For reasons everyone knows, I paid $700,000 in funding fees this year for shorting! The most painful part of traditional leveraged trading is the daily deduction of funding fees, slowly eating away at profits, and positions evaporating overnight. Saw that KillWolf posted about @protocol_fx, so I looked into their fee-saving model. They only charge fees twice—once when opening a position and once when closing it. If your position gets too risky, they don’t liquidate it immediately but reduce your position a bit first, giving you a lifeline. You can leverage up to 7–10x, and everything is done on-chain without relying on centralized platforms. For example, you invest $200, and the protocol helps you “boost” it to a $1,000 position. If it goes up 10%, you earn $50; if it drops, you don’t get wiped out instantly—you still have a chance to recover. It’s not a miracle solution, but at least it provides some buffer. Stablecoin product Currently, the annualized yield for fxUSD’s stable pool is around 12.7%, and TVL is steadily growing. The protocol earns roughly $1 million per quarter. You just need to deposit USDC or fxUSD to earn returns; if you want to be more aggressive, you can go to Curve to provide liquidity as an LP. On-chain data shows total deposits (from whales) amount to $268 million. No idea how the project team managed to gather so much money—they’re insanely rich and kind of scary. My thoughts The main theme of this cycle is stablecoins and DeFi. f(x) does pretty well in this area: it doesn’t sugarcoat market conditions or hide fee structures. You can clearly see how much you might earn or lose, when fees are charged, and when you can exit. Of course, it has its shortcomings—the mechanism is a bit complex, so beginners need to spend some time learning. Currently, it only supports ETH and BTC. Also, the team is still anonymous; rumor has it that it’s led by a former CTO of Huobi. Worth checking out: https://fx.aladdin.club/v2/trade/?code=Elizabeth