BSC Economy x ApolloX AMA Recap - Mar. 23, 2023

Speakers:

Founder of ApolloX - CaptainX

BSC Economy Community Builder - Mabel

Introduction of ApolloX

ApolloX is a derivatives DEX. We offer perpetual futures trading. We are probably the largest DEX futures platform on BNB Chain, both in terms of TVL and active addresses. For those unfamiliar with us, we have two types of perpetuals. One is the traditional order book type, the other type uses a liquidity pool, we call them ALP perpetuals. The liquidity pool acts as the counterparty for the trades. If you are not an active trader but are seeking a relatively low-risk, high-yield staking product, ALP is probably interesting for you.

Community Questions

1. ZAVIERRR @AkhtamX

I understand that ApolloX main feature is Decentralized Derivatives Exchange. But one of the problems of all DEX is the Liquidity and huge SPREADS between prices, so how ApolloX affront these issues? Also, are transaction fees cheaper on ApolloX than other DEXs?

As I mentioned, we have two types of perpetuals. Both solve the spread problem, but in different ways. For the order book perpetuals, we have a market making program. We work with many top-tier market makers who help us with our liquidity. If you look at our order book, the spreads and liquidity are at the level of the best centralized exchange. For ALP perpetuals, all such traders trade against the ALP pool. There is zero to low slippage. You get the price from the price index that we calculated from the most liquid spot markets. This is important for traders who want to execute large orders. This will save you quite a lot of execution costs.

As for fees, we are currently the lowest among all the DEXs. Our fees are currently at the level of a CEX, which is much cheaper.

2. Indieca @Quinne1706

We know through BSC_Economy that you are testnet ApolloX version 2, What does this upgrade improve? What are the benefits for us traders after upgrading ApolloX ver2?

The most important improvement is transparency. When we launched version 1, we thought that the most important issue to be solved for a futures DEX is #1, user experience, and #2, liquidity. So our solution is to put the deposit and withdrawal process on-chain, and we keep the match engine and trading process off-chain. Since the off-chain match engine will offer a better user experience and higher throughput. Currently, we noticed that this solution definitely serves part of our users, but for those who care more about transparency, they prefer for all transactions to be executed on the blockchain, so that’s what we're doing in V2. We’re bringing the trading process to the blockchain. The first step is BNB Smart Chain of course. If you’re a user who cares about self-custody, trading transparency, then V2 is a product for you.

3. KrisD @KrisDuoet

What will we get when we stake #APX? Does we stake #APX or #ALP and get the reward ' #RealYield'? Does ApolloX split its profits with holders?

The short answer is yes. For DAO users who stake APX, we split 50% of our platform revenue to DAO stakers. This is definitely real yield as this is revenue from the services we provide. For ALP users, there are two sources of real yield. One is the profit and loss from market making. I’d like to mention there is a risk there, but if you look at the historical data, the profit is quite ok. I’d like to say it’s a reasonable-risk product. If you’re interested, definitely do your own homework and try it out. We also split parts of our trading revenue to ALP, currently it’s 1/7. When we launch V2, we’ll definitely increase this percentage.

Those are all real yield. Beyond that, we also distribute our APX rewards to our ALP holders. So those are basically risk-free rewards. For APX, the current annual yield is around 27-28%. For real yield, current annual yield is around 20%. So if you add them up, it’s almost 50%, so I’d say quite good right now.

4. Elizabet @AOAElizabet

You will earn over 2,000% APY and need not pay tax when you stake APX-BNB". this is huge!!! Is this guaranteed by the project or is it estimated or changed over time?

Well, the 2000% APY only existed for a couple of hours. That is because we shifted our rewards for liquidity providers from the APX-BUSD pool to the new APX-BNB pool. So since the rewards changed to the new pool and the liquidity providers hadn’t shifted their tokens to the new one, that was why the APY showed a high figure. But currently it’s about 21%, which still isn’t bad.

If you’re interested in providing liquidity – it’s on Pancakeswap by the way – you’re welcome to do so. But I’d say no projects can provide guaranteed 2000% APY, and I’d recommend you to stay away from all those projects who say so, they would be scams for sure.

