Over the past year, we’ve seen a tremendous shift in market structure and the types of products that people enjoy most. What’s become clear as day is that speculation is and will always be crypto’s greatest gift to the world. Unadulterated and frictionless chaos that anyone can join to try their luck.

The typical casino lover, sports enthusiast, or bingo player would likely find it hard to believe the occurrences in the realm of on-chain warfare.

Seemingly, every day, crypto mints a new millionaire, and it's well known that 99% of those whose aspirations come to fruition owe it to memecoins.

Interest is evidently in the court of vibes and cults, as opposed to VC infrastructure vaporwave, and people are increasingly willing to tie themselves to a particular memecoin and hold it over the longer term.

While many have been anticipating a shift towards DeFi utility projects throughout this cycle, it's clear that DeFi might need more time to cook. Going forward, those DeFi projects that manage to capture the fascination of the memecoin crowd will undoubtedly reap the rewards.

The project we’re about to discuss, Demex, is doing just that and is also undergoing a brand re-positioning that presents exciting opportunities for traders to capitalize on, if you catch my drift.

Read on, anon; you won’t be disappointed.

New beginnings

It’s essential to take a moment to reflect on the past to understand our current situation.

Initially named Carbon Network, the chain was explicitly built for DeFi and trading. Carbon was constructed using the Cosmos SDK and runs on its own proprietary tendermint consensus engine known as DemexBFT.

While a DeFi-focused Cosmos chain offers several advantages, including cheap and fast transactions and unmatched interoperability, Carbon only came online in 2022 in the midst of the great crypto depression.

On a side note, if you survived that year, hats off to you.

Since then, the market has not only changed in terms of favored products but also consolidated into just a few dominant platforms like Solana and Ethereum L2s. Only a handful of outliers like Hyperliquid and dYdX have managed to stay relevant.

While the core technology remains rooted in Cosmos, Demex is now dedicated to embracing the diverse needs of the crypto community, particularly targeting the vibrant memecoin traders.

Demex, the Swiss knife of on-chain speculation

It's common for startups to change direction, particularly in the fast-paced crypto industry. By adopting a fresh image, rebranding, and focusing on a new target audience, Demex aims to eliminate excess baggage while building on the established foundation.

In particular, the Demex exchange operates on the robust and scalable Carbon network, which the team has spent years developing. It's a blockchain designed for trading, featuring up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) and 1.8-second block times. This ensures that its trading engine is fully decentralized and resistant to miner extractable value (MEV).

The platform is split into two separate areas—Trade and Earn—enabling users to explore a range of strategies. These two sections also work hand in hand at the infrastructure level to offer efficient trading and yield generation opportunities.

Trading

Trading and investing are the most prevalent forms of speculation in crypto. Although most of this activity still occurs on centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges are gradually eroding their dominance.

This presents on-chain trading venues like Demex with a unique opportunity to gain a slice of the ever-growing pie.

To explore the data further, perpetual contracts, or perps, bring an average of 3x the volume compared to spot trading. With that in mind, here’s a rundown of why Demex stands out among its competitors.

First and foremost, trading platforms should focus on being chain-agnostic, supporting a wide array of wallets and social login options. Furthermore, partnering with bridging networks that accommodate the highest number of chains is essential.

Thanks to the Axelar network and IBC Protocol, users from practically all corners of the blockchain landscape can easily transfer assets to and from the Demex exchange.

The upcoming partnership with Skip protocol will expand this capability even further by allowing users to bridge assets and swap them into their preferred assets simultaneously. This partnership also brings unparalleled spot trading directly on the platform by tapping into external liquidity sources and intelligent routing offered by Skip.

Once users have bridged either native USDC or axlUSDC to Demex, these tokens are seamlessly converted into USDⒼ, which is backed 1:1 by USDC and axlUSDC.

USDⒼ serves as the token used for denominating perpetual contracts. When users wish to withdraw USDⒼ, it can be exchanged back into either USDC or axlUSDC.

