It’s been over a month since we gave you the last Unstoppable article, and if you know how much we love Unstoppable, that’s a couple of weeks too long. 

Look, I know most of you are probably uninterested in DeFi at the moment. The space has dried up, we haven’t seen much innovation, the yields are getting harder to squeeze, and most importantly, the coins aren’t going up. 

While we apes may have lost hope, we assure you that the devs haven’t. When interest/sentiment is low but people keep building, that is precisely when you should focus on that particular sector. 

If DeFi makes the comeback that we think it will, then there’s no better time to pay attention than now. 

Out of the many projects to pay attention to, Unstoppable certainly has to be on your radar. 

From the beginning, their aim has been to overthrow our centralized exchange (CEX) overlords by offering all the features of a CEX without compromising on self-custody and decentralization. 

To do this, they need a sleek and intuitive UI paired with a seamless UX, and their app does exactly that. 

So, as we get closer to the full launch of Unstoppable, we don’t want you guys flying blind. Instead, we’ll try to give you a rough estimate of just how big we think Unstoppable can get. 

To do this, we will compare existing perp DEXs and CEXs based on volumes, fees, and general usage. 

We’ll also examine the success of other protocols that use an isolated application experience. At the end, we’ll tie all of this together to give you a rough estimate of just how big we think Unstoppable can be. 

So let’s break down this sleeping giant. 

What’s the word in the perp DEX world? 

To start this breakdown, we need first to zoom all the way out. 

The perp DEX sector has been growing rapidly ever since the FTX collapse. If we look at the top 5 hottest perp DEXs, they have a combined total volume of roughly $550B. 

That’s no small feat. On this volume, roughly $250M has been generated in fees and been redistributed to token holders. 

Lucrative is an understatement. 

However, to analyze the Unstoppable growth story, we need to have a little history lesson on how the current market leaders reached their position. 

We can break down the current landscape into three broad categories. dYdX has been a pioneer in this space. After dYdX came GMX, which rose to popularity by leveraging the shared liquidity pool model. 

Today, we have newer players like Hyperliquid and IntentX, who rose to popularity by taking advantage of the points to airdrop meta. 

The king of on-chain orderbooks is dYdX, and they’ve been there since before perps were even a thing. Their longevity is impressive, seeing that they still average around $850M in daily volume. 

Eventually, innovators like GMX took advantage of a post-FTX climate to skyrocket in popularity, averaging hundreds of millions of dollars in daily volume at the time. 

Innovation has only continued as projects like IntentX pioneered the intents-based architecture while products like Hyperliquid improved upon the on-chain orderbook. 

Both of these products added upon their innovation the popular incentivisation of points which led to them seeing large volume inflows. 

For example, Hyperliquid alone did a cumulative volume of $200B. 

Yes, that’s a B for billion. 

Despite all this growth in the perp DEX sector, combined with very clear evidence that trusting CEXs is extremely risky, DEXs still get dwarfed by CEXs. 

As the chart above shows, DEXs are still 1% of the total futures market in terms of volume, and they’ve in fact been dwindling since last year. 

Now, there are a lot of factors that could’ve contributed to this. 

Institutional money probably feels more comfortable having their funds on a CEX with which they have good relations, as they can get more customisability and have a point of contact in case mistakes happen. 

Pair this with the fact that we often see major pricing issues on DEX perps where oracle failures or liquidity issues cause massive wicks leading to liquidation, and we can see why institutions prefer this. 

The other issue is liquidity; bigger traders will naturally prefer more liquid venues, and until DEX perps figure out a way to compete in liquidity, CEXs will still dominate. 

The other issues are fees and execution times. Fees are low and predictable on CEXs and execution times are instant. The same cannot be said for DEX perps. 

However, a new kid is coming to the block very shortly, and that new kid is Unstoppable with their very own app. 

If you read our articles covering their apps (here and here), you may already know that all the problems will be solved. 