5. kambon 🌹🌹🌹@Kambon12345

What benefits will a user get if they hold #APX token? The defi/NFT market is very furious nowadays. Lets talk about fear, There's always risk out there like being scammed, rugpulled and so on, What are the real use cases of #APX token?

I’d like to say the most important use case is paying commission. You can use APX to pay fees if you trade futures on ApolloX. If you’re just an investor and holder of APX, you can stake in DAO. As I mentioned, you’ll share 50% of platform revenue and the return is quite good.

And while we’re talking about fear, actually ApolloX has been around for about 1.5 years, and we’ve received investment from Binance Labs. If you look at our liquidity pool, we have about 6-7 million on PancakeSwap. I’d like to say those are strong indicators.

6. Jarvis @mhDuong283

ApolloX Team is not the only team that has Derivatives products, @BNBChain has #Level, #Linear, #Horizone, How do you rate those projects and do you see them as a competitor?

Yes, they are definitely our competitors. As I mentioned, we offer the most trading pairs. This is important. For example, Arbitrum is doing their airdrop tonight and everyone will trade ARB. Hence, we are listing ARB in a couple of hours. Basically, this gives us an edge. All users can trade the asset that they want. As mentioned, we also offer low fees.

If you look at derivatives TVL, we are the leader on BNB Smart Chain. Our TVL is the largest. We’ve been here for a long time. As mentioned, our match engine and trading process is off chain previously, which is why you may not have seen us on sites ranking exchanges through on-chain trading volume. But we actually don’t have any trading incentives at the moment, so all volume is organic right now. It’s a couple of tens of millions every day. That’s where we are.

7. Blink @blink090807

How does ApolloX have trading fees compared to other derivatives exchanges? How do we get the cheapest fees?

Currently, trading fees are 0.02% for maker and 0.07% for taker. For ALP perpetuals, the fee is flat at 0.07%. For most DEXs, their fees are around 0.1%. So, we’re cheaper, especially on the maker side if you trade order book perpetuals. We also have referral and affiliate programs. If you refer friends, that’ll be even cheaper for you.

8. Jung Soo Ri @JungSooRi

How is Apollox interface to new users? is your platform user friendly? do you have an informative material or guide for newbies?

Definitely we do. We want to cater to different types of users, so if you go to our webpage for the first time, it’ll let you choose: Classic Mode if you’re familiar with futures trading. If you’re not, you can choose Lite Mode. That is very easy to understand. If you’ve ever bought BTC or ETH from any exchange, there’ll be no problem for you. Just go long if you think BTC will go up. If not, then go short.

If you need some guides, check our help centre for FAQs. We have step by step guides there.

9. Dương Gia Phong @DngGiaPhong2

As I know ApolloX have launched Affiliate Program. How does this program works? can small influencers get benefits from it?

The Affiliate Program is for influencers. We offer higher referral commission for them. It starts from 50% and goes as high as 70%. We do have some criteria for influencers, so check out our website for more details. If you are a small influencer or just a user, we also have an Ambassador Program which we call Champs Program. This is for loyal users.

Live Q&A

Question from @DefiOGD: I’d like to know more on your security system. Let’s say there’s a hack on ApolloX platform, how do you ensure users who use and trust your platform and keep them for the long-term?

There are a couple of things that we do. First of all, the contracts are audited. Our auditor is Certik, one of the most reputable auditors. We also work with BNB Chain on this. We have a war room with BNB Chain. If they find some attacks or attacks on other protocols that would affect us, they’d give us notice so that everyone can react. Thirdly, after the many hacks in the crypto space that happened a few months ago, we upgraded our contracts as a preventive measure. We put in place a hard limit. The most dangerous hacks are those on DAO treasuries and exchange treasuries, right? If those assets are exploited by hackers, everything is done. So we put a hard limit for every hourly time interval. If there is more than $1M in withdrawal, the contract will pause all withdrawals. This limit has to be removed manually through the multisig wallet. Basically this would cap any losses to $1M.

