The second-largest derivatives platform on Solana by daily volume, Zeta Markets has mounted a major campaign to claim the top spot. Since it runs on Solana’s public blockchain network, Zeta offers the best of both worlds: the speed and user experience of a centralised exchange, and full self-custody and transparency for users.
Zeta is one of the most-used, fully on-chain Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) perpetuals exchange on the market today.
With Zeta, users enjoy:
- Security: Full self-custody of assets, USDC margined;
- Capital efficiency: Up to 10x leverage with cross margin;
- Price discovery without centralisation: Fully on-chain CLOB;
- Institutional liquidity: Programmatic connectivity to smart contracts using SDK / CPI programmes for market makers and other integrations;
- Gamification: Leaderboard, referrals, and trading rewards;
- User-friendly experience: Extremely fast and intuitive trading UI for web and mobile;
- Quick start: Deposit from Solana or other chains in one transaction on the Zeta interface.
Decentralised perpetual contracts exchanges (perp DEX) registered an all-time high in monthly trading volume in March 2024 at $317 billion, representing 395% year-on-year growth, according to DefiLlama. Solana simultaneously witnessed its largest growth in derivatives trading volume, at 244%. Zeta is the major driving force behind this growth in the perp DEX sector, as its volume soared by 397% over the same period.
Last month, the company unveiled plans to release Solana’s first L2 rollup. This month, even more details of future plans emerged when the company published the release schedule and planned incentives for $Z, its soon-to-be-launched governance token.
The token generation event (TGE) will kick-start the following unlocks: An initial airdrop of 8% of the $Z supply distributed to traders, with loyalty boosts for early users. Initial stakers of $Z will qualify for an additional 2% airdrop, issued in the form of staked $Z 1 epoch (28 days) after the TGE.
Traders will receive incentives comprising 30% of the total supply over 90 months, while 22.5% unlocked over 24 months will be committed to the Community Treasury to fund multi-year growth initiatives. These include liquidity provisioning, as well as Zeta’s creator and ambassador programmes. Finally, the $Z token distribution airdrop will see 20% allocated to contributors and 17.5% to investors.
Zeta’s goal is to compete with central exchanges in speed, cost, user experience, and security, while providing the benefits of DeFi, that is, self-custody, accessibility, and the ability to co-own the protocol and participate in governance.
For traders, trading more on Zeta will earn Z-Score, which will determine allocation of $Z upon airdrop and post-airdrop platform incentives. More Z-Score, more $Z. Users can earn more with Z-Score multipliers, for example, a 10% boost if they use a referral link. Users also earn 10% of referred fees, and 10% of referred Z-Score on a lifetime basis for all referrals. In the last two months alone, users on Zeta referred more than $1bn of trading volume.
The company also recently announced it has raised a $5m strategic round, bringing total funding to $13.5m to-date. The round was led by Electric Capital, with participation from DACM, Airtree, and prominent angel investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana and Mert Mumtaz of Helius. Wintermute, Jump Crypto and Solana Ventures are investors in previous rounds.
To date, Zeta has processed over 6.5m trades and $7.5bn in volume, with more than 100,000 monthly users. Most of these metrics are growing at an average of 50% each month. Find out more about Zeta Markets and experience perpetuals at the speed of light today.