It’s officially perp‑DEX szn. My DMs are full of “can I invest?” “what’s the best way to farm?” There are people out there are farming multiple DEXs. This makes sense, if you are low-T and think that diversification is good. But if not, and your man-card is still very much in your possession, here is a simple framework that you can use to go ALL IN on one. Believe in something. 1) Team Have they built a real business before? A biased but good example is Paradex which is our second rodeo. Our first was @tradeparadigm which trades $1.5B / d and is ~35% of Deribit. We know how to build systems at scale, manage cash flow, hire, fire and build culture and when shit hits the fan transform to becoming wartime leaders. If the market or our enemies poke, we stab. That is the mindset. How many times have the founders launched other tokens? I can’t believe I need to say this, but if @PacmanBlur is launching his third token and you fall for it, NO ONE CAN SAVE YOU. If it looks like a red flag, do not be an idiot and ignore it. Are the founders known? The more you know, even the ugly parts, the lower your risk. Who are the investors/backers? Not all investors are created equal. Strategic investors >VCs and Podcasters Paradigm raised money back in 2021 and has ALOT of the biggest traders in crypto on our cap table as owners and as customers. Since Paradex was incubated by Paradigm, all of these investors automatically have an incentive to help Paradex succeed. Our cap table is stacked with strategics like @jumpcapital that we tap for liquidity relationships. In addition, we’ve got ~3,000 institutions on Paradigm; every big crypto name that trades options trades there. This network is one of our biggest strengths. 2) Tech - How scalable is it, really? Team's have had to make tradeoffs in their bid to being a top dex. For example. we (Paradex) fundamentally disagree with keeping execution on‑chain. We think consensus based L1s with complex risk engine workloads have already hit scaling bottlenecks. You see this in implementations where spot and perps need to live in separate wallets vs one unified margin system. Conversely, there are teams powered by ZK, that don't have this problem, because all execution is moved off the L1 and on performance optimized L2s. That is an advantage that zk rollups like Lighter and Paradex have. Having scalable tech unlocks product differentiators like unified margin and multi-collateral which allows you to build more things on top like tokenized vaults and delta-neutral stable tokens that can be used as collateral. Being an L2 also allows u to compose with all the liquidity on L1 which is a MASSIVE advantage over any L1. Exchanges like Paradex and Lighter both inherit these advantages because of their choice of stack. We also fundamentally disagree with the tradeoffs imposed by "cancel-priority", something I have been very vocal about in the past. We agree that in order to scale liquidity, a venue must solve the toxic flow problem. But we disagree with the solution being cancel-priority. We think it's a very crude and overly advantageous "free option" to the market makers. A solution like RPI scales far better. Another critical bottleneck for scaling onchain finance is Privacy. Which DEXs have privacy enshrined into their roadmap and are committed to making it happen. Big money likes privacy, do you really think we will move to the world in which Blackrock puts all their client money on chain for the world to see? Too much transparency invites predatory behavior and ends up becoming a tax on price formation. @JamesWynnReal can attest to this. As of now there are only @tradeparadex and @Aster_DEX who have publicly talked about the need for privacy. If I missed any, pls comment below. The TLDR for tech is is "do they have technical + business model innovation that scales" with as little constraints as possible. For @tradeparadex it's RPI + Zero Fees + Privacy. What is it for other exchanges? 3) Alignment. How aligned are the community, team, and investors via the tokenomics? Paradex for example is the only exchange where 80% of the team tokens are tied to performance milestones that will be set every year. We have also publicly committed to full disclosure of all major agreements with the foundation that will be available to token holders. We believe this radical approach is the only way we build trust back with token holders that have been burned over the last few years. There's other stuff like value accrual linkage like buybacks etc. But that is table stakes by now, so if teams aren't doing that they NGMI. P.S. Tried not to make this too long which meant I cut out a lot of the less important things, but I believe that if you do basic DD using the above framework, you should be OK. Also none of this is financial advice just my opinion and I know nothing, so please DYOR.