Leveraged meme coins, hundreds of millions in trading volume, and record-breaking protocol fees. A lot has happened since TLX first went live. Whether you're just getting caught up, or want to know what happens next, this post is for you.

On this day, just 3 months ago, the TLX protocol went live. Built on the Optimism Superchain and powered by the Synthetix liquidity layer, the launch of TLX brought next-generation leveraged tokens on-chain.

In commemorating this 3 month anniversary of TLX, let's review where we've been and, most importantly, where we are going 📈

Highlights

The TLX protocol powers novel, perps-backed, leveraged tokens that enable new DeFi primitives. In the short time that TLX has been live the protocol has:

• Handled over $400 million in notional trading volume

• Reached $46.5 million in open-interest (ATH)

• Distributed nearly half a million in protocol fees to $TLX stakers

• Executed over 57,000 trades

• Acquired over $1 million in protocol-owned liquidity

• Built nearly $700k in delta-neutral liquidity on @VelodromeFi

Developments

To better understand these points let's review the post-launch developments of TLX that have led to these growth metrics.

30 new leveraged tokens
Since launch, 30 new leveraged tokens have been deployed. In total, the TLX protocol now supports 60 unique leveraged tokens.

3 new assets
Support for $PEPE, $DOGE, and $ETHBTC leveraged tokens were added. Including $SOL, $ETH, $BTC, $LINK, and $OP the TLX protocol now supports leveraged tokens for 8 different assets.

New leverage factors
Upon launch, TLX leveraged tokens could be minted (long or short) with 1x, 2, and 5x leverage. Since then, support for 3x, and 4x leverage has been added along with 7x leverage for $ETH and $BTC.

Zaps
Support for Zaps was implemented, enabling users to mint leveraged tokens with $USDC, $USDC.e, $DAI, $USDT and $WETH.

Fee switch
On May 26th, 2024 the vote to turn on the fee switch passed. Since then, 100% of protocol fees have been distributed, in $sUSD, to staked $TLX holders. Close to half a million in fees have already been distributed and $TLX staking has averaged around 100% APR over the past 3 months.

Protocol owned liquidity (POL)
The TLX community has worked to improve POL, raising 3 different improvement proposals (TIPs), all of which have been implemented. The TLX DAO now allocates 35% of POL to the wstETH/ETH1S pool and 65% to the TLX/WETH pool.

So now what?

The past 3 months have shown that there is a clear demand for on-chain leveraged tokens. The trading volume and user activity that occurred during this time have proven the robustness and performance of the TLX protocol while putting it through multiple stress tests in a production environment.

TLX leveraged tokens offer users non-liquidating and constant leveraged exposure to assets that can be accessed by anyone and utilized like any other ERC-20 token. Unlike all other forms of leverage in DeFi (e.g., perps, money markets), TLX enables truly composable leverage.

By building on the Synthetix liquidity layer, TLX has the power to support leveraged tokens for any asset. Whether it be meme coins, real world assets, or trading pairs like $ETHBTC, there are no limits to the number and type of assets that TLX can support.

TLX leveraged tokens currently only exist on Optimism mainnet, but this is soon to change. Over the coming months, TLX will be launching on Synthetix v3 which will drastically increase TLX leveraged tokens expansion.

Long tail assets, ETH USDC and USDe collateral options, Arbitrum and Base deployment, and more...

While TLX has already seen tremendous volume and growth, leveraged tokens, as a financial instrument, are still largely untapped in DeFi and it is our mission to change that.