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Updraft: Learn how to intregrate GMX on Arbitrum
Recorded: Aug. 14, 2025 Duration: 0:36:36Space Recording
Short Summary
GMX has launched the GMX Perpetuals Trading Courses in partnership with Updraft, aiming to enhance DeFi education and incentivize developers with sponsored certifications. This initiative reflects a broader trend of traditional finance moving towards blockchain, emphasizing the importance of security and innovation in the DeFi space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM.
Testing, one, two, three.
I can hear you.
Testing, three, four, five.
All sounds pretty clear.
Is Cal also joining on stage?
He should be. Cal, have you already asked for speaker rights? Yep, sounds good. Taz, are you also managing to request speaker rights?
He's the ninja frog, if you see him.
He should have received an invite, if I understand it correctly.
He can also request it himself.
Yes, that looks better.
What's up, Taz?
Hello. Hey, we can hear you.
Nice.
Excellent.
Cool.
All right.
On that note, I think we have everybody on stage that we were planning to have on stage.
I'd like to welcome everybody to today's Xspace.
It's a special one because alongside GMX, we have our colleagues from, of course, Arbitrum, who are kind enough to host, but also Siphon Updraft.
So Cypher and Updraft, GMX has recently entered into an interesting partnership with Updraft
and together we have developed the GMX Perpetuals Trading Courses, a quite advanced DeFi curriculum
catering to builders and aspiring developers that teaches you all about perplexes, their
underlying smart contracts, how it works in
terms of trading and liquidity infrastructure and how to easily build on gmx once you've
completed these courses it's quite a technical topic so it may occasionally get technical if you
have a hard time following then don't hesitate to raise a hand or ask a question.
Alongside the many speakers, this is also partly an AMA, so you're very much welcome to ask questions if you have them.
If you're unable to do so on voice, you can also do that in the chat.
Before we get into the thick of it, I'll give my colleagues alongside me a minute to introduce themselves.
I, myself, am Jonesy, communications coordinator for GMX.
Next to me is CoinFlip Canada, and I'll quickly give him the chance to introduce himself to you as well.
Hi, everyone. It's CoinFlip Canada. I'm one of the contributors of GMX. I will not
be able to add a lot in terms of technical prowess to this wonderful discussion today,
but definitely happy to talk through and be available if there's things about sort of
mechanisms, strategy, the economics around GMX and how we operate. So I'm really, really
excited about seeing this wonderful community of people looking at building their public GMX.
Excellent. And then we also have Cal Crypto with us, another valuable GMX contributor.
Cal, if you want to take a minute to introduce yourself.
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, as Cohen coin said i'm also another contributor mostly i'm a
product lead and i guess also the testing aspects of the the gmx protocol um i do have the business
knowledge or the core knowledge of the business uh the gmx how it functions and stuff. So yeah, if there is any questions around that,
I'm happy to step in and answer those questions.
Amazing.
On behalf of Arbitrum, we have with us today,
I expect hiding behind that beautiful logo, Churo.
Churo, if you want to quickly say hi to the audience.
Hey everyone, can you guys hear me? Yeah, it works fine. Hey everybody, my name is Churro. Yeah,
I'm the community manager here at Optional Labs and yeah, I'm here to listen in and learn more about the Updraft course so should be exciting thank you. Amazing and on behalf of
Cypher and Updraft we have with us today Patrick as well as Taz hiding behind
the smart contract programmer handle. Guys, if you want to quickly introduce yourselves, please take the chance now.
Sure.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Patrick.
I'm a co-founder of Cypherin and one of the lead educators
on the Updraft platform.
Yeah, excited to be here.
Hi, guys.
This is Taz.
I also work for Cypherin, making courses for them. I'm also a software developer.
Amazing. Okay, a little bit of context about the GMX Perpetuals trading courses to start off this space.
This is a deep technical dive into the infrastructure that powers GMX.
