Drift Protocol — January 2022 Monthly Update
Setting records and breaking them.
Welcome back to our monthly update!
Today, we’re recapping the huge January we had and we’re going to use this opportunity to share the milestones we hit with our loyal community members.
We exceeded all expectations by breaking old records, setting new ones; and shattering them as well. We were battle tested in the biggest market sell-off since the protocol’s inception and we came out largely unscathed.
We’re so proud of our team. We’re so proud of what we’ve built. And we’re even more proud of what’s to come.
January 2022: a Month of Records
Milestones
In January, we hit $1 billion in volume trade within 39 days of going live on mainnet and hit an all-time high of $100m traded in a single day.
Did you think that was all ?
We then broke that record and traded $2 billion in volume in the following 13 days and hit an all time high of $123m in volume traded in a single day.
Black Saturday
We capped off our record month by surviving the largest market sell off since the protocol’s inception — Black Saturday, 22 January 2022 .
In the face of debilitating network congestions and oracle failures, Drift passed with flying colours.
- Our DAMM confined 93% of our liquidations to partial liquidations. Partial liquidations are unique to Drift and they’re in place as a risk management tool designed to prevent traders from losing their full collateral. They’re useful in times of extreme volatility (as demonstrated by Black Saturday), where a user’s position is only reduced by 25%.
- We had zero wrongful liquidations on the platform. Our oracle guardrails performed as designed and prevented liquidations where the mark price and oracle price of an asset differed by >10%. This gave Drift users: (1) stable prices; (2) manageable liquidations; and (3) more time to adjust positions.
- No cascading liquidations or large downward wicks. This is also thanks to our guardrails. Price stability = no cascading liquidations or large downward wicks.
Market Listings & Unique Users
We listed five new markets in January — $MATIC, $ATOM, $DOT, $ADA and $ALGO — the most we’ve listed in a singular month.
Coincidentally (or not), Drift also saw a new all-time high of 1047 daily unique active users on the platform. Prior to January, this number was 591. This brings our total number of unique Driftooors to 7,784.
Hires
Our numbers aren’t the only thing going up! We also expanded our team and brought on a new:
Our team is still expanding. If you’re interested in hopping onboard our rocket ship; be sure to check out the position openings at the end of this post!
And so much more…
- UI Updates — we shipped new UI updates to streamline the Drift user experience with a new portfolio page, leverage slider and a funding rates page.
- Drift Education — we launched a new education series targeted at retail users on YouTube and Substack titled: Drift Education. Each week, we released original content walking through the basics of technical analysis, market movements and trade set-ups.
- AMAs — a big focus for us in January was to grow in collaboration with our partners within the wider Solana ecosystem. We held joint AMAs with Katana, Henry Harder (Polychain) & Tarun Chitra (Robot Ventures), UXD and we also hosted research calls with our resident gigabrains and co-founders — Z and Cindy.
- Bounty Program — our Bounty Program ran throughout the course of January to incentivise community contributions for both content and technical submissions. We ran the campaign in collaboration with the Solana Foundation and received over 90 expressions of interest, 65 submissions and will award more than $70,000 USDC to contributors (more on this in a stand-alone article later).
- Lit Memes — we had some lit meme submissions for our Bounty Program and ⛽️ Program (see Discord for more on ⛽️). Winning submissions were all paid out so if you think you can beat them be sure to submit a meme and tag @DriftProtocol on Twitter.
Beyond January 2022
Suffice to say, we had a HUGE January but we’re not stopping there! Our February focus is going to be on increasing retail users (lots of new initiatives coming 😉) and shipping out our most in-demand product — limit orders!
Stay tuned as we grind towards being the number one futures DEX across all chains!
🚨🚨 We are hiring 🚨🚨
Get in touch with us via email if any of the below roles suit you.
- Frontend Engineer (Mobile)
- Frontend Engineer
- Smart Contract Engineer
- Full Stack Engineer
- Head of Community/Community Manager
- Product Designer
View full list of available roles at Drift Protocol here.
Get In Touch!
Stay in touch with us as we journey towards becoming the #1 decentralised futures exchange across all chains!
🌐 Visit us at drift.trade 🌐
📩 Email us at hello@drift.trade 📩
💬 Connect with us on Discord 💬
👾 Find us on Twitter — @DriftProtocol 👾
🧵 Check out Drift Education on Substack 🧵
📺 Watch Drift Education on Youtube 📺