The only thing we cannot guarantee is liquidity because it is always going to be unpredictable, but if there were a team to figure it out, it would be Unstoppable.

However, a top-notch perp DEX to beat the rest is not enough. Remember how we told you their mission is to overthrow CEXs? 

Well CEXs aren’t so big because all they offer is perpetuals. Every CEX has a comprehensive product suite which sets them apart from a regular perp DEX. 

Of course, Unstoppable does the same. 

The CEX product suite

If we look at platforms like Binance, Bybit, or even Robinhood, they offer a plethora of different products. 

They offer:

• Fiat on/off ramp 
• Spot trading 
• Trading bots 
• Earn products 

All of this is offered on top of their bread and butter, which is perps, making it a much more holistic user experience. 

While the data on how much these CEXs make from their alternate product offerings is unknown, we can make some estimations. 

We know the majority of CEXs’ revenue comes from fees. Spot markets and fiat on/off ramp fees will likely make up a major chunk of revenue. 

If perps account for roughly 70% of their business, we can assume that spot markets and on/off ramps account for 25% of the business. 

Then, they offer other products like borrowing or even earn products, which allow users to stake assets through them and earn a certain yield. 

These additional offerings aren’t necessarily targeted to crypto native users who hold their assets and stake them on-chain. It targets a completely new crypto-familiar user base that wants rewards but doesn’t have the time or expertise to execute the strategies themselves. 

At the end of the day, the goal is to attract as many users as possible, which means making multiple products that can cater to all of them. 

In the on-chain world, this kind of comprehensive product suite doesn’t exist. Each protocol targets a certain niche and does only that, so users must keep track of multiple protocols for different purposes. 

You have to look at Hyperliquid for perps, Uniswap for spot, AAVE for lending/borrowing, Lido for earning yield, and some automated liquidity managers to earn passive income. It’s all very hectic. 

We all love the on-chain world for a simple reason: self-custody with the added benefits of transparency and censorship resistance, something that CEX can’t offer. 

Therefore, Unstoppable noticed this gap in the market and have decided to act on it. 

Not only will they offer simple leverage trading, but you will also have spot markets, fiat on/off ramps, and an earn product to earn passive income directly on the app while maintaining custody of assets. 

From onboarding to trading to earning, all under one roof. 

But there’s another thing that CEXs have over DEXs. That’s a sleek mobile user experience. 

Many crypto projects have tried apps, but they have never worked out due to security and regulatory concerns. Unfortunately, in this age, an app is necessary to widen your target audience. 

Unstoppable has that on lock, too. 

In-house applications

Initially, dApps were simply websites that acted as fancy frontends to use smart contracts. 

These so-called apps were heavily criticized by crypto and non-crypto folk alike. The popular complaint was a poor UI and UX that could only be understood and effectively used by crypto-native people. 

In general, this criticism was fair, but some of these apps were very hard for the average person to use.

However, since then, applications have evolved a lot. The average crypto application website is now 10x better in terms of UI/UX, but not only that, protocols have leaped forward in the mobile application front. 

Everyone has a smartphone, so it only makes sense for the end goal to be applications that are accessible to everyone. 

Initially, crypto mobile applications were not used due to opsec issues of data and private key leaks. But now, a newer and much superior model is downloading browser apps to your home screen and using them as any regular application. 

This was popularised by Friend.tech, the social-fi platform, and crypto users and developers, who have now been given obvious evidence that this model works. Unstoppable will be using the very same model for their application. 

So, let’s look at some stats to see how effective this model is. 

Let’s start with usage. An app experience like Friend.tech did 14M transactions in just a few months. 

It’s hard to get exact unique user stats, but estimates suggest that the protocol had 915K unique buyers and 271K unique sellers. 

All these buyers and sellers generated around $450M in total volume for the platform, which generated around $22M in fees. 

These impressive stats were achieved in just a few months of hype primarily driven by the points meta. 

As expected, the app is barely used after everyone got their airdrop, but that’s just down to how the product was marketed. 

