Wintermute 談 DEX 之設計缺失：價值分配失衡

作者：Wintermute

编译：Azuma，Odaily星球日报

在加密货币世界，代币的发行至关重要。成功的代币发行可以显著增强协议的价值和影响力，并通过空投的形式为生态系统内的各个角色带来巨大的财富。

然而在当前的环境下，代币发行的真正潜力往往会因为去中心化交易所（DEX）的设计而受限 —— 发行代币的协议无法捕获源自于交易活动的价值。通过拥有自己的自动化做市商（AMM）曲线，协议可以更有效地捕获和保留它们创造的价值，从而完善自身经济模型，同时增强 DeFi 的可持续性。

代币发行可创造巨大的价值

代币的发行是协议发展历程中最关键的时刻，如果设计得当，这将为所有用户、贡献者、投资者乃至整个社区创造巨大价值。

价值的创造一般会以空投形式呈现，即协议会向那些频繁使用其产品的用户分发代币。2024 年至今，仅规模最大的五次空投就创造了大约 66 亿美元的价值（未计入本周空投的 ZKsync 和 LayerZero）。

随之而来的价格发现环节则将不断验证并重塑空投接收者对于协议真实估价的期望，并在很大程度上决定他们是否会出售其空投份额 —— 反过来这也适用于潜在的买家，即决定他们是否会第一时间买入。

这种博弈行为会在 TGE 首日带来巨额的交易量，CEX 或 DEX 所均可在此过程中受益。

如下图所示，Wormhole 和 Starknet 在 TGE 首日的交易量都超过了 10 亿美元，在发币后的一段时间内，交易量一般也为维持在较高水平，例如 Ethena 和 Wormhole 前 14 天的交易量占据了前 50 天交易量的半数以上。

毋庸置疑的一件事是，当前代币发行的成功与否在很大程度上会取决于上线 CEX 的情况，较大的 CEX 可以提供更好的流动性及用户基础，从而帮助协议代币获得更大的曝光并实现更有效的价格发现，双方可以在这一过程中达成互利。

然而在 DEX 的环境下，协议于 DEX 之上构建流动性池往往需要预付一大笔成本（应指用于流动性配对），且无法通过 DEX 捕获他们所创造的价值。

DEX 的价值劫持

当前，DEX 在很大程度上未能合理地定价并奖励为其带来交易量、费用及用户的协议。

举个例子，Uniswap 100% 的交易费用均会流向流动性提供者，Pancakeswap、Curve Finance、Balancer 等协议则会将部分交易费用分配给其生态系统的不同群体 —— 代币持有者、DAO 资金库等等。然而，创建代币并构建流动性池的协议却一无所获。

If you look closely at the composition of Uniswap's trading volume, various small governance/protocol tokens (as opposed to mainstream coins and Altcoins of stablecoins) have historically been one of the main sources of its trading volume in recent months. It accounts for 30% to 40% of Uniswap’s total trading volume. However, this number may still be an underestimate, as mainstream coins and stablecoins will include some LST, LRT, and decentralized stablecoins, and the value of these tokens is derived from the protocol that issued them.

Although it is not as good as mainstream currencies and stablecoins in terms of transaction volume, Altcoin is higher than the former in terms of fee contribution. Since April 2023, Altcoin has accounted for 70%-80% of Uniswap’s total monthly transaction fees, including as high as 87.7% in October. The difference in market share between Altcoin’s transaction volume and fees is primarily attributable to the 0.05% or 0.01% fee tiers commonly used by mainstream coins and stablecoins, while the 0.3% or 1% fee tiers commonly used by Altcoin pools.

As the chart above shows, Altcoin’s dominance in transaction fees has been further strengthened since January 2023. On the one hand, this may be because the number of Altcoins continues to increase. On the other hand, it may also be because the major Altcoin protocol teams have spent countless hours and resources maintaining the community, building products, and promoting the growth of token demand. However, in In this process, all fees generated by token transactions are captured by the LP of the DEX and do not flow to the protocol itself.

