[Discussion] Feedback and suggestions Perp

Community Discussion & Proposal
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I opened this thread to initiate a discussion about the perp exchange and provide some general feedback and suggestions.

Here are some of the things I noticed:

  • Interface and integration into the existing ecosystem: Multiple users, including myself, have mentioned in other channels that the UI is getting crowded, leading to bad UX. If we want new users to use the perp exchange for swaps and trades, the trading view should be the first thing they see. In my opinion, it is time to consider creating multiple stand-alone projects, such as perp and lyf+vaults, that are part of the larger Alpaca Finance ecosystem and are governed by the Alpaca token. The interface for perp, in particular, should be streamlined, prioritize trading, and be simple to use without too many distractions (similar to GMX). Not much needs to be changed to achieve this, mainly removing components (menu-bar, etc.). See the image below for a quick example:

    streamlined
    streamlined1463×1284 119 KB

  • Perp fees: With the Alpaca rewards being only temporary and the Perp fees requiring manual claiming (from a different page that is not under the Perp header), why aren’t we simplifying this and making it so that it auto-compounds the Perp fees into the ALP token? For instance, we could deposit the USDT into the contract that holds the USDT balance of ALP or do some balancing with it. It seems like an unnecessary extra step from the user’s perspective.

  • Incentives: It may be a bit late to change, but why is the focus so much on liquidity? Seeing how it performs now (1m deposited with only 10k Alpaca per week), upping this to 125k seems excessive, especially since liquidity is and should not be the main focus. Getting users interested and familiar with trading and swapping should be the focus, as this will be the lifeblood of Perp and will, in return, lead to sufficient liquidity (currently at 1m, we are getting 8% APR from fees with only 10k Alpaca). I know that trading competitions and such are planned, but I hope we’re not just paying liquidity providers for a temporary boost in TVL as they will likely leave if the trading fees are insufficient after the launch.
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Thanks for your suggestions.

-I will suggest to the team to add a collapsable menu on PC site, which should achieve a similar effect to the image you showed.

-Now that liquidity is available, we are in agreement that our primary goal of incentivization should be to incentivize traders. We’ve already discussed this internally. If after improving the product in beta, the utilization does not correspondingly increase, we will probably restructure our incentivization programs.

4 Likes
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Thank you for the suggestions

I will add to Sam’s response in regard to the manual claiming vs. auto-compounding into the ALP pool for users.

The Perp’s LP pool contract structure work differently from our lending pool. For security reasons, we use accounting system to calculate users’ share in the pool instead of looking at the underlying token balance.

This means we cannot compound the $$ for users - deposited assets w/o minting new ALP token would not be recognized as additional share of the pool to users.