Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have become a critical cornerstone of blockchain applications, offering users permissionless, intermediary-free asset trading capabilities. In 2024, the DEX market experienced significant growth, with trading volume nearly doubling compared to 2023. For instance, the Raydium platform achieved an average daily trading volume of $785 million in the third quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of over 100 times.

Source: The 6th Annual @ElectricCapital Developer Report

In the leading next-generation parallel EVM Layer 1 blockchain, Monad, a powerful wave of native DEX projects has emerged. Leveraging Monad’s next-gen performance, these platforms offer enhanced functionality and superior user experiences. They aim to address key challenges in decentralized trading, such as capital efficiency, pricing accuracy, and user engagement.

This article introduces the native DEX/Perp projects within the Monad ecosystem as of the end of 2024. Built on Monad’s high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure, these native DEXs are poised to redefine the landscape of decentralized trading. By combining the strengths of centralized exchanges with the security and composability of decentralized platforms, they offer a compelling solution. With Monad’s public testnet about to launch, we’ll soon have the chance to experience the performance of these DEXs firsthand:

1. Kuru

Kuru is the first fully on-chain Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) DEX in the Monad ecosystem. By leveraging Monad’s high throughput and low latency, Kuru aims to redefine decentralized trading by combining the advantages of centralized exchanges with the composability and self-custody of decentralized exchanges.

I. Why choose CLOB?

Advantages over Automated Market Makers (AMM):

Capital Efficiency: CLOB allows market makers to place active quotes, providing tighter bid-ask spreads and reducing slippage.

Unlike AMMs where liquidity is passively allocated, CLOB concentrates liquidity at optimal price points.

Pricing Accuracy: Real-time order updates provide precise price discovery, helping maintain better alignment with global market prices.

1. Flexibility for Market Makers: Market makers can dynamically adjust bid-ask quotes according to market conditions without incurring significant gas fees.
2. II. Unique Performance of Kuru

Monad Features Enhance Kuru’s Performance

• Throughput: Approximately 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).
• Low Latency: 1-second block finality.
• Cost Efficiency: Low gas fees enable frequent order updates without substantial cost burdens.

By building on Monad, Kuru leverages these advanced features to enhance platform performance:

1. Optimized Smart Contracts: Designed for market makers to place/cancel limit orders with low and predictable gas costs.
2. Seamless Integration: Supports high-liquidity and long-tail assets, providing diverse trading opportunities.
3. User-Centric Design: Integrates discovery, research, and trading into a single interface.
4. Passive Liquidity Solutions: Develops mechanisms that allow users to passively provide liquidity to the order book.

In July 2024, Kuru announced the successful completion of a $2 million seed round led by Electric Capital, with participants including Brevan Howard Digital, CMS Holdings, Pivot Global, Breed, Velocity Capital, Purple, and notable angel investors Keone Hon (CEO and co-founder of Monad), Jarry Xiao, and Eugene Chen.

Kuru uniquely combines the efficiency of centralized systems with the decentralization of blockchain, aiming to revolutionize on-chain trading. By leveraging Monad’s infrastructure, Kuru has the potential to become a key liquidity hub for the next generation of DeFi projects. With a clear roadmap, robust technology, and a community-focused approach, Kuru is poised to redefine the future.

2. Composite

Composite Labs is building a fully on-chain Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) DEX within the Monad ecosystem. As next-generation trading infrastructure, Composite integrates innovative features for both spot and derivatives markets (including real-world assets). The project leverages Monad’s high-performance blockchain to address long-standing challenges in DeFi and seize emerging opportunities in the space.

I. Why Choose Composite?

Composite stands out in the DeFi space for its innovation in decentralized trading. Below are the unique and important core reasons for choosing Composite:

• Integrated Order Book: Composite integrates lending, spot trading, and perpetual contract trading into a fully CLOB-based platform. This integration streamlines the user experience and operational efficiency, meeting users’ cross-platform needs.
• Portfolio Margining: Composite offers top-tier capital efficiency through portfolio margining. Traders can open positions using existing assets (like ETH) as collateral without needing additional collateral. For example, selling a perpetual contract to generate profit requires no extra collateral.
• Cost Efficiency: Composite charges a unified low fee for all transaction sizes. Whether the trade amount is $1,000 or $100,000, users pay the same minimal fee, enhancing cost efficiency for users.

