An open source, perpetual futures exchange on Solana
Trade, earn, build. The top perpetuals DEX on Solana, Drift has built a UI that is intuitive to use and easy to understand. Experienced traders will find this platform incredibly versatile, with options to borrow/lend, spot, swap, get involved as a market maker by providing backstop AMM liquidity in their BAL program, and more. Users can earn rewards in their upcoming Fuel program, through referrals, and by joining their weekly prize draw. I hope to outline the usefulness and flexibility of Drift while encouraging Solana enjoyers to give it a try.
With over 25.5B cumulative trading volume and 320M TVL, Drift has established itself as the largest open source perpetuals futures trading platform on Solana. Perpetuals futures can be traded with leverage up to 20X, while assets can be spot traded with up to 5X leverage, and tokens pairs can be swapped with up to 5X leverage too. Drift is capital efficient and protective of your assets, having built a sophisticated cross-margin risk engine which protects against over-extending risk. Yield on your assets can be earned by lending, and you can borrow against the collateral. You can also earn by staking your assets into a vault to earn yield from exchange fees, opting-in on the market-making Alpha Program, and by providing liquidity with leverage. The platforms decentralized architecture allows it to act as a layer for other protocols to be built on top of, which is encourage through API documentation, SDKs, tutorials, and the Drift Gateway – a self hosted API gateway for easy interaction with Drift V2 Protocol. It is open source and invites contributors to participate for the betterment of the platform.
On April 16, the Drift Foundation introduced the DRIFT token, a governance token set to empower Drift users and contributors to impact decision-making processes and guide the future direction of the Drift ecosystem. The token will “grant Drift users tangible ownership of the protocol and a significant voice in guiding its development trajectory through the Drift DAO.” Drift seeks to distribute power and decision-making instead of centralizing it. The DAO will facilitate the coordination of decisions and initiatives from the token holders. It consists of “a Realms DAO for general protocol development, a Security Council for governing protocol upgrades, and a Futarchy DAO for funding technical grants.” The 1B $DRIFT tokens will be distributed over 5 years, with more than 50% being distributed to the community. An airdrop is coming up, and a blog post outlining the airdrop eligibility criteria will be released shortly.
Why was Drift built on Solana? I think we all know. The low transaction fees and near instantaneous transaction speed allow traders to move as fast as the markets, making perpetual futures trading an exciting and potentially rewarding experience. Drift was one of the first de-fi projects on Solana having launched in 2021, and has since established itself as a pillar in the community through its honest work. Having started with less than 100 daily active traders, Drift now boasts an impressive 175,000 traders.
Drift also hosts an extremely useful learning section on its website, with article covering topics from understanding open interest, to setting up a wallet to trade of Drift, to articles on risk management and price action. By providing these learning opportunities at no cost to the community, Drift is offering a valuable service to Solana and furthers its reputation by trying to improve the knowledge and thus success of traders on its platform.
All in all, I think Drift has clearly positioned itself as one of the most useful and reputable de-fi apps on Solana, and will continue to contribute to the ongoing success of the blockchain. If you want to work for them, check out their careers page where they are actively hiring for a number of roles! Hope you enjoyed this article.
Cheers,
Davie
Quoted lines are directly taken from the Drift website.
©2024 Davie Waulaucher
