The LSE Directory / Crypto exchanges
GMX is a decentralized, permissionless exchange for perpetual futures and spot crypto trading that operates without an order book or a centralized matching engine. Rather than matching buyers and sellers, GMX routes trades against pooled on-chain liquidity and prices them off an oracle feed, so a trade executes at the oracle's index price instead of a price set by order flow on the exchange itself. The protocol supports leverage up to 100x on markets including BTC, ETH, SOL and a range of altcoins, and users open positions or supply liquidity directly from a self-custody wallet with no account registration or KYC. GMX's defining technical choice is its liquidity model. Version 1 pooled all liquidity into a single GLP vault that acted as counterparty to every trade; version 2 replaced this with per-market GM pools, so liquidity providers choose which specific asset's risk they take on rather than underwriting the whole platform at once, alongside a stablecoin-only GLV vault for LPs wanting less directional exposure. GMX fully retired the legacy v1 GLP model in July 2025, leaving v2 as its sole architecture. Protocol fees from trading, swaps, borrowing and liquidations are split roughly 63% to GM pool liquidity providers and 27% toward buying back GMX on the open market for stakers, a real-yield structure the protocol presents as distinct from projects that pay liquidity providers from token emissions rather than actual revenue. This oracle-priced, order-book-free model is what separates GMX from order-book perpetual DEXs such as dYdX or Hyperliquid. GMX traces back to a 2021 merger of the XVIX and Gambit token protocols on BNB Smart Chain, relaunching on Arbitrum as GMX in September 2021 before adding Avalanche shortly after. The founding team is anonymous; the project has acknowledged only one public-facing pseudonymous developer. GMX integrated Chainlink Data Streams for its oracle pricing following a 2023 community governance vote. As of early 2026 the protocol reports more than $363 billion in cumulative notional trading volume across eight chains and over 740,000 traders, with its GM and GLV liquidity tokens integrated into more than 70 other DeFi protocols. In January 2026 GMX announced a native deployment on MegaETH, a blockchain built for sub-10-millisecond block times and over 100,000 transactions per second, launching initially with BTC, ETH and SOL perpetual markets backed by a USDm stablecoin liquidity vault, and drawing on MegaETH's Chainlink Scale membership for expanded collateral options. GMX now runs natively on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Botanix and MegaETH, and has added a GMX Account feature that lets traders holding assets on Ethereum, Base or BNB Chain access its Arbitrum-based markets without manually bridging first.