So for those of you who are not familiar with GMX,
it's one of the most popular perp dexes on chain.
Weekly, we have about 4,000, about 4000 5000 users doing billions of
volume. And we can enjoy quite good adoption in that sense. And
now behind all that bustling training activity is the smart
contracts and those can get quite complicated. And GMX has
always emphasized and prioritized composability,
meaning that we like to make it easy for other community
builders to integrate with GMX, build on top of GMX,
really ensure that GMX functions as foundational liquidity
and trading infrastructure for the entire DeFi space
and enable other builders to create interesting instruments on top of GMX's foundations.
Now, because these are quite technical smart contracts, that can sometimes be challenging.
So for a while, we have been looking for a good solution to make the smart contracts more insightful to alongside the existing documentation,
create additional resources for developers who want to engage with GMX and just make
it as easy as possible for them to understand what the smart contracts make possible and
how to go about it.
Syphon was a great match for this
because they have some of the top educators in the entire industry.
Those are thankfully with us today,
both Patrick and Smart Contract Program here
are leading authorities in that domain.
So we're very happy to have had both of them engaging
with the GMXx smart contracts taking that deep technical dive into the contracts getting to understand them
and subsequently creating a lot of interesting lessons around those smart contracts that's
important to understand that this new gmx curriculum ondraft, and Updraft is one of the leading Web3 developer platforms,
is really one of the most complete
and advanced DeFi education resources in existence.
We're talking about more than 90 lessons
over four hours of video tutorials
created by these expert educators,
coupled with a lot of hands on interesting
coding exercises and additional skills, skill validating exercises such as quizzes and the
like. So it's a very thorough course program. And that's exactly what we were looking for, something for builders to really grow their competence, elevate their skills, and also certify those skills.
And that's perhaps a good opportunity for Patrick to jump in and explain a bit more about what Cypher and Updraft makes possible.
Yeah, sure, absolutely.
So Cypher and Updraft makes possible. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So Cypher and Updraft, like the wonderful introduction there.
Yeah, we are the leading technical education platform in the blockchain industry.
So if you want to become a smart contract developer, a security researcher, or a DeFi
smart contract expert, especially on the GMX protocol, you know, this is kind of the
one-stop shop for you to come to to you know learn everything and get a career
get your career started or you know continue your career and learns any of
these these new amazing protocols or ideas and what have you and the way that
a lot of students validate that they have all the knowledge that they need and
some employers will look for this as well is we have a SSCB plus certification
so this is a this is a certification that developers who complete the courses
and pass the tests will get that proves that they have this knowledge that they
can be competent you know smart contract developers in this space. This is really important because, you know,
so Cypherin, along with doing education, we're also one of the top smart contract audits and
security companies in the industry. You know, we work with many of the best protocols in the space
to make sure their code is secure. And these are everything in this certification is what we look for in these,
you know, top protocols, these top companies. I would even go so far to say that like our
certification is harder and more advanced than, you know, a lot of the current talent pool that's
out there. So if you want to be better than you know 75 of the
developers out there this is what uh you can go for um to uh to prove that you know what you're
doing and uh in this age where security and writing defensible smart contracts is so so
important especially you know in the defFi ecosystem and you know as part of
that I guess maybe all I'll be the one to talk about this so incredibly
we're thrilled to be working with GMX you know and TAS or
smart contract programmer programmer smart here absolutely made this
phenomenal course on updraft to teach you about GMX, how to build with GMX,
how to integrate with GMX. If you go through this course, GMX is actually sponsoring 25 of
these certifications for the first 25 students who complete the course, who complete the GMX
course, and then also do a GMX integration challenge and I have a link to that
I can send you all to get this as well but yeah the GMX integration challenge after you learn all
these skills it's great to learn all these skills but the the best way to really ingrain them and
to prove to the rest of the industry that you've actually learned, you know, what you've learned is to build something with it.
