At Carrot, we want every trader to understand the trading venues powering our simulated trading environment. Knowing how your trading venue works isn't just useful, it's essential for building confidence and making more confident decisions. That's why we're starting with a three part series covering our first integrated trading venue: Gains Network's gTrade, one of DeFi's most established perpetual DEXs.
This short series will consist of the following:
1. What Gains Network and gTrade are (Part 1)
2. Why gTrade (Part 2)
3. How gTrade's trading conditions actually work (Part 3)
In this series, we'll cover everything you need to know to develop a solid understanding of the fundamentals and the trading experience gTrade offers.
CEX vs. DEX 101
Most trading today (still) happens on CEXs (centralized exchanges) such as Binance or Coinbase.
These platforms manage your accounts, custody your funds, and match your orders. However, they also require identity verification, can freeze your funds, and store all trading data on internal systems.
DEXs (decentralized exchanges) flip that model, and in contrast to CEXs, on DEXs such as gTrade, everything runs on-chain using open-source smart contracts:
- You stay in control of your funds.
- No KYC, no custodians, no middlemen.
- Trades execute automatically, verifiably, and permissionlessly.
In short, nobody can turn off the lights, censor, alter your trading activity, or hold your funds, not even the platform itself. That's the power of decentralization, an open system that brings transparency by design.
What is gTrade?
gTrade is a capital-efficient, decentralized leveraged trading protocol that lets you trade a wide variety of assets, crypto, forex, indices, and even U.S. stocks (Gains Network is the ecosystem behind it). Launched on Polygon in late 2021, and later expanded to Arbitrum and, most recently, Base, Gains Network has processed over $107 billion in cumulative trading volume to date.
Their mission? To make trading as simple and accessible as possible, without relying on centralized intermediaries and to provide the best and fairest leveraged trading experience to traders on a fully decentralized protocol.
Providing a fair trading experience is a shared goal between Carrot and Gains Network, and one we're working to expand it into the trader funding industry.
Architecture
Unlike traditional exchanges, gTrade employs a proprietary oracle-based architecture that sets it apart from order-book or traditional AMM (Automated Market Maker) models.
This makes gTrade a fully synthetic trading platform, meaning you gain price exposure to an asset's movement without borrowing or taking ownership of the underlying asset. This exposure is created through smart contract-based price feeds rather than direct asset custody, keeping the system capital-efficient, scalable, and fully transparent.
This design revolves around liquidity vaults that act as the counterparty to all trades, enabling advantages in capital efficiency, asset diversity, and fee structure.
Price Feed
Unlike centralized limit order books (CLOBs), oracle-based DEXs import prices from external sources like Chainlink or Pyth instead of performing organic price discovery on-platform.
At the heart of gTrade lies a battle-tested oracle-based trading engine that provides accurate and fair market pricing without relying on a traditional order book. gTrade uses a proprietary oracle stack based on chainlink architecture and design. gTrade was the first to build a hybrid architecture that combines the widely used Chainlink Price Feeds with their own proprietary Chainlink decentralized oracle network to provide real-time, aggregated prices for their leveraged trading products.
Unlike centralized limit order books (CLOBs), oracle-based DEXs import prices from external sources like Chainlink or Pyth instead of performing organic price discovery on-platform.
At the heart of gTrade lies a battle-tested oracle-based trading engine that provides accurate and fair market pricing without relying on a traditional order book. gTrade uses a proprietary oracle stack based on chainlink architecture and design. gTrade was the first to build a hybrid architecture that combines the widely used Chainlink Price Feeds with their own proprietary Chainlink decentralized oracle network to provide real-time, aggregated prices for their leveraged trading products.
Unlike centralized limit order books (CLOBs), oracle-based DEXs import prices from external sources like Chainlink or Pyth instead of performing organic price discovery on-platform.
At the heart of gTrade lies a battle-tested oracle-based trading engine that provides accurate and fair market pricing without relying on a traditional order book. gTrade uses a proprietary oracle stack based on chainlink architecture and design. gTrade was the first to build a hybrid architecture that combines the widely used Chainlink Price Feeds with their own proprietary Chainlink decentralized oracle network to provide real-time, aggregated prices for their leveraged trading products.
How it works:
- Prices are determined by a custom, decentralized oracle network, which aggregates median spot prices from up to 7–8 external exchanges via high-quality APIs. Each order triggers a real-time on-demand request to these nodes.
- The median price is calculated twice, first by the node aggregator, then by the smart contract, ensuring decentralization and removing single points of failure.
- The result is verified against official Chainlink feeds to reject outliers and guarantee reliability.
- You can see this process in the image above, illustrating real-time oracle flow, from data requests to median aggregation and price verification.
This innovative approach was the first of its kind, confirmed by Chainlink, and ensures:
- Near instant trade execution.
- Real-time, to-the-second pricing.
- No "scam wicks" or artificial volatility.
Essentially, false or manipulated price action gets filtered out, meaning you trade on accurate, fair, and verifiable prices. These design choices are what make gTrade trustworthy. In Part 2, we'll talk more about the unique advantages this brings to traders and how this, combined with features such as guaranteed execution, directly improves the trading experience and results in a fairer, more transparent trading environment.
Liquidity
As mentioned earlier, one of the core positives of gTrade's design is its capital efficiency, derived from its single-liquidity vault structure, which enables a greater number of trading pairs and leverage. gTrade is keeping things simple by relying on a shared liquidity pool instead of requiring separate liquidity pools for each trading pair, as is typical for AMM-based exchanges. This vault acts as the counterparty for all trades across every listed asset, which now includes almost 300 trading pairs and an unbeatable product to boost your gains in terms of leverage: 50x on stocks, 150x for crypto, and up to 1000x on forex trades.
This unified liquidity model is cited as being over 100x more capital-efficient than systems that fragment liquidity across multiple pairs. The key difference lies in how only the trade's collateral interacts with the vault, not the full leveraged position size, while all pairs share the same deep liquidity.
You can explore the vaults and their live stats here.
Carrot integrates with execution layers like gTrade to ensure every simulated trade reflects real-world, verifiable trading conditions.
By understanding how Gains Network works, you're better equipped to:
- Recognize transparent on-chain execution.
- Trust the data powering your evaluation and trade confidently.
In Part 2, we'll dive into why gTrade's architecture directly benefits traders, from guaranteed execution and transparency to fair pricing and the elimination of "scam wicks."
We'll also look at execution conditions, limitations, and how they shape your trading experience, giving you a clear understanding of why gTrade deserves your attention as a trading venue of choice.
