In fact, we are Starknet's First Appchain!
We've optimized for the most degen experience possible which means you can expect clean UX, deep liquidity, capital efficiency, low fees and rad performance. Anything less is a compromise. Paradex is self-custodial and our risk-engine is on-chain which means all the complex business logic that goes into derivative transactions is validated on the L2. That's pretty tight, seriously.
Why build Paradex?
If you are wondering why we are building yet another exchange, the answer is simple: Because we saw some very clear gaps in the market.
First, market trust was greatly undermined after the collapse of FTX in 2022 which was a "Lehman Brothers" moment for crypto. Since then, self-custodial solutions have become the norm, demanded most by institutional investors, and its clear that we aren't going back.
Second, CeFi risk engines lack a unified framework to accurately measure risk across a portfolio of assets. This means that margin requirements on most exchanges do not always properly reflect the risk of a user’s portfolio and as a result users are penalized via higher capital requirements.
Finally, most DeFi exchanges chronically suffer from a lack of "real" user flow and fall short versus their CeFi peers in terms of liquidity and trading volumes.
Paradex offers perpetual futures trading today but we will add more assets as soon as we iron out all the kinks. One last thing, community is everything which means decentralization will happen, but progressively.