II. Key Performance Achieved by Composite through Monad Features

• Scalability and Performance: Monad’s high throughput and low latency enable Composite to efficiently process a large volume of transactions, providing users with a seamless trading experience.
• Cost Efficiency: Optimized execution and storage mechanisms reduce operational costs, allowing Composite to offer users extremely low trading fees.
• Security and Decentralization: Monad’s robust consensus mechanism and fully on-chain operations ensure Composite maintains high levels of security and decentralization, aligning with its commitment to transparency and trustlessness.

By leveraging Monad’s infrastructure and combining it with the team’s innovation, Composite is poised to become a cornerstone of the Monad ecosystem and lead the next wave of DeFi innovation. Composite Labs combines advanced financial engineering with Monad’s cutting-edge blockchain features to create a fully on-chain, high-performance trading platform.

3. Zaros

Zaros is an innovative decentralized exchange (Perp DEX) for perpetual contracts, combining liquidity-staked tokens (LSTs and LRTs) with perpetual futures markets, aiming to provide a user experience comparable to centralized exchanges (CEXs) while maintaining the advantages of decentralization.

Why Choose Zaros?

• Diverse Market Coverage: Traders can access 30-40 different perpetual contracts on a single platform, covering a wide range of markets including cryptocurrencies, forex, and commodities. This diversity supports comprehensive trading strategies across multiple asset classes.
• Innovative Market-Making Mechanism: Zaros introduces a new market-making engine that allows anyone to participate by locking yield-bearing assets as collateral. This approach democratizes market-making, enabling liquidity providers to earn ETH fees from traders by lending out their collateral to generate Zaros liquidity.
• Enhanced Capital Efficiency: By linking LSTs and LRTs with perpetual futures, Zaros allows liquidity providers to increase returns through the ZLP treasury. The ZLP treasury is a single contract that locks the collateral provided by liquidity providers to boost the liquidity cap of Zaros’ perpetual futures market. This integration promotes real yield generation and capital efficiency, enabling LST and LRT holders to lend out their liquidity.

In May 2024, Zaros successfully completed a $1.8 million funding round led by SNZ Holdings, with participants including Seven Capital, Cogitent Ventures, DCI Capital, and notable angel investors Antony Sassano, Fernando Martinelli, Kieran Warwick, Andy Chen, and Kevin Lu.

By building on Monad, Zaros leverages Monad’s core features to provide an efficient, cost-effective, scalable, and user-friendly trading platform. Monad’s high throughput and low latency ensure that traders experience minimal delays even during peak trading times. The cost efficiency translates into lower transaction fees for users, making trading easier to execute. Additionally, Monad’s EVM compatibility ensures Zaros seamlessly integrates with other Ethereum-based applications, enhancing platform composability and the broader DeFi ecosystem.

With the support of Monad, Zaros offers a powerful and user-centric perpetual futures trading platform, combining the best features of centralized and decentralized exchanges to create an unparalleled trading experience for users.

4. Drake

Drake Exchange is a fully on-chain decentralized exchange (Perp DEX) for perpetual contracts, designed to provide a trading experience comparable to centralized exchanges (CEXs) while maintaining the transparency and security of DeFi. By leveraging Monad’s high-performance infrastructure, Drake offers advanced trading features, deep liquidity, and efficient execution, positioning itself as a leading perpetual contract DEX in the Monad ecosystem.

Why Choose Drake?

• Hybrid Liquidity Model: Drake combines a fully on-chain limit order book (LOB) with an Automated Market Maker (AMM) backup. This dual-layer approach ensures optimal price discovery, minimal slippage, and the ability to quickly seize market opportunities without immediate market-making.
• Advanced Trading Capabilities: Traders can use up to 50x leverage on major assets like ETH and BTC with both cross-margin and isolated margin accounts. Features such as internal collateral swapping and automated vaults (including funds rate vaults for directionless yields) enhance users’ trading strategies and risk management.
• Automated Yield Strategies: Through features like the funds rate vault, users can earn directionless yields on USDC deposits, providing continuous returns without active management. This dual-layer liquidity system ensures deep liquidity and optimal price execution, even during periods of high volatility or low order book depth.

