I have read and understand the CONFLUX ECOSYSTEM GRANTS OVERVIEW, and determined that my proposal is best for the Growth Grants stream.
I understand that the Conflux Growth Grants are subject to a No Sale Rule, and I have read the terms of this rule.
I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Conflux Foundation to receive this grant.
I understand that I will be required to follow public grant reporting requirements.
APPLICATION INTRODUCTION
Zeepr Finance is the first decentralized perpetual protocol that allows users to trade a wide range of mainstream financial assets using all types of cryptocurrencies as collaterals. It supports both U-margined contracts and COIN-margined contracts and offers features like stop-loss and take-profit, creating a near-centralized experience for traders while operating entirely on-chain.
Yes, Zeepr is an incorporated startup. Here are all the related links:
Website: https://zeepr.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Zeepr_labs
Telegram: https://twitter.com/Zeepr_labs
Medium: https://medium.com/@zeeprlabs
Conflux eSpace recipient wallet address for the grant
Brc20:
0x68aF20BdecFcb4745f1F107Cf25421f54c36Cf55
TEAM
Product and Tech
Product and Tech
Bill: A postdoctoral fellow in financial engineering at Fudan University, has more than 10 years of experience in designing financial derivatives. Pioneering the perp sector, he designed the linear perpetual contract for OKX and Bybit at early times and invented the perpetual option product in 2020.
Maco: From 2018 to 2020, Maco held key roles as a blockchain backend developer, making significant contributions to the creation of decentralized lending platforms and decentralized oracle projects. Since 2020, he has taken on leadership roles in the technical department of a technology company, overseeing crucial projects like Onpay and Defor.
Zack: Graduated from Fudan University with a major in computer science, Zack has more than 15 years of coding experience, and has participated in the transformation of China’s Ping An Annuity investment system and the development of Wind trading terminals, which later became the most popular trading terminals in China (Chinese version of Bloomberg). In 2018, he started working on the back-end development of perpetual contracts in crypto’s top centralized exchanges. Start focusing on the decentralized derivatives track in 2020
Wudy: Wudy has more than 10 years of experience in tech development and system architecture design, and has engaged in the development of crypto projects for more than 5 years, with past experience in Public Chain, DEX, and Wallet.
Marketing, Operations, and Business Development
Norah: Experienced in both Web 3 research and business development, Norah used to lead a research team at a Web 3 research company and issued more than 40 research reports. Her business development experience was mainly in important roles in tier one exchanges, where she got to build up a strong network with crypto projects, market makers, and crypto funds.
Jay: Jay is a seasoned operations manager and marketer in the Web 3 industry with a robust portfolio of successful projects listed on major exchanges. He has an expansive, worldwide Web 3 network encompassing communities, builders, investors and businesses. Graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, Jay was a Hollywood producer before joining the Web 3 force.
Sira: Formerly the Global Business Development Manager at BitKeep Wallet, Sira cultivated partnerships with 10+ Mainnets and 100+ Projects, facilitating integration and collaboration. Proficient in orchestrating impactful joint activities and aligning tech solutions with market trends. As the Marketing and Operations Lead at a BSC DeFi Protocol, she led a diverse team of 20+ managers, surpassing $700 million in TVL within 3 months. Her strengths encompass strategic alliances, brand exposure, and nurturing user engagement.
TOTAL BUDGET AND FUNDING TIER
PROJECT INFORMATION
Zeepr is the first decentralized perpetual protocol that supports leveraged trading of a wide range of crypto and traditional financial assets, with all types of crypto collaterals. All transactions take place on-chain, yet retaining essential functionalities such as stop-loss and take-profit. This creates a trading environment that mirrors centralized platforms and delivering a seamless experience to on-chain traders, achieved by multi-chain support, built-in oracle, and the innovations on the liquidity pool.
User Base: Who are your users, and how many do you currently have? Show your work.
Firstly, if you’re a regular user wanting to use your crypto as collateral for trading traditional financial assets, you might be interested in our platform. There is no need for you to sell the token you are holding, and you can use it as collateral on Zeepr.
Secondly, for projects, deploying liquidity on Zeepr can give their tokens more use cases and help them generate income. So, all projects can also benefit from our platform, thus, become our users.
