k for BTC/ETH). So $1m volume = 200-1,000 XP = 200 - 1,000 for alts and 100-333 XP for BTC/ETH: 100 - 333. Again, the factors probably changes a lot, and with more users, it will be harder to get XP from the same volume. I have a hard time seeing how $10m in volume won’t give you 5k XP, though. Also, if perp DEXs become huge, which I think, then $1b FDV for Paradex is FUD, because it could be so much more. The market is still wildly mispricing what perp DEXs represent IMO. Perp DEXs aren’t just the next Robinhood or Binance. Perp Dexs are financial supercenters. They have the combined TAM of exchanges, clearinghouses, asset managers, custodians, banks, and brokerages in one financial megacenter. Sign up here using my ref link and you get 10% of my points: https://app.paradex.trade/r/route2fi(Route 2 FI)