Monad Madness NYC 2024 Finalists: Drake has been recognized for its innovative features and user-friendly design, highlighting its potential as Monad’s native perpetual contract DEX.

By building on Monad’s efficient infrastructure, Drake offers gas-free trading, enhancing the user experience by reducing transaction costs. With Monad’s unique capabilities, Drake’s performance and features can rival those of centralized exchanges. Its innovative liquidity model, user-friendly design, and commitment to transparency make it an ideal choice for traders seeking a secure and efficient on-chain perpetual contract DEX.

5. Bean

Bean Exchange is a decentralized exchange (DEX) offering spot and perpetual trading with features such as low swap fees, zero price-impact trading, and multi-asset liquidity pools, benefiting liquidity providers.

Why Choose Bean?

• Low Swap Fees and Zero Price-Impact Trading: Bean reduces swap fees and eliminates price fluctuations, ensuring cost-effective trading with zero price-impact transactions.
• BLP Tokens: Liquidity providers can participate in BLP pools, earning yields through leveraged trading (including spot and perpetual), lending fees, and swap fees. The fees from leveraged trading and swaps automatically increase the price of BLP tokens.
• Advanced Position Management: Traders can adjust their positions by adding collateral to prevent liquidation or fine-tune leverage ratios. Additionally, features like modifying take-profit and stop-loss levels allow for more precise trade management.

By leveraging Monad’s infrastructure, Bean Exchange is poised to offer a powerful and user-friendly decentralized trading experience, meeting the needs of DeFi traders seeking efficiency and reliability.

6. Amalgam

Ammalgam is an innovative DeFi protocol that combines lending and trading functions into one platform, becoming a decentralized lending exchange (DLEX). This integrated innovation enhances traders’ capital efficiency, offering a superior user experience.

Why Choose Ammalgam?

• Permissionless Overcollateralized Peer-to-Peer Lending: Allows users to engage in overcollateralized lending without intermediaries.
• Decentralized Lending Exchange (DLEX): Ammalgam seamlessly integrates lending and trading functionalities within a single contract, enabling smooth interaction between these functions and improving capital utilization.
• Enhanced Capital Efficiency: By lending out unused assets typically locked in AMM pools, Ammalgam boosts market maker profits, increasing liquidity provider returns by up to 20%.

In September 2024, Ammalgam announced the successful completion of a $2.5 million seed funding round. This round was co-led by Lightspeed Faction and Framework Ventures, with other participants including Robot Ventures, Bodhi Ventures, NGC Ventures, DeWhales, Blockchain Founders Fund, and notable angel investors Kain Warwick (founder of Synthetix), Anton Bukov, Spencer Noon, and Jordi Alexander.

With the support of Monad, Ammalgam combines its innovative DLEX model with a blockchain infrastructure designed for speed, efficiency, and compatibility, positioning itself as a strong competitor in the DeFi space.

7. Monorail

Monorail is an innovative DEX aggregator designed to optimize trading by integrating liquidity from both AMM and CLOB. By leveraging Monad’s high-performance blockchain, Monorail offers users improved price efficiency and advanced trading features.

Why Choose Monorail?

• Exceptional Price Aggregation: By integrating liquidity from both AMM and CLOB, Monorail ensures that users trade at the best prices. The platform routes large orders from Ethereum and L2 networks to Monad for settlement, taking advantage of Monad’s scalability and low fees.
• Advanced Features: From the start, Monorail offers limit orders, providing traders with more control and flexibility than traditional DEXs. Its aggregation model optimizes trade execution by combining multiple liquidity sources to reduce slippage and improve trading outcomes.
• Experienced Team: Monorail is developed by a team incubated by Delphi Labs, known for successfully launching Astroport in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Monad Madness BKK 2024 Finalists: Monorail is the next innovation in the aggregation space, merging order book efficiency with AMM liquidity to create a personalized order book, offering traders the best trading experience.

Monorail showcases Monad’s high-performance features, providing a next-generation DEX aggregator that combines AMM and CLOB liquidity to achieve optimal trading efficiency. With a strong team, innovative features like limit orders, and strategic partnerships within the Monad ecosystem, Monorail is poised to become a key player in the DEX space.

8. Nitro

Nitro Finance is an innovative DeFi protocol that integrates the functions of decentralized exchanges (DEX) and money markets into a unified platform, aiming to solve common challenges such as impermanent loss, bad debt, low capital efficiency, and market fragmentation.