After that’s done, users are greeted with a sleek and modern interface that features all the bells and whistles a trader would want — customizable UI, one-click trading, newsreel, and real-time pop-up notifications.

The team has gone above and beyond by enhancing the user interface for mobile devices, catering to those who can't resist clicking buttons.

The platform offers deep liquidity and low spreads for perpetual trading, supported by market makers alongside AMM liquidity pools (which we’ll discuss in the Earn section). This setup enables traders to enter and exit leveraged positions with minimal slippage and reduced losses from spreads.

Demex features around 100 markets available to be traded with leverage up to 50x, ranging from majors to crowd-favorites like Popcat or Bonk.

Moreover, with the upcoming introduction of cross-margin and multi-collateral features, Demex is poised to be one of the most capital-efficient platforms in the market.

This improvement will allow traders to use a single margin account to trade multiple contracts or markets simultaneously.

To make this possible, someone has to provide liquidity and execute the trades to make efficient trading feasible. For Demex, that’s achieved by dedicated market makers working together with AMM pools available in the Earn section of the UI.

Earn

Every trade you execute, whether on a centralized or decentralized exchange, involves a counterparty that fulfills your order.

On platforms like Binance or Coinbase, this role is handled by professional firms with immense computational power, enabling trades to be executed in milliseconds to bridge the gaps between bids and asks.

In contrast, decentralized exchanges like Uniswap use an automated market maker (AMM) to perform this function. AMMs allow users to trade without human intervention, relying solely on smart contracts, thus facilitating price discovery for on-chain assets.

However, the AMM model has drawbacks compared to traditional order books, resulting in higher slippage, slower execution, and risks of sandwich attacks. The solution is to merge the strengths of both systems.

Since liquidity is mainly sourced from the LP pools for every transaction on the Demex platform, those who supply liquidity to these pools effectively become the counterparties for all traders.

Market makers merely act as a supplementary mechanism in case there’s a shortage of available liquidity.

Here's a little secret that highlights the advantage for LP providers: Most traders tend to lose money over time, and many approach trading, almost like a gamble. Consequently, by contributing liquidity to the LP pools, they essentially position themselves as "the house."

As mentioned, Demex supports both spot and perp trading.

Via spot trading, users acquire the underlying asset when they execute a trade. The same applies to LP providers who wish to deposit money into the respective LP pool. Users must provide the two tokens on both sides of a spot market.

However, when users trade perps, the asset's price is merely tracked by oracles, meaning they do not own it outrightly. They have to provide collateral in the form of USDⒼ to trade and use leverage.

Users who wish to deposit in the perp LP pools simply have to provide USDⒼ. Once you’ve done that, voila, you’ve become a casino shareholder.

In addition, imagine having the freedom to determine which part of the casino you'd like to provide liquidity to. Think players often lose more at the slot machines? You can add liquidity to the FOMO LP. Prefer the house edge in roulette? The L1 sector is all yours!

This list includes dedicated pools that provide market-making to sectors such as DeFi protocols, L1 blockchains, the Solana ecosystem, and the most interesting of them — the FOMO LP, which includes the 20+ memecoins available on the Demex platform.  

But how’s that achieved?

Demex’s capital-efficient infrastructure enables effective liquidity management across multiple markets.

For instance, when a user deposits $10,000 into the FOMO LP, this amount is not distributed evenly amongst all markets. Instead, it can be replicated on both the buy and sell sides for all the markets within that LP pool, which boosts capital efficiency and enhances the chances of liquidity being utilized, resulting in increased fee earnings.

However, to ensure liquidity across markets, Demex typically replicates only a portion of the deposit. This strategy prevents any single market from becoming fully utilized at the expense of others, leading to sky-high borrowing costs.

All in all, Demex LPs enjoy:

• One of the highest maker rebates (6 bps)
• Dynamic funding fee
• Fees from traders’ PNL (specifically losses)
• External incentives from other protocols

And yet, Demex has more tricks up its sleeve.

