LEVERJ reveals groundbreaking scaling tech, launches perpetual swap futures

LEVERJ is a decentralized crypto exchange founded by a small team of Wall Street veterans from ​J.P. ​Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse. Having seen the systemic risk inherent in the legacy financial system while developing trading technology during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (and how little was fixed afterwards), the founders discovered Bitcoin and began developing distributed trading alternatives.

In 2015 their first decentralized exchange ‘Coinpit’ was launched. Built on Bitcoin, this early proof-of-concept DEX validated the idea that decentralizing the orderbook and matching engine was possible, but with Bitcoin’s 10 minute block times and scant smart contract functionality the team decided to switch to Ethereum in 2016.

Inspired by the early work of ‘Plasma’, the LEVERJ exchange today is focused on providing enterprise-grade trading solutions while remaining strictly non-custodial. The exchange has offered crypto spot trading for some time and has just launched BTC/USD and ETH/USD perpetual swap futures contracts – allowing for up to 100x leverage.

The LEVERJ trading interface

As a fully decentralized crypto derivatives exchange, LEVERJ differs from centralized exchanges like Bitmex and Deribit in some important ways – with security at the top of the list. Because LEVERJ is a decentralized exchange, trading is self-custodial with traders in control of their private keys at all times. In addition, transaction speeds are comparable, if not faster, than those offered by centralized exchanges. In recent months a major surge in the number of DeFi users and traders transacting on Ethereum has seen the Ethereum mainchain and the DeFi ecosystem in general put under strain. The net result has been Ethereum transaction speeds falling at the same time as gas fees have hit all time highs.

What is Gluon?

LEVERJ has addressed these issues with the three year development of ‘Gluon’ – a game-changing Layer 2 solution purpose-built for high-frequency trading and designed to solve Ethereum’s congestion and gas fee scaling issues.

As the only Layer 2 solution developed specifically for high speed trading, Gluon is a technical evolution. It is light-years ahead of hurried scaling solution fixes like ZK Rollups and Optimistic Rollups that have been rushed to market as supposed fixes to the current Ethereum bottlenecks. ZK Rollups, for example, takes additional compute resources and creates a larger footprint onchain, creating scalability issues, while Optimistic Rollups have limited throughput with the current conditions and are not scalable enough to offer traders the sub-second performance expected from a traditional exchange. Indeed, in some instances where these Rollup solutions have been implemented, users are being forced to wait up to two weeks to withdraw.

In contrast, Gluon is an account based Layer 2 solution that has been through robust external audits and thorough testing. Trading with Gluon is sub-second, there are zero gas fees and trading and withdrawals can be as quick as 30 minutes – faster than most centralized exchanges.

Gluon was originally created for the sole purpose of powering a decentralized derivatives exchange (LEVERJ) but due to industry demand for super fast and reliable Layer 2 solutions, LEVERJ CEO Bharath Rao says the exchange has expanded its plans to allow any DeFi project to utilize its groundbreaking technology. Grants and investments will be made available to finance the ecosystem growth (more details will be announced when the Gluon.Network launches). Along with ecosystem funding and marketing making initiatives, LEVERJ has also announced DeFi integration, liquidity rewards and a decentralized affiliate program.

At this time the exchange is also announcing the 1:1 migration of its existing $LEV tokens to its new Layer 2 token $L2. Although its tokenomics are exactly the same as its predecessor, the role of the $L2 token has been broadened to encompass the Gluon ecosystem as its staking and governance token. Its Twitter cash-tag is $LTWO.

Regarding the liquidity issue that has often been a problem for early DEXs, traders on LEVERJ can be confident they will be able to enter and exit positions, as the platform has rolled out a Market Making incentive program, with MakerDAO announced as one of its first partners. The initial liquidity on the Gluon mainnet went live last week and Rao says the platform is in discussions with other significant liquidity providers to scale the book depth and the number of tradable instruments.