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What are the differences and advantages between DeFi derivatives upstart Kine and dYdX?

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This article makes a comprehensive comparison between Kine and dYdX to look for value depressions in the DEX track that are gradually accelerating.

Source: Kine community enthusiast

At present, the blockchain industry is no longer satisfied with the blockchain itself and the value performance of its value tokens, and the market has naturally eliminated the "amazing" concept in the industry but extremely bad implementation in the process of repeated argumentations and continuous transactions.

As far as exchanges are concerned, the comparison between the advantages and disadvantages caused by the conflict between the concepts of distributed and centralized exchanges has always been controversial. The negative events caused by the central management of the centralized platform often occur, while the overly radical decentralized platform also faces the problems of slow trading caused by immature technology. As a result, the industry is looking for ways to both meet the characteristics of the blockchain itself and improve the efficiency of transactions.

As Lei, founder of Kine, said, "The financial world is not black and white", so the blockchain trading platform is not freely centralized and decentralized. Before the technology and support community can reach a certain height, the so-called "semi-centralized" and "blockchain financial derivatives" concepts are born from this.

So what are the similarities and differences between Kine, a project dedicated to "on-chain financial derivatives", and dYdX, the much-hyped leader in "semi-centralisation"? This article will make a comprehensive comparison of the two to look for value depressions in the accelerating derivative DEX track.

The core difference: the trading mechanism

Through the peer-to-pool mechanism, Kine can provide users with multiple trading options and a large amount of liquidity. Kine now has Ethereum, Binance smart Chain, Polygon and Avalanche.

The biggest feature of Kine is the peer-to-pool trading mechanism, which allows traders to complete a transaction immediately at an order price without partial or no transaction after placing an order. In Kine, the trader's opponent is not other traders, but the pool of liquidity provided by the pledgee. Through this mechanism, Kine provides traders with ample liquidity.

DYdX is a relatively traditional order book derivative DEX, and is currently the leader of the derivative DEX circuit. After launching three transaction products on the main ethereum network, dYdX launched a perpetual contract product on the Layer 2 network in February this year, which was officially launched in early August.

The biggest difference between the two is the trading mechanism. The order book trading mechanism may have problems such as insufficient liquidity in the early stage of the development of the agreement, while the peel-to-pool trading mechanism effectively solves this problem.

team

The Kine team had an absolute advantage in finance and technology, while the dYdX team was superior in technology.

Lei, the founder of Kine, has more than 15 years of experience in traditional investment banking and served as the head of Huobi Institutional Business Division. At present, Kine team has a total of 20 members, mostly from Merrill Lynch, HSBC, Citigroup and other major investment banks. Kine's technical team is also very mature, with core technical personnel cooperating for more than 5 years.

DYdX founder Antonio Julianno previously worked as a software development engineer at Coinbase, Uber, and MongoDB. The dYdX team currently has more than 23 people, eight of whom are software engineers, some from Coinbase.

money

In each round of financing, dYdX is escorted by well-known investors in the industry. The project development fund is sufficient and strong investors are also the reasons why dYdX attracts great attention. In comparison, Kine is slightly inferior in terms of the amount of financing and investor background.

Kine has raised $20 million in three rounds of funding. Participating investors include Ascensive Assets, Divergence Capital, NGC Ventures, Block Dream Fund (OKEx), CMS Holdings, Bixin Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, Original Capital, DeFi Alliance, Spartan Group, Blockchain Capital, Red Chain Capital, and individual investors include AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant and Alexander Pack.

DYdX has raised at least $87 million in at least four rounds of funding, The list of investors includes Paradigm, Polychain Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), Three Arrows Capital, and more. In addition, dYdX has a strong relationship with Coinbase. On the one hand, some of the dYdX team members come from Coinbase, and on the other hand, Coinbase participated in the dYdX seed round and injected liquidity into its lending products.

product

Kine, which trails dYdX in terms of number of products, currently offers both leveraged trading and pledged income. DYdX currently offers five products: perpetual contracts, margin trading, leveraged trading, spot trading and lending.

Kine currently provides trading services for 21 cryptocurrencies including BTC, ETH and BNB. Users can use USDT, USDC and kUSD as margin for trading. KUSD needs to be cast through Kine dAPP mortgage assets, and there will be a certain difference between the collateral and the value of kUSD, which will be used as a clearing buffer.

In addition, Kine offers a pledge service where users can pledge their assets to earn Kine pledge rewards.

Ethereum chain supports USDC, ETH, wBTC, USDT, xKINE, WOO pledge.

Binance smart chain supports BTC, ETH, BTC, BNB, XRP, LTC and xKine pledge.

Polygon supports THE LP pledge of Matic, BTC, ETH, BTC, xKine, BTC-ETH, USDC-ETH, and MATIC-ETH.

Economic models

两者都将绝大部分的 Token 用于生态系统的发展以及社区激励，相对于言，dYdX 的 Token 总量过多，短中期通胀压力更为显著。

KINE 是 Kine 项目的 Token ，总量为 1 亿枚，目前流通数量为 2203 万枚。ID0 价格为 4 美元，目前 Token 价格为 1.342 美元。分配规则方面，KINE 总量的 40% 用于生态系统补助，总量的 20% 分配给团队和顾问（其中 25% 在 ID0 6 个月后解锁，剩余 75% 在 18 个月内线性解锁），13% 分配给种子支持者（成本为 0.2 美元，其中 10% 在 ID0 后解锁，60% 在 12 个月内线性解锁，剩余的 30% 于第二年解锁），12% 分配给私人销售参与者（成本为 0.5-1 美元，25% 在 ID0 后解锁，剩余 75% 在 12 个月内线性解锁），10% 分配给流动资金伙伴关系（25% 在 ID0 后解锁，75% 在 12 个月内线性解锁），剩余 5% 分配给平衡器流动性引导池（LBP）。

DYDX 是 dYdX 的治理 Token ，总量为 10 亿枚，目前流通数量为 3504 万枚，DYDX 将在 5 年内完成分发，5 年之后年通胀率不超过 2%。分配规则方面，DYDX 总量的 50% 被用于分配给社区用户（其中，25% 分配给挖矿交易者，7.5% 分配给追溯交易者，7.5% 分配给流动性提供者，5% 分配给社区金库，2.5% 分配给流动性质押者，2.5% 分配给保险池质押者），总量的 27.73% 分配给投资者，其余部分分配给创始团队和顾问等。

data

There is a huge difference between Kine and dYdX in terms of total lock-up value. The total lock-up value of dYdX is 13 times higher than that of Kine. However, with such a large gap in lock-up volume, dYdX's advantage in daily trading volume is less than 4 times, which is achieved when dYdX is still engaged in large-scale trading incentives. It can be seen that Kine has a great advantage in the activity of its stock funds compared with dYdX, which is also the key factor that Kine was able to maintain the highest trading volume of derivative DEX on the Ethereum chain.

conclusion

Kine 独特的交易机制在保证了交易流动性的同时降低了交易成本， Token KINE 的分配机制为生态系统的发展保驾护航。虽然 dYdX 凭借先发优势以及长期以来积累的用户量和资金量占据明显优势，但是二者当前完全摊平后总市值存在三十余倍的巨大差距略显夸张，尤其是 Kine 能够在存量资金活跃度以及交易机制等方面占据一定优势的情况下，市值遭到相对低估的情况客观存在，尤其是考虑到衍生品 DEX 赛道尚处在发展的「萌芽期」，Kine 也许值得更多关注目光。