Executive summary
Merkle Trade is one of the fastest growing derivative exchange projects on Aptos. The project raised a $2.1m seed round from crypto-native funds, and its core team brings over 10 years of experience building both Web2 and Web3 companies. With over $15b in total trading volume, Merkle Trade recognized the need for reliable, continuous, and data-driven stakeholder reporting. To improve its existing onchain analytics and stakeholder reporting, Merkle Trade turned to Token Terminal, a leading onchain data platform trusted by institutional partners like Bloomberg.
Token Terminal's dedicated focus on data standardization made it an ideal partner for Merkle Trade. The decision to partner was further eased by the fact that Token Terminal already had a public track record of reporting standardized financial and usage metrics for other leading derivative exchange projects, such as GMX, dYdX, Vertex, and more.
“By partnering with Token Terminal, we’re able to benchmark our performance against the competition in a fair and accurate way. Having a real-time dashboard on Token Terminal is not only a great tool for our team, but for all Merkle Trade stakeholders.”
Ye, Head Builder at Merkle Trade
Data Partnership
To ensure accurate and ongoing stakeholder reporting, Merkle Trade entered into a Data Partnership with Token Terminal.
The Data Partnership consists of four different parts:
1. Smart contract registry
- Since Merkle Trade isn’t an appchain, but a set of smart contracts running on Aptos, this first step did not require a node infrastructure setup. Instead, Token Terminal was able to rely on its existing node infrastructure.
- To start, the Merkle Trade and Token Terminal teams worked together to build a labeled registry of Merkle Trade’s smart contracts on Aptos.
- A complete smart contract registry is a prerequisite for the next step: the transformation of raw blockchain data into standardized financial and usage metrics.
2. Metric transformations
- Leveraging the information in the smart contract registry, Token Terminal’s research team transformed the raw blockchain data from the smart contracts into standardized financial and usage metrics.
- For a derivative exchange project project like Merkle Trade, the standardized metrics include net deposits, notional trading volume, fees, revenue, daily active users, and more.
3. Discovery and reporting
- After the metric transformations, Merkle Trade was listed on the derivative exchanges market sector dashboard on Token Terminal, and also featured on the recently launched Discover page.
- As a result, users, developers, and investors can now refer to a single source when deciding which protocols to use, integrate with, and/or invest in.
- For Merkle Trade, the dashboards on Token Terminal streamline the reporting to existing and future stakeholders.
4. Data maintenance
- Standardized onchain metrics require ongoing maintenance work, especially when the goal is completeness and accuracy.
- The maintenance work has only grown in magnitude and importance over the last few years, as more DeFi projects have evolved from single to multichain apps, with often more than one business line.
- A Data Partnership with Token Terminal means that Merkle Trade can rely on Token Terminal to manage all future updates to its metrics, and instead direct all focus on growing its onchain business.
Future opportunities
In addition to standardized financial and usage metrics, Merkle Trade and Token Terminal are excited to explore opportunities to create custom dashboards with more project-specific metrics. These dashboards would offer both LPs and traders deeper insight into the platform’s features and performance. Some examples include LP profitability, trading activity by trader profile, and more.
Through its partnership with Token Terminal, Merkle Trade turns transparency into a competitive advantage and continues to build trust with its growing community.
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