It is worth noting that some teams have tried to recover some value by implementing buy/sell taxes on their tokens, requiring a fee to be paid for every purchase or sale. This tax collection model has been quite effective for some protocols like Unibot and has generated $36 million in revenue for their ecosystem and token holders. A common drawback of this approach, however, is that it introduces greater complexity into the token contracts themselves and limits teams to capturing fees only on the tokens they deploy and control.

How to solve the problem? Self-built DEX

If leading DEXs like Uniswap will hijack the value that should belong to the protocol, what should the protocol do?

One option is to start a DEX yourself, like Friendtech started BunnySwap. BunnySwap is Friendtech's fork from Uniswap V2, and its main purpose is to facilitate transactions of its native token FRIEND.

During the fork of BunnySwap, Friendtech made two important changes: one is to change the proportion of transaction fees flowing to FRIEND-WETH liquidity providers to 1.5%; the other is to vest FriendTech The team’s protocol fee income also becomes 1.5%.

On the original version of Uniswap V2, you can neither achieve the first point - because the fixed rate of all liquidity pools is 0.3%; nor can you achieve the second point - The latter is also fixed at 0.05%, and all protocol fees belong to the Uniswap DAO treasury.

With these changes in place, BunnySwap helped the FriendTech team capture value from protocol fees in just 35 days since the FRIEND token was launched $8.26 million WETH. Like most other airdrops, FRIEND has maintained high trading volume in the early days of TGE, reaching $89 million on launch day, which represents $1.7 million in protocol fees.

FriendTech is not the only protocol to recover value by building its own DEX. Since 2021, Katana has imposed a 0.05% protocol fee on all transaction operations on the Ronin chain, which goes to the Ronin treasury.

Since its launch in November 2021, Katana has facilitated over $10 billion in transaction volume and generated $5 million in protocol fees to the Ronin treasury. For just two tokens, AXS and SLP, Katana now accounts for approximately 97% of all DEX trading volume, underscoring how effective a closed ecosystem can be at value retention. And before Katana launched, AXS and SLP liquidity pools had generated 38 on other major DEXs. billion in transaction volume, this is expected to equal approximately $1.9 million in lost protocol fees.

New ideas, new challenges

Buildingyour own AMM DEX may seem profitable, but it does bring some new considerations and challenges.

In the above cases, what FriendTech and Ronin Chain/Katana have in common is that both have built a strong ecosystem with strict restrictions and achieved subsequent capture through advance constraints— — FriendTech limits FRIEND’s transferability and provides the only interface for users to buy/sell its tokens, while Ronin Chain/Katana strongly incentivizes users to migrate AXS and SLP to its dedicated chain. Therefore, for the protocol, if you want to successfully capture value, you must strictly control the value you create within your own ecosystem, because DeFi is permissionless and anyone can use your token without restrictions. Coins deploy their own liquidity pools on another DEX.

In addition, building your own AMM DEX requires additional audit costs, time and technical resources, and requires convincing users and liquidity providers to accept the corresponding risks.

Finally, building your own AMM DEX also means that you will lose certain network effects. For example, adding your token to only one X-WETH liquidity pool means that all potential buyers will have to buy WETH before buying the token, especially before other aggregators integrate your DEX, which is inevitable Will affect the exposure of the token.

Fortunately, the DEX field is quietly changing, Balancer has announced their V3 version, and Uniswap V4 is coming, which is expected to make the liquidity pool highly customizable. Specifically, Uniswap V4’s hooks architecture will allow liquidity pool creators to add additional transaction fees and treat them as another form of protocol fees. This will allow the protocol to capture some of the value created by Uniswap while enjoying its security and liquidity network effects.

Conclusion

All in all, the current DEX environment fails to properly incentivize the value that protocols bring to their platforms.

By building its own DEX, protocols can avoid the value hijacking that occurs when relying on third-party DEXs. The cases of BunnySwap and Katana prove that protocols can achieve value retention by building their own AMM solutions.

Although this will also bring some new challenges, such as the need for additional audit resources, or new risks, etc., it has potential in value retention and ecosystem control. The benefits make this still an extremely attractive proposition.

As the DeFi industry continues to evolve, protocols may increasingly consider controlling their own AMM curves to ensure longer-term sustainability.

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