JOE

The exchange has been growing rapidly, attracting over $4 billion in total value locked (TVL) since it was launched in June 2021. Trader Joe claims to take a community-first approach, and to prioritize innovation, speed and safety. It aims to provide a one-stop-shop DeFi experience and to integrate new products without compromising on security. To achieve this, Trader Joe has outlined an ambitious roadmap that focuses on token-holder growth. It plans to have improved staking, non-fungible-token (NFT) exchange listings, the collateralization of the JOE token, and leveraged trading –– all during 2021.

Trader Joe was founded by Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, two pseudonymous developers. Cryptofish is self-described as a full-stack and smart contract engineer, who was an early contributor to several Avalanche projects, such as Snowball and Sherpa Cash. S/he worked at Google and holds a Master's in Computer Science from a U.S. university. 0xMurloc is a full-stack developer with experience starting several startups. S/he was also a Senior Product Lead at Grab. The team is complemented by over a dozen other pseudonymous users working on software, marketing and community.

Trader Joe provides all the functionality of a modern DEX and offers a convenient user interface, combined with speedy and cheap transactions. Users can provide liquidity by participating in one of its yield farms and earn JOE (JOE) as a reward token, which can later be staked and used to vote in governance proposals. Its lending protocol Banker Joe, based on the Compound (COMP) protocol, allows users to borrow and lend funds in a non-custodial manner. Moreover, users can also open leveraged positions on their provided or borrowed funds.

To increase the utility and adoption of the JOE token, Trader Joe is working on introducing several new options, which are aimed at transforming the project into the main DeFi platform within the Avalanche ecosystem. First of all, users will be able to use JOE as collateral to borrow against. Moreover, Trader Joe also plans to facilitate limit orders, options and futures trading on its platform. Thanks to the speed of its innovation and strong comic book-like branding, Trader Joe has attracted strong backers from within the DeFi community, including from AAVE (AAVE) founder Stani Kulechov and Darren Lau.

The total supply of JOE (JOE) is 500 million. The token was launched without a pre-sale, private sale, or pre-listing allocations. The distribution of JOE is as follows:

50% – liquidity providers

20% – treasury

20% – team (three-month cliff)

10% – future investors (three-month cliff)

JOE is being emitted over a 30-month period and JOE stakers earn 0.05% of all trades. JOE also pays a share of fees from lending interest and liquidations into the staking pool. The emission rates of JOE steadily decrease over time and will come to an end at the beginning of January 2024.

Trader Joe is built upon Avalanche (AVAX), a blockchain with its own proprietary consensus mechanism, in which all nodes process and validate transactions by employing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) protocol.

The treasury is currently entrusted to its developers Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, although the Trader Joe community plans to establish a multi-signature governance mechanism in future. For now, token holders can vote on the development of the protocol via Snapshot.