As you can see, we are still in an early stage and have not yet launched our product to the public, which is why we currently lack on-chain data. Nevertheless, we have been actively engaged in business collaborations. You can find our interactions with various projects on our Twitter platform. Furthermore, we have been conducting AMAs to introduce our product and explain the relationship between RWA and DeFi. We place a strong emphasis on early-stage user education.
User Growth: What is your main value proposition for your users? And how do you plan on targeting them?
For projects and market makers, our platform empowers them by providing a valuable use case for their tokens. Additionally, they can earn profits through this: liquidity providers receive 100% of user liquidation, plus a share of the trading fees.
As for retail users, we also empower them by allowing them to link their existing assets with mainstream financial assets. This enables them to engage in traditional financial asset contracts without the need to sell their assets, thus leveraging their holdings for potential profits.
How do we plan on targeting them:
Zeepr’s go-to-market strategy leverages both of it strong projects network and community resources. Zeepr will bring projects in it’s ecosystem by providing B2B service to projects and clients, providing business clients like Web3 projects a seamless coin-margin trading environment. Meanwhile, the launch of Zeepr’s NFT and trade to unlock program will integrate Zeepr with its 100+ global communities and 1500+ KOL resources, empowering brand visibility and user growth.
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For liquidity partners, they could understand this need between us.Our team has a strong network background and have already established numerous successful partnerships. These factors can effectively attract project teams and market makers.
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For retail users, if they want to use their holdings as collateral, they can only do so with us, as other Onchain perpetual contract platforms only support U-based contracts. We will collaborate with project teams to educate the market and bring their users to our platform for trading. Additionally, we will offer U-based support and plan to launch a series of operational activities to activate the retail user market.
Market: What are alternative or competing protocols? Pick a competitor and describe a main difference/competitive advantage.
Due to our unique positioning, we don’t have direct competitors. However, if we were to make a comparison with current on-chain perpetual contracts platforms, the following points stand out:
As a decentralized perpetual decentralized exchange, we have two key differentiating features compared with GMX, one of the most well-known perpetual dex nowadays.
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Asset Variety: Taking GMX as an example, which only supports BTC, ETH, LINK and UNI. Unlike GMX and many other on-chain perp protocols, which are primarily limited to crypto-based perpetual trading due to oracle constraints, we support a wide range of asset classes, including both cryptocurrencies and traditional financial assets. Real-world assets (RWAs) can serve as price indices and have significant market potential. For instance, consider Gains Network (GNS), which supports forex trading, and its forex trading volume surpasses that of crypto. Furthermore, in the long term, our target market extends beyond the existing crypto user base. This allows us to explore new horizons and envision extensive growth opportunities.
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Collateral Flexibility: While most on-chain protocols rely primarily on stablecoins as collateral, we offer the flexibility of using coin-backed collateral. This means users can collateralize their assets with a wide range of cryptocurrencies. This approach taps into the market of crypto holders who might not have been addressed by other U-based protocols, fostering rapid launch and growth. As an example, GMX, one of the current leading platforms, has a daily active user (DAU) count ranging from 1k to 2k. Most other new perp platforms generate initial buzz through token airdrops, but their actual DAU remains in the low hundreds. With our model, we have the potential to surpass these figures and establish a robust user base.
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Liquidity: Liquidity is vital for trading platforms, influencing trading volumes. dYdX employs market makers to provide liquidity, focusing on efficient matching but incurring slippages. GMX implements a zero-slippage mechanism, allowing stable trades through oracle-based pricing, even for large trades. Zeeper introduces the Peer to Dual Pools (P2DP) liquidity solution, featuring public and private pools. Public pools offer supplementary liquidity, while private pools cater to professional market makers. Zeeper’s hybrid approach ensures superior liquidity compared to dYdX and GMX.
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Funding Rates: dYdX’s funding rate mechanism resembles CEXs, while GMX relies on GLP for both long and short positions. GMX users pay equal fees for both long and short positions, resulting in constant funding payments. In contrast, dYdX users pay or receive funding based on market conditions. Zeeper’s dual-pool logic incentivizes competition among market makers for fee earnings, eliminating funding rates. Therefore, Zeeper provides a favorable experience for long-term position holders compared to dYDX and GMX.
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Price Discovery Mechanism: Price discovery determines an exchange’s pricing power. dYdX utilizes the order book model, affecting prices based on trades. GMX relies on oracles for pricing, which limits its potential as a dominant exchange because oracle-based pools lack pricing power and can only passively receive oracle prices. Zeeper’s pricing model combines oracle-based prices with adjustable quotes from private pools, enhancing the decentralized price discovery mechanism and user experience.
