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Posted on Nov 06, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

Green Liquidity: What is Rage Trade?

Introduction

Rage Trade is striving to become “the most liquid $ETH perp” on Arbitrum. Users can long or short $ETH with up to 10x leverage using Rage Trade’s deep, “recycled” omnichain liquidity.

Rage Trade is building an ultra-composable central liquidity hub for trading $ETH on margin. Using LP tokens from a bunch of different EVM-compatible chains, Rage Trade works with an abundance of liquidity and near-instant execution.

The Problem

As it stands today, it is hard to leverage trade without relying on centralized counterparties for liquidity. Decentralized perpetuals exchanges have been on the rise, but few of these protocols exist and a frequent issue is a lack of available liquidity.

Simply put, leverage trading $ETH onchain is only as efficient as liquidity is deep. Few perpetuals protocols (if any) have been super effective in creating deep liquidity for traders, especially without heavily relying on inflating their own token. Not only this, but many also struggle with components like accurate funding rates or appealing UI/UX.

The Goal

Rage traders enjoy the benefits of deep, concentrated liquidity incentivized largely without token emissions. Rage Trade can aggregate deposits of ETH-USD LP tokens from all LayerZero supported networks while LPs retain their native chains’ security.

Users will be able to trade $ETH with up to 10x leverage and have the unique ability to withdraw and trade with unrealized PnL. Not only this, but Rage Trade plans to grow its product stack with new partnerships and ideas such as its recent collaboration with GMX. In short, the goal of Rage Trade is to build a composable, highly liquid $ETH perp that benefits traders, other protocols, and LPs alike.

Rage Trade's products, including its GMX products and ETH perp

How Does it Work? Trading on Rage Trade

Arbitrum users simply deposit $USDC collateral into the protocol and can begin trading at their desired leverage. Naturally, traders also need $ETH in their wallet for gas fees.

Each trader has their own Account Market Value which is the sum of their margin and corresponding PnL. In order to avoid liquidation, traders must ensure their Account Value remains above the Required Maintenance Margin amount. With that said, traders can withdraw and trade with their unrealized PnL as long as their Account Value remains above the liquidation threshold.

Rage Trade's trading interface for longing or shorting $ETH with up to 10x leverage

Liquidation occurs when an account has hit the maximum 10x leverage threshold. Keepers facilitate liquidations onchain and execute partial or full liquidations depending on the account’s value and margin. Keepers earn liquidation fees and (if necessary) are paid out by the Rage Trade insurance fund to compensate for any margin deficits.

Funding rates on Rage Trade are determined by its special mechanism known as “Forward Guidance”. Forward Guidance is an an advanced three-pronged set of algorithms toggled by governance depending on changing market conditions.

The three prongs of Forward Guidance

The first prong is the standard mark-index calculation, which is likely to be used at most times as it works best in standard conditions. The second prong is a Chainlink oracle which supplies funding rates from Binance, and this is most likely to be used when Rage Trade’s funding rates and CEX funding rates diverge. The last prong is a manual update by governance vote which is necessary in rare “emergency” situations when mark and index prices deviate.

How Does it Work? Recycled Omnichain Liquidity

Rage Trade uses its novel concept of “Recycled Liquidity” to maximize the efficiency of ETH-USD liquidity deposited into Rage Trade 80-20 vaults.

Recycled Liquidity works by incentivizing ETH-USD LP deposits into corresponding 80-20 Vaults. Depositors can deposit either the vault’s LP token or (w)ETH/USDC individually. Inspired by Uniswap’s Hayden Adams, 80-20 vaults earn yield with 80% of TVL and supply Rage Trade with the other 20%.

The 80% that earns yield is deployed on whichever protocol the LP token comes from. The other 20% is deployed as concentrated ETH-USDC liquidity for Rage traders. In this fashion, Rage Trade “extends” the underlying LP token liquidity by using just 20% to power all trading while the rest stays earning yield on its native protocol.

All 80-20 Vault depositors earn yield from where the 80% is deployed, Rage Trade trading fees, and $RAGE emissions. Besides the obvious Rage Trade platform risk and Arbitrum uptime risk, the only real risk depositors bear is the platform risk(s) of wherever the 80% of liquidity is deposited.

The Vaults tab with the  only 80-20 vault currently (Curve tricrypto)

Rage Trade plugs into LayerZero’s interoperable messaging infrastructure to aggregate omnichain liquidity. As such, Rage Trade can create vaults for ETH-USD LP tokens on any chain supported by LayerZero.

Rage Trade leverages LayerZero’s cross-chain messaging to mint and burn synthetic liquidity corresponding with deposits and withdrawals from chains outside of Arbitrum. Although there are no omnichain vaults live yet, this is coming very soon as Rage Trade grows out of its infancy.

As a depositor enters an 80-20 vault, LayerZero sends a message to the host chain (Arbitrum) which triggers the creation of virtual liquidity in Rage Trade’s vAMM. This liquidity is backed by the deposit on the other chain, and when the depositor withdraws, this virtual liquidity is burned accordingly. Rage Trade uses LayerZero to rebalance this virtual liquidity as well, but in doing so may actually transfer these assets cross-chain to maintain solvency.

80-20 Vaults perform a few different daily operations such as adjusting the concentrated liquidity range, rebalancing assets to payout traders with positive PnL, and maintaining a constant 80-20 TVL ratio based on price swings.

Partnerships

Rage Trade relies heavily on LayerZero’s cross-chain messaging infrastructure as any omnichain deposits, withdrawals, or rebalancing of liquidity depends on LayerZero working properly.

Recently, Rage Trade announced a partnership with GMX and the coming release of its delta-neutral GMX vaults. Rage Trade will hedge the volatile exposure of the GMX LP index, effectively turning $GLP into a “stablecoin farm”. Depositors can take risk-on or risk-off vault positions and earn from different yield strategies based on their risk appetite. This is just another composable outlet for other protocols to work with, and is expected around the 10th-15th of this month.

Different yield ranges for GLP risk-on and risk-off vaults, from @crypto_noodles on Twitter

Rage Trade is also closely partnered with the Dopex onchain options protocol following their investment announcement. There is lots of potential in a Dopex collaboration such as in Atlantic Options or even with potential changes coming to the launch of $dpxUSD.

Other protocols have also looked to potentially partner with Rage Trade, such as Cosmos-based and IBC-enabled Entangle. Cosmos liquidity and features like interchain accounts combined with Rage Trade’s omnichain vaults could be an unrealized synergy that is truly “meant to be”. This is just one of the 100+ different potential collaborations between Rage Trade and other protocols.

Tokenomics

$RAGE Price: N/A

Market Capitalization: N/A

Circulating Supply: N/A

Total Supply: N/A

The $RAGE token is not officially released, but is confirmed to eventually launch on Arbitrum. There is also no official details on $RAGE tokenomics but the team has confirmed that an announcement is coming very soon.

Naturally, it could be speculated that $RAGE stakers (or lockers?) earn boosted vault rewards and trading fees, benefit from lower trading fees, can participate in governance, and potentially even benefit from reserved access to full 80-20 vaults.

Conclusion

Rage Trade is building a robust, decentralized trading layer that focuses on the common issues seen with perpetuals exchanges. The Arbitrum-native protocol will maximize capital efficiency with its 80-20 vaults, generate deep liquidity from omnichain deposits, and dynamically adjust funding rates based on market conditions.

Ultimately, Rage Trade is taking a tactical approach to an onchain $ETH perp, and it will be another notable and welcomed addition to the Arbitrum family.


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