Question from @Meemah_Oumar: Staking programs attract users to your platform. I heard you talking about your benefits of staking your token. Is there a minimum or maximum amount of token required for staking? I’d also like to know the lock up period. Do you have a Telegram community so that I can join?

The short answer is no, we don’t have a minimum or maximum limit. You can stake as much as you want. We offer different time periods for locking. It starts for 1 month to as long as 4 years. But the reward is distributed according to the amount and time lock you choose. We call it Power. The longer you lock, the higher Power you get. There is a calculator on the website. So you’ll know what your annual yield is before you lock your tokens.

For Telegram community, just go to our website and we have the Telegram group link there. Website is apollox.finance.

Question from @Champak656: Speaking of DEX, APX has ranked in the top DEXs. What do you think makes APX different from other exchanges?

If you’re talking about what makes us different from CEX, the answer is obvious. It’s full self-custody. Your key, your crypto, right? If you’re talking about differences with other DEXs, I’d like to say that the best advantage is that we offer the most trading pairs amongst all futures DEXs. We have about 70 perpetual markets for users to trade. We also offer low fees.

Question from @NftTray101: What are some of your scalability challenges as more traders and liquidity providers flow into your platform? How will you address these challenges?

I don’t think this is a bottleneck for now. To be honest, we were more worried about there being no users using the product. We don’t worry about scalability that much. For type 1 order book product, I mentioned it is off chain. Throughput is not a problem. So we can handle even tens of thousands of trades per second. For V2 trading that we are about to launch, that may cause us higher gas. For every trade users make, they pay gas. But on our end, there’s also a gas cost for the oracle. It will be costly, but the actual commission will cover the cost. Since the traders are against the ALP pool, as long as there is enough liquidity in the pool, it will be fine. If the traders are very active, by design this means that real yield for the liquidity pool will be high, which will attract more liquidity in the pool. That’s a very positive circle.

On blockchain, since the support on the blockchain is just not that high, no one can do high-frequency trading on the blockchain. If you are not a high frequency trader, that won’t be a problem for you.

Question from @Cryptocapables: I see on your website that you’re on Arbitrum, Ethereum and BSC. I want to know in the future do you have plans to have other blockchains? And also, why did you decide to use Arbitrum?

We don’t have a clear decision on which blockchain is next. If you look at the TVL and active addresses, MATIC (Polygon) is probably leading. DOT (Polkadot) and other Layer 2 blockchains also look promising. Those are the next ones we will consider. For the order book futures, it’s not hard for us to extend to another blockchain, especially EVM blockchains. So we’ll look at any important improvements, and if addresses and TVL increase a lot, we’ll be interested in extending to that chain.

And that’s exactly the reason why we expanded to Arbitrum. Given that their airdrop is coming, all the attention is on them. Just to share, they also airdropped to DDEXs on the blockchain and we are one of them. They sent us 75,000 ARB tokens and we’ll use that for community campaigns.

@Cryptocapables: I also see that APX token price is around $0.05 currently. I want to know what is the mechanisms in place to improve the price in time?

Well, basically you’ll have to build a product well and build something that more and more people will use. And bring value and revenue to the protocol itself. That will increase the price of the token. We are expanding our ecosystem gradually. We do global campaigns or with KOLs in their communities basically every week. We launch new products very quickly. We also care about APX holders, our investors. And that is why we distribute 50% of revenue to DAO stakers. Profit sharing will be an important reason to hold APX.

Question from @itsOmega12: I was going through the ApolloX staking system. I see that we can stake NFTs to get APR rewards. Which kinds of NFTs we can stake here and what is the APR? What about your NFT Lottery Game? How does it work?

That is for a particular campaign previously. We currently don’t have rewards for NFT staking. The NFT Lottery Game is the previous product and the game is shut down currently.

Question from @Cryptomaxup: What strategies do you have in bringing in non-English users to your platform? They are potential customers for ApolloX.

