What Is Perpetual Protocol (PERP)?
Perpetual Protocol is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for futures on Ethereum and xDai. Traders can go long or short with up to 10X leverage on a growing number of assets like BTC, ETH, DOT, SNX, YFI and others. Trading is non-custodial, meaning traders always retain possession of their assets, and on-chain. Perpetual Protocol utilizes a virtual automated market maker (vAMM), which provides on-chain liquidity with predictable pricing set by constant product curves. Furthermore, Perpetual Protocol designed its vAMMs to be market-neutral and fully collateralized.
The declared vision of Perpetual Protocol is to create the world’s best, most accessible, and most secure decentralized derivatives trading platform. By building on our DeFi projects and allowing projects to build on Perpetual Protocol, the company embraces the “DeFi money lego” ethos. After hitting a number of milestones in its roadmap, such as launching staking pools and implementing limit and stop-orders, Perpetual Protocol plans to expand to other chains, introduce leveraged tokens, and launch dynamic liquidity in its pools.
Who Are the Founders of Perpetual Protocol?
Perpetual Protocol was launched by Yenfen Weng and Shao-Kang Lee, two Taiwanese cryptocurrency entrepreneurs that previously had launched payroll & accounting companies for crypto startups. Most of the team is based in Taiwan. Perpetual Protocol is backed by many highly reputable investors, such as Zee Prime Capital, Multiarrows Capital, CMS Holdings, Binance Labs and Alameda Research, a strategic partner of FTX. With their backing, the company closed a Multicoin Capital-led seed round for $1.8M in 2020.
What Makes Perpetual Protocol Unique?
The goal of Perpetual Protocol is to create a perpetual contracts trading platform that anyone can use. To do that, users need to be able to trade with good liquidity and low slippage. Perpetual Protocol solves this by employing its vAMM solution. Perpetual Protocol doesn’t follow the usual order book model of centralized exchanges. Instead, traders trade against a virtual automated market maker, whose initial liquidity is set by the operator.
For instance, assume the operator sets the vAMM’s liquidity at 100 vETH to 40,000 vDAI. Someone depositing DAI to go long on ETH would tilt the price of ETH upwards and create an incentive to go short on vETH if the price is out of line with market prices. Traders going short on vETH would also deposit DAI as collateral and bring the price of vETH back to its equilibrium. Having liquidity swaps is unnecessary, as the vAMM functions as a tally of all trades and automatically finds an equilibrium in the long run. In practice, trades on Perpetual Protocol are all settled in USDC.
By using this vAMM model and building the exchange on xDai, traders are able to enjoy on-chain trading without fees and instant settlement. Furthermore, Perpetual Protocol supports gas-free deposits over 500 USDC, meaning traders are able to deposit with 0 ETH in their wallets.
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How Many Perpetual Protocol (PERP) Coins Are There in Circulation?
The total supply of PERP is 150 million. The current circulating supply of PERP is 68.7 million. The token distribution is as follows:
7.5 % - Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP)
4.2 % - Seed investors, 20% unlocked on mainnet launch, 20% every three months
15% - Strategic investors, 20% unlocked on mainnet launch, 20% every three months
21% - Team & advisors, 2.1% per 3-month period beginning six months after mainnet launch
54.8% - Ecosystem & rewards, distribution of ecosystem rewards will be decided by the Perpetual Protocol community
PERP is a utility token that incentivizes and facilitates the decentralized governance of the protocol. The token feedback loop looks like this: Staking rewards & trading fee rewards increase > 2. PERP token value increases > 3. PERP token awareness increases > 4. Protocol awareness increases > 5. Trading volume increases > 6. Trading fees increase > Back to 1.
How Is the Perpetual Protocol Network Secured?
Perpetual Protocol has been audited by Consensys and Peckshield. The protocol is community-governed and has a bounty program for developers that find bugs in the smart contracts. The network is on xDai, while the PERP token is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum.
ERC-20 is a token standard most new tokens follow when publishing on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is one of the most popular blockchains for DAOs and is secured by a proof-of-work consensus mechanism that requires miners to mine new Ether. A set of decentralized nodes validates transactions and secures the Ethereum blockchain.
Perpetual Protocol uses Chainlink as oracle for funding rate calculations but does not have an on-chain oracle as a price engine to prevent the use of flash loans to manipulate the price of underlying assets and profit from Perpetual within the same transaction.
Where Can You Buy Perpetual Protocol (PERP)?
PERP is available on UniSwapV2, Binance, Kraken and Gate.io.