Technology: What is your project’s core technology, explained in non-technical terms.
- Comprehensive Asset Coverage with Built-in Oracles:
Zeepr spans all blockchain assets and integrates built-in oracles for global asset pricing, including traditional financial markets. Supporting coin-margin trading and a diverse collateral range, we address on-chain market gaps, bridging crypto and mainstream finance. - Enhanced Trading Experience and Innovative Dual Liquidity Pools:
We optimize liquidity and minimize slippage, introducing the innovative Private + Public Dual Liquidity Pool. This ingenious system empowers both professional market makers and everyday users to participate as liquidity providers, effectively balancing the risks. This dynamic liquidity environment not only fosters a smoother trading experience but also offers a range of robust trading tools and features. - Infrastructure Upgrades with public chains and L2
In addition to our multi-chain approach on mature public chains, we seize the opportunities presented by advancements in Layer 2 and Layer 3, along with the modular blockchain infrastructure improvements. This proactive approach enhances the on-chain perpetual trading experience, propelling it to new heights.
Traction: Provide an overview of your project’s current traction, including community and social channels. Please provide metrics and links to public sources.
Twitter followers: 32k https://twitter.com/Zeepr_labs
Telegram community: 21k https://t.me/zeeprlabs
Stage of the project: What growth stage is your project at? e.g. pre or post revenue?
We are still in pre pre-revenue stage. Our product’s revenue model is based on trading fees with the maker-taker model, which enables us to generate income with each order. This fee is a percentage (0.1% by default) of the trading volume and is charged from takers. Most of the fee will be distributed back to the LPs and referrals, and the remaining is designed to sustain the ongoing development, maintenance, and growth of our platform.
Security: Please link to any code audits (if any).
Here is the github of Zeepr: https://github.com/Zeeprlabs
And here is the audit report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ETOtMm2pJLCrR_rY4_R-NCaaf3qSDgr0/view?usp=sharing
ECOSYSTEM FIT
In this section, please describe how your proposal supports the Conflux ecosystem. Please include the following information:
Benefit to Conflux Ecosystem: Tell us about how your project will benefit the Conflux ecosystem. In concrete terms, explain how you this grant will lead to more meaningful user interactions on Conflux.
Economic Benefit: Explain how this grant will help lead to more assets and transaction on-chain for Conflux.
As a multi-chain perpetual DEX project, we can contribute to the Conflux ecosystem in the following ways:
Building up financial infra: Trading is one of the most essential scenarios in the crypto space and DEX is the most important part. With a product that has already been developed and available for users to trade, users on Conflux will have access to the most essential trading function for not only crypto, but also traditional financial assets.
Increasing liquidity: By encouraging users to trade in Zeepr with $CFX or any other project’s token in Conflux, purchasing power of the token can be created and thus providing better liquidity in the Conflux ecosystem. We can help to increase the adoption and usage of the tokens in the ecosystem.
Providing new use cases for $CFX and other projects in the ecosystem: Zeepr could provide a solid use case for $CFX and other projects token in the Conflux ecosystem. By supporting the use of any kind of crypto as collateral to trade against the price volatility of mainstream assets, Zeepr links $CFX and other projects token to mainstream financial assets, enhancing user engagement and on-chain activeness
Marketing and community boost: Zeepr could help to boost the marketing and community engagement of the Conflux ecosystem. By promoting the benefits of the Conflux ecosystem, and leveraging our strong projects network, Zeepr could help to attract new users and developers to the ecosystem. Additionally, Zeepr could leverage its own marketing channels to promote the ecosystem and its projects, which could help to increase visibility and awareness.
Overall, as a multi-chain perpetual DEX project, we can contribute to the Conflux ecosystem by building up financial infra, increasing liquidity, providing new use cases, and contributing to the marketing and community boost.
Economic Benefit: A grant can enable us to enhance the product experience, expand the range of supported trading assets (note that on-chain oracle price feeds require gas fees), and conduct operational activities to educate users about contract trading, ultimately boosting community engagement.
GROWTH PROPOSAL
The section describes your plans and how they will be tracked and measured. Please provide the following information:
Grant Plan: In concrete terms, describe your plan and how you will implement it.
Users Acquisition: What users do you plan to target with this grant?