Why Choose Nitro?

Fused Trade Ledger: Nitro introduces a single paired asset pool (e.g., ETH/USDC), allowing users to seamlessly swap, lend, and borrow within the same pool. This design enhances capital efficiency and consolidates DeFi operations.

• Price Bin Mechanism: Unlike traditional models, Nitro employs a price bin system where each asset has multiple bins. Liquidity from one bin must be depleted before the next bin is activated, providing a structured approach to liquidity provision and utilization.
• Reducing Bad Debt: The automated debt recovery mechanism combined with fixed debt terms effectively reduces bad debt by absorbing collateral assets at the borrowing price upon expiration.
• Nitro Launchpad: An innovative token issuance model offering customizable distribution curves for efficient price discovery and guiding initial token liquidity.

By leveraging Monad’s advanced blockchain infrastructure, Nitro Finance enhances platform performance, security, and user experience, enabling users to swap, lend, and borrow from the same asset pool. This integration improves capital efficiency and reduces fragmentation within the DeFi ecosystem.

9. Narwhal Finance

Narwhal Finance is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform built on Monad, characterized by the integration of AI-driven trading and gamified trading experience. It allows users to trade a variety of leveraged pairs, including cryptocurrencies and forex, without the need for KYC, geographical restrictions, or high fees typically associated with centralized exchanges.

Why Choose Narwhal?

• Simplified Trading Like a Game: Narwhal introduces a gamified copy trading platform where users can easily follow the strategies of top traders and enjoy the same returns. This feature lowers the entry barrier for novice traders and fosters a community-driven trading environment.
• AI-Driven Trading Platform: The Narwhal platform integrates AI-powered trading bots, providing users with advanced tools to optimize trading strategies and improve performance.
• Synthetic Leveraged Trading: Narwhal uses a synthetic trading model, eliminating the need for traditional order books or individual liquidity requirements for each trading pair. Profit and loss calculations are performed in smart contracts and settled with the platform’s liquidity token, NLP, streamlining the trading process.
• Diverse Asset Choices: With the synthetic asset design provided by Pyth, Narwhal offers deep liquidity and minimal slippage, allowing users to trade across asset classes beyond just cryptocurrencies, including stocks, indices, and forex.

In March 2024, Narwhal Finance successfully completed a $1 million seed round led by Animoca Ventures, with participation from top investors and several angel investors.

By building on Monad, Narwhal Finance combines innovative trading features with a powerful and efficient blockchain infrastructure to offer users a decentralized trading experience comparable to traditional centralized exchanges.

Summary

The Monad-native decentralized exchange (DEX) ecosystem is rapidly growing, benefiting from Monad’s advanced technology. The above DEX projects aim to address the shortcomings of traditional centralized exchanges (CEX) and existing DEXs. By emphasizing user experience, capital efficiency, and innovative trading mechanisms, these projects are poised to play a key role in shaping the future of DeFi. These emerging ecosystem projects may attract traders seeking more efficient, transparent, and secure trading platforms. By leveraging Monad’s high throughput, low latency, and cost efficiency, they showcase Monad’s critical role in driving innovation in the field.

This article introduces the Monad-native projects publicly built on Monad as of 2024. We welcome more builders to explore Monad’s technological innovations and join our ecosystem. Below are Monad’s related links and community channels—feel free to contact us anytime.

Gmonas

Official Links WebOfficial Links

• Website: https://monad.xyz/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/monad_xyz
• Substack: https://monadxyz.substack.com/
• Discord: https://discord.gg/monad
• Developer Discord: https://discord.gg/monaddev
• Jobs: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/monad.foundation
• Monad Chinese Community Twitter: https://x.com/monad_xyz
• Monad Chinese TG group: https://t.me/Chinads
• Monad Chinese developer TG group: https://t.me/+UE_dh4BNHIxhMjY1

Note: The author is from the Monad Ecological GroupHarvey, currently based in Hong Kong/Shenzhen, and working with APAC colleagues are committed to promoting the prosperity and development of Monad ecology in the Chinese-speaking area, actively introducing Chinese power, and promoting the prosperity and growth of Monad ecology. Ecological partners and developers are welcome to DM at any time

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