2022 was the nightmare year that web3 advocates, enthusiasts, and critics will never forget. Starting with the collapse of the industry’s most sought after centralized exchange (CEX) FTX, a contagion of bad debt brought down prominent organizations across the space. CeFi platforms Celsius Network and BlockFi and brokerage Voyager Digital were just a few of the big names to go under. But the worst part is that the thousands of users and billions of dollars that were lost on paper pale in comparison to the credibility that web3 technologies lost in the public eye.
While Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other top crypto assets recovered quickly from 2022 lows, the sentiments of pundits, regulators, and prospective users did not. After having championed decentralization, on-chain transparency, and community-led initiatives, 2022’s multi-billion dollar bankruptcies exposed many of the industry’s leading platforms as opaque, centralized, and exceedingly trust-driven.
Fortunately, 2023 has seen the emergence of Perpetual Exchanges, which have reigned in users, engaged enthusiasts, and brought some much needed positive energy back to the space. Better yet, web3’s newest Perpetual Exchange, QuickPerps, is doing all that while remaining true to web3’s founding principles. Decentralization, transparency, and community governance: that’s a recipe worth rooting for.
Perpetual Exchanges: The Financial Products Web3 Always Wanted
First and foremost, Perpetual Exchanges facilitate the exchange of perpetual contracts – a modified form of futures contracts that don’t have expiration dates. Perpetual contracts, or “perps”, as they are often called across Crypto Twitter, allow users to borrow capital to take highly leveraged bets on the future price movements of their favorite crypto assets. While perpetual contracts are very useful tools in hedging existing positions to reduce risk, they can also be employed to place high-stakes investments.
Where the web3 community stands today, decentralized finance, early-stage investment, and high-risk derivative instruments are what drive growth and volume. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. But building an opaque derivatives platform and using platform deposits to take risky bets as did FTX Exchange – that’s wrong. In essence, 2022 saw centralized opaque organizations provide web3 users the derivatives products that they wanted, absent the core principles they had come to expect from their favorite web3 ecosystems.
Needless to say, bringing a high-performance derivatives platform to users while upholding web3’s key principles is what is truly needed to change any lingering negative perceptions. QuickPerps is on the job and doing it well!
Principled Innovation: How QuickPerps is Serving Users without Abandoning Web3’s Mission
Long before its March launch, QuickPerps’ entire development process was designed to integrate decentralization and community governance into every component of its platform. Most fundamentally, the platform runs on Polygon zkEVM, web3’s most advanced Layer 2 scalability technology. Unlike CEXs and CeFi platforms, QuickPerps operates in a decentralized, transparent environment. Best of all, Polygon zkEVM’s performance is second to none, so transactions are lightning-fast and fees always stay low.
When it comes to doing right by users, maintaining deep liquidity and transparency are imperatives. FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, and others were able to maintain the trust of users because they avoided providing meaningful reserve transparency to demonstrate that they could back up user deposits. On QuickPerps, not only can users track transactions and liquidity on-chain in real time, but the platform’s entire liquidity pool is sourced from a decentralized body of users.
Here’s what that means: margin traders on QuickPerps borrow capital from their peers to take on leverage – not from the platform. On QuickPerps, exploitation has been removed from the equation and replaced with a true commitment to decentralized mechanics. Perpetual contracts and capital on QuickPerps are truly exchanged between users. The exchange protocol merely facilitates position openings and closures, transfers capital, and executes liquidations.
Last but not least, QuickPerps involves its community at every turn. The platform’s native token, $QUICK, which is also the native token of the QuickSwap decentralized exchange (DEX), confers voting powers to users in key governance decisions. In this way, the development direction of the QuickPerps platform is ultimately shaped and guided by the will and discretion of community members, platform users, and liquidity providers (LPs).
With a popular brand, expanding user base, and a growing TVL (Total Value Locked) over $10 million USD, QuickPerps’ future is as bright as its inception was principled.