So, you know, students who want to do this can build a trading integration, you know, build a GMX arbitrage bot tool,
like a delta neutral funding fee farming vault, a vault capturing positive price impact on GMX,
a GMX copy trading bot, a tool to automatically rebalance liquidity
between GMX pools, whatever, or an AI agent that interacts with GMX, whatever you want
to do.
If you go through that, you will get a free certification.
Well, you still have to pass the test, but you'll get a free test to attempt to pass
if you go through this and to me this is like the
Absolute win-win-win because not only are you getting an opportunity to you know
Get the certification to prove that you know your stuff and to you know show employers that you know your stuff, but
It's being paired with actually taking the skills that you've learned and
Applying them and like I said, that's really how you drill in everything that you've learned.
So, yeah, be sure to go to Cypher and Updraft,
take the GMX perpetuals trading development course
and build something with it,
and you can get a free SSCD Plus certification,
which, as of today,
there are fewer than 20 people on Earth who have one
because it is incredibly hard, because our standards
are incredibly high.
But if you smash through the GMX course,
I'm positive you will smash through the test as well.
to smash through the test as well.
So, yeah.
So yeah.
Thanks, Patrick, for the added context.
That was indeed a lot of great information already.
And as you already touched on, aside from this GMS curriculum really being focused on
developers, you know, created by devs, devs. Ultimately, what we're looking to do is make it as easy as possible for aspiring builders and developers to understand GMX and then build on GMX. And we're also offering ecosystem rewards as an incentive for contributors who do that, who try to engage with GMX, try to, aside from mastering these courses initially,
also subsequently try to put all that they learned
into action and create an interesting instrument
on top of GMX.
So that can be indeed a V2 trading integration,
can be an arbitrage bot or a vault that captures price impact.
There are numerous potential added value instruments that could add interesting financial functionality on top of what GMX already offers.
And that's what we're looking to inspire developers to further expand this decentralized finance ecosystem.
Smart contract programmer.
Perhaps that's a good moment to bring you into the discussion.
You spent a lot of time evaluating the contracts and creating these lessons.
and creating these lessons.
What was the most interesting thing that you came across
and what stood out the most during your process?
I would say there's two most interesting things
that I learned from looking at GMX V2 contracts.
The first one was about, was 63-64 gas attacks. I really didn't understand
it until I saw something in production. And that sort of also made me understand that GMX B2
protocol takes two transactions to execute most orders. So like a user would submit order for trade
and then on the GMX side, it will execute the order.
And then on top of that, I will also say that
from there, yeah, I saw that it was interesting
that GMX used price oracles to execute their orders.
Whereas a lot of the DeFi protocols
would maybe use like an AMM
or maybe use chain link as a price oracle.
But I thought GMX B2 was doing something different.
The other interesting part about learning GMX
was perpetuals, trying to calculate the payoffs of perpetual.
The math behind it actually turned out to be pretty simple, but it was also really helpful if you're into DeFi.
Great. That's interesting to hear about your perspective.
To clarify a little bit,
GMX has always worked with Chainlink for its pricing,
for the index pricing of the markets,
initially with the standard Chainlink price orgals,
but for V2, those are the Chainlink data streams,
which is Chainlink's more advanced product
that was tailor-made for on-chain perp dexes and gmx was
the primary launch partner for those advanced low latency price oracles and i think data streams is
quite a an excellent product for that when you have an on-chain perp dex you're always
on-chain perp decks you're always very aware of the risks involved and any oracle-based system
carries some risks so working with chain link in that domain was kind of a no-brainer considering
their their reputation in the space maybe my my colleague coin, can also touch on that a bit more as he's been intimately involved with the partnership with Chainlink and the development of all their services over the years.
I know. I mean, I think highlighting the uniqueness of Oracle's was quite relevant.
I think both in terms of how Oracle's function and how GMX is sort of approached integration
of oracles within our design.
