I hope you had great New Year celebrations. Now, it’s time to get back into the market slowly.

StarkNet Plays

I won’t spend much time explaining why using StarkNet matters now. If you just joined, you can check previous issues of Edge for this. This time we have another DEX to look at, JediSwap, and options platform Carmine.

JediSwap will almost certainly have a token, given that it has a “stake” button with a “coming soon” placeholder.

The drill is simple: make a swap transaction and preferably provide some liquidity. The exchange is on the mainnet, meaning you will need real ETH. If you don’t have it on StarkNet, you can use Orbiter for bridging.

Moving on to Carmine. Like JediSwap, it has a staking module that suggests an upcoming token, but the product is still on the testnet.

Testing Carmine could be problematic if you’re using StarkNet’s testnet faucet because it gives you very little test ETH, yet Carmine’s contracts are expensive to use. A workaround is to use the Alchemy faucet to get testnet ETH to your MetaMask and then use the StarkGate bridge to move them.

Once you get some ETH, head to this page and scroll down to the trading terminal. I won’t explain how options work. You can learn more here if you’re curious. Choose the call options and click on any of them to long or short it. The rest of the process is straightforward.

Click on an option from the list.

Trying the Innovative GammaSwap

It might not feel like it, but Uniswap was a breakthrough. On the surface, it looks very simplistic, but the internal design and the underlying idea made the entire DeFi summer and a subsequent market-wide bull run possible. However, Uniswap and similar DEXes have a flaw.

This flaw is impermanent loss. To ensure adequate pricing, exchanges need funds from regular folks like you and me, so they incentivize us to provide the funds with fees and rewards. However, even that might not be appealing because the impermanent loss will nullify all the rewards and might even put us in a losing position. 

It’s a catch-22: you need funds for trading, but you can’t attract much because of the impermanent loss. It’s a big issue, even after all the advancements in the space.

That’s why GammaSwap looks so attractive. The team claims to have overcome the impermanent loss issue. Moreover, they say they turned losses into gains. You have a chance to put these claims to the test, and I think you should. This product should have a significant impact, so an allowlist seat will be valuable.

GammaSwap works on its own EVM chain. If you added networks to MetaMask manually before, you should feel at home. If not, here’s how it’s done.

Click on your MetaMask icon, then the three-dot button, and click on the “Expand view” option. A new tab with MetaMask will open. In the top right corner, you should see the network selector. Click on it, and you will see an “Add network” button. Click on it and then on “Add network manually.”

  1. Network name: GammaSwap Testnet
  2. New RPC URL: https://b0416a2a-a17d-45ef-83b9-d18cd311b15a.ethereum.nameless.io/
  3. Chain ID: 786466
  4. Currency symbol: ETH

You can skip the rest and click on “Save.” Then, copy your address and head to the project’s Discord. Paste it in the “testoooors” channel and relax for a while. The funds go out every hour.

After the wait is over, you will have 0.25 test ETH. It’s time to try GammaSwap. Connect your MetaMask and click on your wallet address. In the drop-down menu, click on “Request.” Request all the tokens available, but do it smartly.

Instead of clicking through each MetaMask pop-up, click away back to GammaSwap and request the next token. Once you click through all of the “Request” buttons and get back to the MetaMask pop-up, you will have all transactions conveniently queued.

At the top of the screen, select “Markets,” click on any market in the list, and try providing liquidity to Reserve and LP (the toggle is in the top right of the window) and borrowing liquidity. You don’t have to know how it all works or what it all means. It’s test money, so don’t overthink it.

Try different modes.

If you encounter issues, post them in Discord’s “product-feedback” channel. This feedback might give you special roles and maybe perks like an allowlist seat.

That’s it for today. Thank you for reading.