Jul 17, 2021
The Two Week Report
It’s now been exactly two weeks since Trader Joe was launched, and wow what a crazy two weeks it’s been!
First, let’s talk about the highlights:
- We are almost at $20M total value locked.
- Our last daily volume is $1.536M representing 7.8% of our TVL.
- Token price has been on the upward trend, reaching an all-time high of $0.1048.
- The first 100 HATs were claimed in less than an hour.
In this report, we’ll start with a little prelude about our launch, what we’ve implemented since then and then dig deeper into the metrics before finishing with what’s next for Trader Joe.
The days leading up to our launch was received with a mix of skepticism as well as excitement. We made big promises that we were going to build fast, be different and put the Avalanche community first. Understandably, some were also worried that our promises would fall flat and we’d be yet another DEX fork.
Come launch day, the reception was largely positive with a few cautions:
- We had $8M total value locked quickly placing us as the 4th project by TVL.
- However, the JOE token decreased to $0.028 and many were worried that the small 3x multiplier for JOE/WAVAX compared to the 50x multiplier for ETH/WAVAX meant incentives were misaligned to hold JOE.
We heard the community’s concerns about the 3x multiplier on JOE/WAVAX and rectified the situation by first increasing it to 10x, and then soon after, to 25x. The token price reacted well to these changes:
So what was the reason behind our unorthodox strategy of starting with a small multiplier for JOE/WAVAX? After all, the conventional strategy seems to reward your own token’s farm with the highest multiplier.
Here’s our take:
- Because JOE is emitted over time, liquidity for it will be low in the beginning.
- Starting out with a high multiplier for JOE/WAVAX builds liquidity fast. This seems like a good idea, but also means there’s lots of liquidity for large amounts of dumping which lead to price volatility.
- So the goal was always to increase the multiplier over time.
- And even with a 3x multiplier at the start, the APR was still extremely higher than ETH/WAVAX.
What we did not expect was the psychological aspect of 3x vs 50x multiplier, so we pivoted on our original plan.
In addition to managing the farms, users started giving us lots of feedback on things we needed to improve on:
- Mobile: Truth be told, we didn’t expect so many of our users to be using Trader Joe on mobile, so our initial plan was to roll out a mobile version later on. But our analytics show that a staggering 40% use Trader Joe on their phones! So we quickly made the website mobile-responsive and compatible with Metamask mobile.
- Dark mode: The initial version of Trader Joe only had light mode configured, but users started showing some rather hideous screenshots of dark mode enabled. It turns out if your OS has dark mode enabled (e.g. Mac’s dark mode), then it would show it be default. So we quickly rectified the situation by configuring it for dark mode.
- JOE token stats: Users needed a way to track token price, circulating supply and circulating market cap. We added a card to show that on the homepage as well as telegram and discord bots to report that info.
Now onto the features!
- Farmer’s Market: This was an idea inspired by one of our community members on telegram, Arsenal Unicorn! The idea is that we boost a community farm to 20x for 48 hours and the goal is to 1) boost trading volume and 2) attract new liquidity with the goal of sticking after Farmer’s Market ends. Our first Farmer’s Market was VSO/WAVAX was a massive success. Before Farmer’s Market, the farm was sitting at $240k liquidity and after it ended, it’s now at $400k liquidity.
- Grown on Avalanche: Sticking to our core value of putting the Avalanche community first, we wanted to pave a way for new projects to onboard onto Trader Joe. The reason is simple; taking Uniswap as an example, we believe that the success of a DEX is its ability to capture “long-tail” pools, because our analysis revealed that these smaller pools actually generated high relative volume. So we rolled out Grown on Avalanche, a program that allowed smaller projects to receive a reward farm once they had $50k liquidity on Trader Joe. The first project to receive a farm this way was Avalanche’s very first dog coin, HUSKY. Since receiving a farm, their liquidity has increased 50% and we hope that this will pave the way for other new projects to follow.
- Zap: This was initially disabled at launched because we didn’t want to rekt people on slippage due to low liquidity. But it’s now up and running!
- Coin98 integration: A lot of our users happen to use Coin98, so we made it easier for them!
- Analytics: Our power users wanted analytics to get a deeper look into the numbers, so we rolled out our analytics page. One of the features that have been a hit is the portfolio page, where you can finally track all your investments in farms and xJOE!
We’ve already highlighted the main points:
- Just under $20M total value locked.
- Steady uptrend in daily volume, with an all-time high of $1.536M.
- Steady uptrend in JOE token price, with an all-time high of $0.1048.
What’s important to take into account when considering these trends is the current market conditions. Our TVL, volume and token price have all been increasing despite being in a bear market. Compare this to the #1 DEX on Avalanche currently, Pangolin, who’s metrics have been on a downtrend since our launch on July 3rd.
What’s also important is that our daily volume represents 7.8% of our TVL; in comparison, Pangolin hovers around 5%. Pancakeswap does 10.6%, which is the target we’re setting for ourselves.
Furthermore, the JOE token represents 6.9% of TVL. This is a very healthy metric. For comparison:
- PNG represents 21% TVL of Pangolin.
- CAKE represents 6.8% TVL of Pancakeswap.
- SUSHI represents 5.67% TVL of Sushiswap.
- UNI represents 2.55% TVL of Uniswap.
In general, all of our current metrics paint a fantastic start for Trader Joe.
Our core focus is now on lending, which we plan to roll out by the end of August.
Aside from that, here are some other things that we plan to refine over the next weeks:
- xJOE: There’s lots of confusion as to how this works. It works differently to other x tokens, like xSNOB and xPEFI. We’re currently working on revamping the UI as well as the docs for this page so users have a better understanding how it works.
- New bridge: We’re preparing for the new bridge which will potentially release the floodgates for a lot of new liquidity coming onto Avalanche.
- ChartEx integration: We’re in talks with the team at ChartEx to get Trader Joe fully integrated.
- Governance: Our initial plan was to release governance one month after launch. But after speaking to the community, we all felt governance only slows building time, so the plan now is to release governance after lending is launched.
- Marketing: We’re ramping up our marketing efforts to make sure we get the word out as much as possible. There are various partners we’re currently in talks with to help on this front.
- HATs: Everyone wants to know what’s happening to their HATs! Don’t worry, our intern, MeMyself, is currently working on it and he has some really interesting ideas for it. We’re hesitant to say anything because the last time we did the price 7x’d!
All in all, we’re extremely pleased with the fantastic start Trader Joe has gotten off to, despite launching in a bear market.
However, we’re keeping our feet on the ground and staying laser focused as there’s still lots more to come.
Thank you for your continuing to support us ❤️