Over time, I think we're gonna start to see, you know,
chains evolve in such a way that we can ingest oracle data
in a way that isn't front run.
But until that sort of happens, you know, for example,
on GMX, we've worked with Chainlink to get extreme granularity in terms of the data that they're now outputting, roughly four to five updates per second, so two to 250 millisecond data updates, us being able to view that, that granularity ensure that when when you when
a when a trader comes in places to trade on gmx there they are uh you know faithfully given a
price that is immediately after the execution of that trade a price that neither gmx has a protocol
anybody else involved in the process knows and ensures that they are given that that fair
execution and the fact that, you know,
it's been a real building block for us
in terms of being able to not have to think about this.
Oracle's are actually probably one of the hardest parts
of kind of the DeFi stack
because implicitly they require off-chain information
to a great extent,
unless the assets were strictly on-chain.
So, you know, it's really interesting what you can,
what we've been able to do over time,
getting these oracles sort of developed with chain link,
these data streams V2 oracles.
I'm not sure, did that answer the question or,
but again, I will just say,
it's a very interesting surface area
and one which probably, you know,
it's worth people even digging in more and more
because I think I just start to look at oracles
will start to see a lot of uniqueness that, you know,
in something that in theory is very simple,
there is actually an immense complexity.
Yes, I agree.
There is indeed a lot of complexity in that.
And I think it's also worth highlighting in that context that Chainlink has recently introduced data streams for various other asset classes alongside crypto from stocks to indices, I believe, and is actively expanding in that domain. domain that also makes makes for additional opportunities for GMX to expand into those
asset classes and create secure robust markets based on those.
So quite interesting developments that we see going on in that space.
Patrick as somebody who has been in this space for a long time, probably done more audits than
anybody else practically has, what keeps you so excited about this space and educating
people about the importance of security and good smart contract design?
I mean, where to end begin with, you know, what's exciting here?
To me, the summary is we're kind of seeing it right now, which is awesome, of the entire
traditional financial market moving off of centralized rails moving over to blockchain,
right? The current financial structure that the entire world
sits on is just perfect for corruption to exist. And it, you know, ruins the financial
independence of every single person on this call, which is awful. You know, blockchain
smart contracts offer just the most amazing possibilities where you can, you know, you can be financially free no matter where you're born.
You know, historically, if you're born in a country with a weak economy, well, too bad.
You rolled the the bad being born in the wrong place lottery and you will, you know, you'll never be financially free.
And with blockchain, we finally have the opportunity to move away from that.
So, yeah, I'm just I'm excited for all the rails to move over to blockchain.
And, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, we're not early anymore.
You know, blockchain, you know, blockchain finally found its stride.
I actually think we're still just getting started because of how little of the current world uses blockchain as on the back end.
So I actually think we're still crazy early.
And once the entire world stock markets move over to DEXs, then I'll say, OK, now we're not early.
But if you look at the trading volume, we're maybe like 0.001% of like all like trading volume or something like that.
But yeah, so before I started Cyphering, I worked at Chainlink Labs, absolutely love Chainlink, love oracles.
And yeah, you know, you hit the nail on the head.
Oracles are super hard because blockchains are deterministic but pricing data is not deterministic
like you can even get philosophical and say well price is just kind of what people assign to it man
um so like getting like a deterministic result about something that is not necessarily deterministic
is is really tricky like you could get super deep into like,
oh, what even is a price?
Is it what the last person bought or sold it at?
Is it what the average person bought it, sold it at?
Is it what serious people buy and sell it at?
Is it, you know, there's,
and all these questions are actually not trivial
when it comes to building Oracle mechanisms.
But in any case, to answer the rest of your question, not trivial when it comes to building or global mechanisms.
But in any case, to answer the rest of your question,
the reason I ended up starting Cypherin was because I am so excited for this industry,
but the route we had been taking security-wise
makes it unacceptable to replace the current financial rails.