If we look at it purely from a UI/UX perspective, the whole app experience was great, and we expect to see it emulated throughout crypto in the near future. 

Okay, so now we understand the current DEX perp landscape and the new in-house app landscape. The next step is to combine our knowledge of the two to come up with a rough estimate of how big Unstoppable can get. 

An Unstoppable valuation 

Unstoppable is not only creating a DEX perp experience that can rival the UX of a CEX, but they’re doing so with their browser app, which, I can tell you from using the early access, is incredible. 

So, let’s look at valuations. 

Friend.tech, backed but not endorsed by Paradigm ;), launched at a $200M valuation. 

Granted, all the airdrop hype contributed to the high valuation, so it’s difficult to say how much is attributed to the app's actual use. However, the market has corrected, and it’s currently at a $30M valuation. 

If we look at perp DEXs, we have GMX, which has a market cap of around $215M after losing a significant amount of steam from its heyday, and the market leader in dYdX, which has a fully diluted valuation of $1B. The rest of the competitors are somewhere in between. 

For simplicity’s sake, let’s take dYdX. It’s been around the longest, so it serves as a sort of perp DEX benchmark. Over the past three months, they averaged around $850M in daily volume. 

Considering that Unstoppable will be a newer DEX, let’s discount it and say that initially, the protocol will do 10% of what dYdX does. 

If we do some hand-wavey crypto marketcapof.com maths, then on the conservative side, Unstoppable could be worth around $100M by doing 10% of what dYdX does. 

In addition, the superiority of a mobile app experience and a $110M valuation seems reasonable. 

But let’s say we go even more conservative and look at GMX on the lower end. 

They’ve averaged a daily volume of $190M these past three months. Despite that, they have a market cap of $275M. 

Doing 50% of GMX’s activity, given the issues they’ve been having, looks pretty reasonable. Hence, a valuation of $100M at least seems fair. 

But we have to remember the CEX:DEX ratio. DEX perps are still 1% of the entire perp market, so there’s a lot of pie left to grab. 

From the start, Unstoppable's main competition has always been CEX rather than DEX. Chipping away at that market share has always been the goal, and it is a very real possibility. 

Binance recently has been doing roughly $13B in daily volume, Bybit has been doing $3.9B, OKX has been doing around $2.2B, and even a smaller exchange like MEXC has been doing around $1.1B in daily volume. 

Unstoppable's mobile app experience rivals any CEX experience, but it also offers additional products such as on/off ramps, earn, and spot markets. 

The difference is the added benefit of self-custody. If liquidity isn’t a problem, then chipping away at CEX market share could mean valuations upwards of $1B. 

But let’s take an even longer-term approach, say 4-5 years from now. What if DEX perps' market share goes from 1% to 20%? 

A 20x increase in the entire sector means individual winners in this sector would catapult to insurmountable heights. 

In this scenario, valuations of $10B+ five years down the line aren’t as crazy as they sound. Unstoppable is making an all-in-one trading solution offering multiple products, a sleek app, and easy onboarding. 

Being a winner amongst the DEXs seems like a certainty at this point. The main question is just how much of the CEX market can they chip away at. 

Of course, I understand this is very nuanced, there’s a lot of ifs, ands, and maybes. 

There are also many discrepancies with tokenomics and distribution, but the idea is just for us to show you that if you expand your horizons a bit more, some things are still very mispriced compared to their potential. 

We believe Unstoppable is among the top of that list. 

Concluding thoughts 

We’ve been in absolute hell for the past three months as the market has chopped everyone to bits and it looks like some nice respite has arrived.

But while everyone is on holiday or losing their mind trading the 1m chart, that’s the time you should be looking for these mispriced opportunities. 

At blocmates, our job is to shine a light on the best and brightest in this industry and let you decide from there. 

There is nothing more I have to say about Unstoppable that hasn’t already been said in our past articles. 

They are absolute phenoms, and the market just hasn’t woken up to this fact. Soon, they will, and we just hope you’re up earlier than the rest.