Competitive Landscape

Several projects touch on elements of Xi’s offering, but none combine all features into one unified platform. Below is a brief comparison of Xi with leading Web3 derivatives platforms and AI protocols.

dYdX - (Perpetual DEX)

dYdX is a pioneer in decentralized perps, offering an orderbook-style exchange with up to 20× leverage. It achieved high volumes (averaging $0.3–2.6B daily in early 2023), but relied heavily on token incentives, leading to inflated volumes. dYdX’s model is semi-centralized (off-chain matching engine) and focused purely on individual trading; there are no social investing features. Its token, $DYDX, initially lacked fee-sharing (leading to value leakage), prompting plans to direct trading fees to token holders in its upcoming v4.

Xi vs dYdX

Xi uses a different approach – instead of an orderbook for each asset, Xi creates markets for traders themselves. This introduces a social element dYdX lacks, and Xi’s token captures fee value from day one via buybacks and staking rewards. While dYdX targets pro traders seeking a CEX-like experience, Xi targets both traders and their followers, expanding the addressable market.

GMX (Perpetual DEX)

GMX is a leading on-chain perp exchange on Arbitrum & Avalanche, using a pooled liquidity AMM model (traders trade against a multi-asset pool, GLP). GMX emphasizes simplicity (swaps with ~0 slippage using oracle pricing) and real yield: 30% of all trading fees are distributed to GMX stakers in ETH/AVAX. GMX grew organically to ~$600M TVL, outpacing dYdX’s liquidity, but supports a limited range of assets (historically ~4–8 major tokens).

Xi vs GMX

Xi also shares real yield with stakers—much like GMX—and can tap into the strong demand GMX has already shown for revenue-sharing primitives. The key difference is that Xi’s underlying “assets” are trader strategies rather than token pairs such as BTC or ETH. Because each strategy is treated as its own isolated market, Xi can list an unlimited roster of trading agents without fragmenting liquidity. GMX, by contrast, lacks built-in copy trading; its users still have to place their own trades. By adding this social follow-and-copy layer on top of a GMX-style fee model, Xi can appeal not only to active traders but also to passive investors who want exposure to proven trader skill without managing positions themselves.

Synthetix/Kwenta (Synthetic Perps)

Synthetix is a decentralized liquidity pool for synthetic assets, now powering Kwenta and other front-ends to trade synthetic perpetual futures with up to 50× leverage. It offers deep liquidity (all SNX stakers back all assets) and a wide variety of markets (including long-tail assets). Synthetix’s recent growth was driven by heavy incentives (e.g. $5.7M in Optimism tokens rewarded to traders), which enabled it to briefly overtake GMX in volume. However, trades on Synthetix are against a debt pool – a more abstract mechanism – and there is no concept of investing in individual traders.

Xi vs Synthetix

Xi also relies on a synthetic-performance model: whereas Synthetix tokenizes reference assets, Xi creates synthetic instruments that track the results of individual traders. The design is community-centric—each trader behaves like a micro-economy with followers—while Synthetix serves primarily as a protocol-driven liquidity backbone. By isolating every trader’s performance in its own instrument, Xi avoids the complexity of a shared debt pool, so one trader’s loss can’t spill over to others (no socialized losses). This straightforward, one-to-one linkage between a trader’s results and the corresponding instrument makes Xi’s offering more intuitive for retail investors.

Virtuals Protocol (AI Agents Platform)

Virtuals, launched in late 2024, is a platform that allows creation of tokenized AI agents (with each agent having its own token and on-chain revenue model). Its vision is an AI agent economy with co-ownership and revenue sharing through tokenization. In practice (so far) most agent tokens act like speculative memecoins as real revenue streams are still in early stages. Virtuals introduced the concept of an Initial Agent Offering (IAO) – creators lock the platform’s $VIRTUAL token to launch an agent token via bonding curve, and a 1% tax on agent token trades funds the agent’s operations.

Xi vs Virtuals

Xi’s model is similar in spirit: traders launch trading agents whose performance can be bought or sold through purpose-built synthetic markets, and the protocol takes a 1 % fee on every trade to sustain the ecosystem. The focus, however, is narrow and deep—only agents backed by proven traders are listed—whereas Virtuals hosts a grab-bag of agents (entertainment bots, chat assistants, etc.) that have yet to establish predictable revenue streams. Because each Xi agent is tied directly to verifiable trading results, its value driver is concrete, and the platform layers in sophisticated mechanics such as going short on an agent and a structured fee/reward split for backers—features that sit outside Virtuals’ current scope. In essence, Virtuals introduced the notion of co-owning AI agents, but Xi executes a highly monetizable version of that idea in the lucrative crypto-trading niche. Its AI integration is likewise laser-targeted: tools are built specifically to enhance and benchmark trading, creating an “AI trading layer” that builds on Virtuals’ early momentum while pushing the concept into a revenue-generating frontier.

In summary, no existing platform offers retail investors a way to invest in a trader’s future performance or bet against it. By being first-to-market with this model, Xi aims to carve out a new category in Web3: a perpetual exchange to buy, sell, and invest in assets backed by pro traders.