GMX Development Plan for 2025
As we start 2025, GMX is excited to unveil the development plan for the months ahead. This GMX v2.2 plan is the result of in-depth discussions with contributors and the community.
Exec Summary
Multichain: trade on GMX from any supported chain
Gasless Transactions
Network Fee Subsidies
Cross-collateral Support
Lowered Price Impact
Scaling Liquidity via Net Open Interest
And what comes after…
2024: Growth and Innovation
Before we explore all that's ahead, let's recap the key milestones achieved in the past year. In 2024, numerous enhancements to GMX v2 have been realised:
Adaptive Funding Rate: Significantly improved the pools’ balance between longs and shorts.
RewardRouter Updates:
Introduced a cap on the boost from Multiplier Points (later, MPs were sunset).
Enabled reward distribution in GMX tokens.
GMX V2.1:
Shifts: Simplified moving liquidity between GM markets.
Auto-Cancelling Orders: Automatically cancel related orders on position close.
Atomic Withdrawals: Enhanced support for lending markets.
Kink Borrowing Rate: Lowered borrowing rates during normal usage, while scaling them during high demand.
Switched to Chainlink Data Streams’ time-based oracle for improved speed and reliability.
Launched GLV:
Innovative vault that dynamically moves liquidity between GM markets when their demand rises.
GLV improves upon the GLP concept, and allows more synthetic markets to be supported on GMX.
Added support for GMX Token rewards
Changing the fee distribution system from ETH/AVAX rewards to the distribution of native GMX rewards
Integrated Chaos Labs Risk Oracle:
Implemented automatic high-frequency updates to Open Interest parameters based on current market conditions, improving protocol security.
Enabled dynamic Price Impact according to market conditions, improving pricing and UX for traders
Lowered borrowing and funding rates:
Efforts are underway to optimise the borrowing and funding rates, in a way that balances the experience of traders as well as liquidity providers.
UI and Speed improvements:
Significant work has been done on improving the loading speed, stability and responsiveness of the GMX website and dApp.
Refinements of the user interface are being worked on alongside these efforts.
Looking Ahead: GMX V2.2 Development Plan
Without specifying a particular order of development, the GMX v2.2 Development Plan includes the following key elements:
1. Gasless Transactions
Gasless transactions can be implemented to improve reliability even during times of blockchain congestion
Gasless transactions would allow users to trade by just signing a message in their wallet.
Trades would be broadcasted via keeper networks like Gelato, ensuring reliability even in high-demand periods.
It also simplifies the 1-Click Trading account setup, by eliminating the need for the 1CT account to be funded with any gas tokens.
Goal: Enhance stability, reliability, and user experience (UX).
2. Network Cost Subsidies
High network fees during times of blockchain congestion have been a persistent issue. A network fee pool funded by a portion of the open and close fees can be created to reduce users’ network costs:
This pool would subsidise a percentage of users’ network costs (based on trade size to prevent waste or abuse.)
Would require a Snapshot vote to enable the required fee allocation.
Goal: Reduce network fees and improve UX for traders.
3. Multichain Support
To vastly expand accessibility, GMX can introduce virtual accounts for seamless cross-chain trading:
Users could trade on GMX from any supported chain, without switching networks or bridging gas tokens, and enjoy full access to the existing liquidity on Arbitrum and Avalanche.
The user would send a transaction on the source chain. This transaction would bridge funds to a current GMX deployment, with those funds stored in a MultichainVault securely linked to the user’s account.
To trade, the user would just need to sign a message on the source chain for each trade. This can even be further simplified if the user enables 1-Click Trading.
Future iterations could enable the minting of GM tokens from any supported source chains. The composable GM token would then be bridged back to the source chain and be usable by GMX integrations.
Goal: Provide seamless cross-chain trading while leveraging the existing deep GMX liquidity.
4. Cross-Collateral
This feature would enable using assets like USDC as collateral in the single-token pools (such as ETH/USD [WETH], BTC/USD [BTC] and SOL/USD [SOL]).
Goal: Improve liquidity utilisation and provide more flexibility for traders and liquidity providers.
5. Capped Price Impact
Based on the ideas proposed by community member Q, the Price Impact mechanism could be adjusted to improve trader UX.
Instead of charging price impact on position open, this price impact could be stored in the contract and the net price impact (open + close price impact) would be charged on position close.
This would allow the current price impact rebates to be applied to an entire trade.
This mechanism could enable virtually zero price impact for highly liquid markets like BTC and ETH, while maintaining limited price impact for less liquid markets.
Goal: Reduce price impact and streamline trader experience.
6. Net Open Interest Limits
To further optimise liquidity efficiency:
Introduce a configuration limiting the maximum difference between long and short open interest: capped net open interest. (This restriction would apply only during position open and not during position close.)
This restriction would allow reserve factors for the pools to be increased, allowing higher open interest to be supported by existing levels of liquidity while managing risk.
With supportable open interest increased in this manner, the borrowing fee can be reduced. Increased pool fees would offer users sufficient incentive to provide liquidity to the GM pools.
Goal: increase liquidity efficiency.
Beyond v2.2’s Advancements: Outlining GMX v2.3
Realising the six elements mentioned above will lead to big improvements in protocol stability, liquidity efficiency, streamlined trader UX and cross-chain accessibility. This is expected to take a few months to complete, and the changes may be released in separate phases depending on the timeline and progress.
Looking ahead to v2.3, these are two subsequent development priorities being proposed:
1. Cross-Margin
A frequently requested feature, that builds on v2.2’s cross-collateral functionality.
Unlike isolated margin, this margin method will allow all positions to share the same collateral. This means that positive PnL from existing positions can be used as margin for other positions. As a result, traders can utilise their entire available funds, reducing the risk of liquidation and boosting capital efficiency.
2. Market Groups
Currently, liquidity in similar perp markets is separated by pools, e.g. ETH [WETH-USDC] and ETH [WETH-WETH]. To simplify the trading experience, it may be possible to aggregate these similar perp markets under a single group.
For example, there could be an ETH/USD group that would include the following pools:
ETH [WETH-USDC]
ETH [WETH-WETH]
ETH [USDC-USDC]
This approach would reduce complexity and unify liquidity. Traders would interact with a single market group instead of choosing from multiple pools, while liquidity providers would continue to manage individual pools as usual.
With this aspect of the UX simplified, there could also be additional options offered to liquidity providers to provide liquidity in their preferred token.
Closing Thoughts
In the coming months, GMX is set to deliver significant advancements. With v2.2, the focus is on enhancing stability, lowering costs for users, and enabling multichain access. Following that, GMX v2.3 will further optimise the trading and liquidity experience, making markets more capital-efficient for the benefit of both traders and LPs alike.
These developments reflect GMX’s commitment to creating an accessible, high-performance, user-friendly platform powered by public blockchains and decentralised technology.
Today, the GMX DEX is trusted by thousands of users every day, facilitating billions of dollars in weekly trading volume. The protocol serves as a foundational liquidity layer for the DeFi infrastructure on Arbitrum and Avalanche.
In the near future, this trading and liquidity infrastructure will expand to include Solana and will be accessible from any supported EVM blockchain. This will further solidify GMX’s role as a base layer for an interconnected decentralised finance ecosystem.
We invite the blueberry community to engage with these plans, share feedback, and help shape the future of the protocol.
Massive vision. Let's go!