We do support 10 languages — those that more people speak. If this includes your language, then this isn’t a problem. We also recruit KOLs who love to promote our product around the globe. We have several local communities as well, like in Korea, which is one of the most active markets for us. We also have an Indian Telegram community. I believe there are several Indian users here. If you’re interested, you’re more than welcome to join our local communities.

Question from @Galileo12340: So many projects just talk about long term vision and mission, but what are your short term goals and what are you focusing on right now?

As I mentioned, we are about to launch our V2 trading product. That is a huge product update for us. This will bring the trading process on to the blockchain. To promote the product, we will also have a large round of campaigns. We welcome everyone to stay tuned and join the campaigns! Another thing is to bring more interesting trading products to our users. We will add more trading assets on V2 gradually after launch. This is what we’ll do in this quarter and the next one.

Question from @nuk2km: How do your project try to solve some blockchain industry issues like scalability and interoperability? Can you tell me the strongest or unique advantage that you feel your project is going to lead the market?

I think we have talked about this. We have two types of perps. For order book perps, we kept the match engine off-chain, so throughput is not a problem. And for the on chain one, we adopted a pool to peer model, so everyone trades against the central liquidity pool. This solves the liquidity problem. The throughput is determined by the blockchain.

We offer probably the most trading assets amongst all futures DEXs. Besides about 70 crypto pairs, we also have other trading assets. For example, we have forex. If you want to trade Euro against the dollar, or British pound against the dollar, we have that. We also have several index futures. For example, AI is quite a hot topic in the tech industry recently. We have an AI index futures covering all the related projects and coins. The ticker is AIBUSD, check it out if you’re interested.

Question from @Abdullah678789: What is your focus right now? Are you focused on the market at this time, or focused on building and developing your project or getting new community and users and partnerships?

For the team, the most important focus is always building. As we mentioned, the next important product launch is V2 trading. I guess both in terms of product development or marketing, everything surrounds V2 trading right now.

Question from @Angeljuli7041: Can you tell us about the team behind your project? What makes them capable to build the project?

Actually we are an anonymous team, and that is common in the crypto industry. But we share the backgrounds of major founders and team members. This is on our Gitbook. Check it out if you’re interested. Basically, our key members are either from the technology industry or the finance industry.

Question from @Saggy986: In ApolloX platform, do you have any notification features? So that if my liquidation is near, you can notify me like CEX does?

Yes, we do have notifications on DEX. You can go to our website and enable notifications for margin calls and liquidation calls via email, SMS, Telegram or Discord.

We also have stop loss orders. If you want to control your risk, it's better to put a stop loss order when you have an open position.

Question from @CsChiDy: I’ve been following ApolloX. I’ve been using your app for some time. Since ApolloX is a derivatives DEX, I know you have CEX too. If I want to use your DEX, why do I have to deposit into my wallet? Do you have plans on adding more trading pairs?

Thank you, glad to have a user here. We used to have a centralized arm, but it has already shut down. The reason why you need to deposit for V1 protocol is because the match engine is not on the blockchain, hence there is one more step. The deposit process is shifting the coin from your wallet to the smart contract on the blockchain of the exchange treasury. For V2 product, you don’t need to deposit anymore. Since all trades happen on the blockchain, you can just click the long/short button and open a position, approve from your own wallet and the trade is done.

Question from @cryptoablez: What are your latest innovations you have for this year?

As I mentioned, the key focus is on V2 product. This is an effort from the whole team, so stay tuned for that.

Question from @BleuMot12000: I want to invest in your project. How many people are in your project? What benefits do they get, and what benefits will I get?

If you’re talking about traders, as far as I can remember, it’s between 1000 and 2000 distinct traders every day currently. We are a futures DEX, and we offer high leverage futures trading. That’s the reason why people use our products.

This AMA recap has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full AMA here: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1BRJjZygvVQJw

Risk Reminder: Crypto trading carries a risk. All trading activities are done at your discretion and at your own risk. The information here should not be regarded as financial or investment advice from ApolloX. ApolloX will not be liable for any loss that might arise from your use of any financial product.

Stay up to date with ApolloX!