Proposal OKRs: Set ambitious goals for your project. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): are used to set goals and track the progress of your application. Please identify at least 3 OKRs that are observable and measurable.
ROADMAP
This section describes the milestones and distribution plan for your grant:
How will this grant be used and in concrete steps describe how you will implement your grant plan?
We are seeded by Central Research and have enough funds to cover normal operations, thus the funds from the Conflux grant can be all used to push the development and marketing on our cooperation with Conflux.
a. Development: A significant portion of the funds would be allocated to further develop the platform’s infrastructure, user interface, and trading tools, enhancing the overall user experience.
b. Community Building: Funds would support community-building efforts and improve the public awareness of the cooperation between Conflux and Zeepr. Events, forums, and educational initiatives will be hosted to grow the user base and have them engaged in trading on our platform with $CFX.
Provide and define milestones for your proposal. These milestones will be used by the community to track progress of your project, and used by the committee to confirm deliverables before grant payments are released. In each milestone please include:
Specification of the initiative or deliverable
Requested funding per milestone
Milestone duration
Please see below as the Milestone and monthly breakdown of budget. Please note that the Milestone is tentative and may subject to change according to the actual market condition (eg. accelerate the process or adjust the strategy to make it more aggressive if the market suddenly gets warmer). Below is the best estimation based on current judgment of the market
Month 1: on tech and product operation, user education, PR and KOL promotion, and marketing campaigns
- Deployment on Conflux
a. Integrate with Conflux and deploy our product on Conflux - Liquidity Deployment, Market Education, and Product Operation
a. Walk Conflux Team through the liquidity deployment process to ensure seamless
deployment of the liquidity of $CFX
b. Partnership Announcement, AMAs, Giveaways, Medium articles demonstrating the cooperation
c. Educational materials about perp trading (Articles, live streaming sessions, etc) will be made by our traders and spread among both of our community to get users engaged - Enhancing Public Awareness
a. Cooperate with KOLs and media on PR
b. Promoting the Conflux x Zeepr partnership - Co-marketing Campaigns
a. Trading campaigns that award the users and encourage users to use $CFX
b. Referral program and other different kinds of campaigns - Product & Tech
a. Adding price index of tradable asset types from oracle that tailors to Conflux users’ need
b. Starting pushing forward the product iteration and adding product functions (a continuous effort)
Month 2 marketing events
On continuous improvements on product and tech, growth plans, and - Cooperation with other projects on Conflux
a. Cooperate with other projects on liquidity deployment and co-marketing - Co-marketing Campaigns:
a. Various marketing campaigns that involve projects on Conflux, demonstrating the Conflux ecosystem to the community - Community Building
a. Community and user growth
b. Continuous efforts on branding
c. SEO, pushing forward the plans for getting audience from outside of crypto, educating the new users about perp trading on Zeepr and Conflux
Month 3:
On product and tech - Enhanced User Experience
a. Focusing on the Iteration of the product and improvements on the functions, making the trading experience on Zeepr competitive to centralized exchanges - Preparing for the Deployment of Stablecoins Liquidity
a. Follow up with our close MM partners on liquidity providing of stablecoins - Expansion of Partnerships
MAINTENANCE CONSIDERATIONS
In this section, please specify any maintenance considerations and your plan to maintain the community activities post grant.
If CFX tokens are to be directly distributed to users, why will users and liquidity remain after grant funded incentives run out?
Our product at Zeepr addresses real user needs, as trading needs arise naturally within our user base. What sets us apart is the comprehensiveness of our asset offerings, making us the go-to platform for a wide range of trading options. Our initial market activities are aimed at jumpstarting the platform, capturing early users, and increasing our presence in the community.
However, the true user demands can only be met through a superior product experience, which is why we are committed to continuous product optimization. We’re actively working on refining our product to ensure that it remains aligned with the evolving needs of our users.
Simultaneously, liquidity provider (LP) demands center around profit generation. We’ve introduced the concept of perpetual market-making, which can be leveraged for profitability. This innovative approach provides LPs with a lucrative opportunity within our ecosystem, allowing them to earn sustainable returns.
Our journey is rooted in solving real-world problems, and our commitment to delivering valuable solutions remains unwavering. As we expand our user base and improve our product, we’re dedicated to listening to user feedback and adapting to their evolving requirements, making Zeepr a platform that truly caters to the demands of our diverse and dynamic user community.