Upcoming product launches

While crypto is already the most volatile market known to man, the fact that perps are raking in 3x more volume than regular spot markets shows how far crypto market participants are willing to go down the risk curve.

If there was a way to 100x long a shitter that’s just graduated from Pump.fun to Raydium, you bet a lot of people would exercise that option.

In the near future, this will be possible on Demex through permissionless perp listings. Yes, anyone will be able to create a market for an asset, as long as it has oracle support, by adding initial liquidity to that market.

The permissionless perps listing feature allows any market to be launched on the platform. Prediction markets will soon be available as well.

Polymarket undoubtedly put prediction markets out on the map, but its current functionality still leaves much to be desired.

For example, users on Demex will be able to not only bet on a specific outcome but also do so with leverage while utilizing the full suite of risk management functions like stop-loss and take-profits.

These forthcoming products are part of a greater initiative to rise above merely being another perpetual decentralized exchange and ultimately appeal to a much broader audience.

The road ahead for Demex:

A new identity naturally requires a new token. Am I right?

Tokenomics

Since Demex operates on its own layer-1, it requires a token for gas fees and to ensure the chain's security. Previously, this responsibility was assumed by SWTH.

Soon, this token will be succeeded by one featuring a more appealing ticker and improved economic structure — DMX. I have to say, the ticker will surely resonate with fans of the late Earl Simmons.

For those holding onto SWTH with unwavering confidence, rest assured, the new token will be airdropped on a 1:1 basis and the vesting terms will follow the industry's standard.

The DMX token serves purposes beyond governance and basic transaction fees. Users who choose to stake DMX will earn block rewards for securing the network and a share of trading fees alongside other revenue sources, including permissionless perpetual market listings.

Additionally, a structured token buyback is proposed to help enhance the value of the DMX token.

The new token will also enable the team to allocate resources for strategic expansion, including engaging professional market-making firms, securing exchange listings, forming partnerships with other protocols, and maintaining a treasury that supports upgrades to existing offerings and aids in introducing new ones.

Now that we’ve outlined how the new token benefits the protocol, here’s some alpha for you, anon.

For every $10,000 in perpetual volume or every $1,000 deposited in perpetual liquidity pools (LPs), you earn 1 spin on the Demex Points wheel (once every week).

The more spins you accumulate, the more points you get, and the higher your potential allocation of DMX during the token generation event (TGE), expected at the end of Q1 2025.

But wait, there’s more.

Mantle trading league

How convenient that you’ve just learned everything about Demex and how it plans to make waves in the market with its multi-faceted product, and there’s a recently launched trading competition in collaboration with Mantle that features a prize pool of up to $10,000?

That’s what we do here at blocmates — provide alpha before anyone else.

The objective is straightforward: Trade to earn points and rise through the leaderboard for a chance to win from the 10,000 USDC prize pool.

Points System

• Earn 1 point for every $1 in trading volume on perpetual markets.
• Earn a boosted rate of 3 points for every $1 in trading volume on MNT (Mantle's token).

Focus on trading MNT to maximize your points due to the higher multiplier.

Maximize Volume

• Aim for a high trading volume to accumulate points quickly. For example, if you trade $10,000 in perpetual markets, you would earn 10,000 points.
• If you trade $10,000 in MNT, you will earn 30,000 points(3x multiplier).

Closing thoughts

While crypto can often feel like an endless sprint, it's really more of a marathon with occasional bursts of rapid energy. Teams need to remain adaptable, but they should also be mindful of the overarching vision.

The competition might seem fierce, especially in the perp DEX market, but it’s important to remember the graph we showed at the start — the goal is to move people away from centralized venues and show them the power of self-custody.

The platform that simplifies the onboarding process and provides a wide range of tools will likely secure a substantial portion of the growing market.

With a strong foundation in its fully operational perpetual DEX, sector-specific liquidity pools, and the upcoming permissionless perpetual listing feature, Demex is in a favorable position for success as it heads into 2025 and its TGE.