Executive summary

Vertex Protocol is one of the fastest growing derivative exchange projects on Sei, with deployments also on Arbitrum, Base, Blast, and Mantle. The project has raised an $8.5m seed round from crypto-native funds, and its core contributors are a team of seasoned traders and engineers spanning both TradFi and DeFi markets. Now, with ~$80m in net deposits, Vertex recognized the need for reliable, continuous, and data-driven stakeholder reporting.

To improve its existing onchain analytics and stakeholder reporting, Vertex turned to Token Terminal, a leading onchain data platform trusted by institutional partners like Bloomberg. Token Terminal's dedicated focus on data standardisation made it an ideal partner for Vertex. The decision to partner was further eased by the fact that Token Terminal already had a public track record of reporting standardised financial and usage metrics for other leading derivative exchange projects, such as GMX, dYdX, Holdstation, and more.

“By partnering with Token Terminal, we’re able to benchmark our performance against the competition in a fair and accurate way. Having a real-time dashboard on Token Terminal is not only a great tool for our team, but for all Vertex stakeholders.”

Darius Tabai, Founding Contributor to Vertex

Data Partnership

To ensure accurate and ongoing stakeholder reporting, Vertex entered into a Data Partnership with Token Terminal.

The Data Partnership consists of four different parts:

1. Smart contract registry

Since Vertex isn’t an appchain, but a set of smart contracts running on multiple chains, this first step did not require a node infrastructure setup. Instead, Token Terminal was able to rely on its existing node infrastructure.

To start, the Vertex and Token Terminal teams worked together to build a labelled registry of Vertex’s smart contracts across chains.

A complete smart contract registry is a prerequisite for the next step: the transformation of raw blockchain data into standardised financial and usage metrics.

2. Metric transformations

Leveraging the information in the smart contract registry, Token Terminal’s research team transformed the raw blockchain data from the smart contracts into standardised financial and usage metrics.

For a derivative exchange project project like Vertex, the standardised metrics include net deposits, notional trading volume, fees, revenue, daily active users, and more.

3. Discovery and reporting

After the metric transformations, Vertex was listed on the derivative exchanges market sector dashboard on Token Terminal, and also featured on the recently launched Discover page. As a result, users, developers, and investors can now refer to a single source when deciding which protocols to use, integrate with, and/or invest in.

For Vertex, the dashboards on Token Terminal streamline the reporting to existing and future stakeholders.

4. Data maintenance

Standardised onchain metrics require ongoing maintenance work, especially when the goal is completeness and accuracy.

The maintenance work has only grown in magnitude and importance over the last few years, as more DeFi projects have evolved from single to multichain apps, with often more than one business line.

A Data Partnership with Token Terminal means that Vertex can rely on Token Terminal to manage all future updates to its metrics, and instead direct all focus on growing its onchain business.

Future opportunities

In addition to standardised financial and usage metrics, Vertex and Token Terminal are excited to explore opportunities to create custom dashboards with more project-specific metrics. These dashboards would offer both LPs and traders deeper insight into the platform’s features and performance. Some examples include LP profitability, trading activity by trader profile, and more.

Through its partnership with Token Terminal, Vertex turns transparency into a competitive advantage and continues to build trust with its growing community.

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