When I first started Cyphering, the DeFi hack rate was something around 6%.
DeFi TVL was like, I forget what it was at the time, maybe it was like 50 million, 100 million.
Maybe it was like 50 million, 100 million.
And there was, you know, 2 to 5 million, or excuse me, not million, billion, excuse me,
excuse me, 50 billion to 100 billion.
And around 2 to 5 billion had been stolen.
You know, you do some quick math.
That's around 5% of DeFi TVL was being hacked.
of DeFi TVL was being hacked. That's, you know, 5%. You putting your money into an investment
That's, you know, 5%.
vehicle where there's a 5% chance that it goes to zero is unacceptable, right? It's like walking
into a bank, you know, you giving the bank your money and the bank going, hey, thanks for giving
us your money. By the way, there's a 1 in 20 chance that next year you go to withdraw and we
don't have it anymore.
Like, that's ridiculous. You're never putting money into that bank. But yeah, that's what we were asking people to do when they move over to crypto, which is why, you know, you see so many
people put disclaimers, hey, crypto is risky, you know, you could lose what you put in, blah, blah,
blah. So for me, you know, somebody who absolutely loves what this technology has to offer,
For me, somebody who absolutely loves what this technology has to offer, I see security
as one of the biggest pillars that we need to get correct for the rest of the world to
come over.
That's what we're doing at Cypherin, but we take a different approach, obviously, than
a lot of other people.
A lot of security firms, they go, okay, we're going to audit one protocol, one project at a time.
And I think that that's great.
And we do that as well.
But I think that scales very poorly.
I want every single smart contract in the industry to be better, to be more secure, so that we can bring over more people to retail.
We can have our TVL explode.
And to me, the best way to do that is to have everyone have security knowledge and everyone
be able to develop very well.
And so that's why we do our education on Cypher as well, because we think that that's actually
maybe even arguably a more important security initiative that we take for the entire industry.
The hard thing about that, and this is why other security firms don't do this, is because monetization is obviously not as straightforward, you know, Taz goes super deep on GMX to teach people not only to like build fantastic integrations with GMX,
but also build secure ones so that people who want to put their money into these protocols can feel safer knowing that,
okay, like there's a floor, there's an expectation of knowledge, of security parameters followed that are going to make this protocol do really well.
I think you touched on a lot of important points there, even very crucial elements that underpin the founding of GMX in a way.
That certainly inspired the vision of GMX when it comes to decentralization and permissionlessness, self-custody, and even just fair, transparent markets and how to offer those.
Those are all incredible challenges
and all ideals worth striving for.
And none of those are easy.
And many of those are spectrums,
certainly when it comes to decentralization
and matters like self-custody.
And GMX has from the very start, over four years ago,
always emphasized security,
prioritized decentralization.
And we still occasionally notice how difficult it is
and that there are always further aspects you can improve on.
So that's an ongoing challenge.
And certainly that goes for the entire industry
as a whole as well. I fully agree.
as a whole as well.
I fully agree.
Kyle, we barely have had a chance to hear you speak yet
as we haven't really had technical questions yet.
Let me also take this opportunity to remind people in the audience
that if they do have a question about the courses
or about a particular GMX function or smart contract, don't hesitate to
raise your hand. I'll happily bring you up on stage and give you a chance to ask a question
or just drop it in the comments. But as somebody who is quite knowledgeable about the GMX smart smart contracts cal i was wondering um what has always stood out to you as being a unique selling
point of gmx or one of the competitive advantages that that made it stand out to you and made you
interested in contributing to gmx Yes. Yeah, one of the most, and I think folks touched upon it, I think the most interesting
part of me was the aspect of democratizing and how it, because a lot of, if you look
at most perpetrating happens, it's happening on order book, right?
And the order book model is efficient in certain stages, but it's also very closed. What I mean by closed is it doesn't give you the opportunity to participate.
And it's a bit closed system. Thank you.
