Decentralized Exchange Token GMX Surges After Binance, FTX Listings

The token of the decentralized exchange GMX surged close to its all-time high Wednesday as Binance and FTX, two of the world’s most widely used crypto exchanges, announced plans to list the token.

GMX jumped to as high as $60 from around $40, data on crypto price tracker CoinGecko shows, the highest since January, when the price hit $62. The token has since pared some of the gains, changing hands at $48 at press time. Trading volume soared, reaching $150 million in the last 24 hours, almost 20 times more than the previous day, CoinGecko data shows.

GMX is a decentralized exchange (DEX), meaning that investors can buy and sell tokens on the platform without an intermediary by using smart contracts. The platform offers low fees and so-called zero price impact trading, which allows more capital-efficient trading without slippage, which is the difference between the expected price of a trade and the actual price.

The protocol gained popularity among cryptocurrency traders as it defied this year’s market rout. As other decentralized-finance protocols saw their total value locked (TVL) – an important metric for how much capital a platform can capture – deflate, GMX’s TVL has grown consistently, and now stands at a record-high $455 million, according to crypto data provider DefiLlama. Holders of the GMX token earn 30% of all the trading fees accrued on the exchange.

Notoriously, in early September, a savvy trader exploited a loophole on GMX’s smart contract code to manipulate the price of AVAX, the Avalanche blockchain’s native token, netting over $500,000 to $700,000 in profits, CoinDesk reported.

Traders could deposit GMX and trade against BTC, USDT and BUSD pairs on Binance starting Wednesday at 10:00 UTC, the exchange said in a statement. FTX said it would allow trading in the token starting at 14:00 UTC.