GMX has chosen to reset its Solana experience by bringing GMTrade back into the fold while introducing Builder Fees, a user-programmable revenue-sharing feature that enables developers to generate a fee stream on trades executed through their apps. This completes the reversal of the former GMX plan for independent development of a separate GMTrade version since late 2025 and connects growth on Solana to GMX governance token economics.
Solana has become the primary battleground for perpetual DEX competition against Arbitrum, Hyperliquid, and centralized venues. Data from DefiLlama shows the GMX Solana deployment handled roughly 27.88 billion dollars in perpetual trading volume in the past 30 days, with overall volume topping 188.5 billion dollars. Given that magnitude, the branding, fee-migration, and distribution considerations loom large.
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GMTrade Re-Built into GMX Again
GMTrade launched as GMXSOL, an approved GMX autonomous-organization deployment that was established as a GMX V2 pool-based trading model on Solana mainnet in March 2025. In November 2025 the team rebranded to GMTrade to distinguish the project as a standalone entity, removing the Solana product from GMX branding, governance, and the GMX token. The merger ends that separation.
Reunification means fee flows, product development, and documentation are now grouped under one umbrella. This is significant given the contentious nature of Solana fee distribution, with governance proposal GMLabs-003 contemplating placing the remaining revenue of the Solana protocol toward the buybacks, tying Solana’s success to token rewards.
Source: Binance
For users, one unified product manages fragmentation across Arbitrum, Avalanche, MegaETH, and Solana. For governance participants, reunification means oversight of the largest deployment by recent volume. The real challenge will be maintaining the experimentation that made GMTrade a crypto gateway to commodities, indices, and equities.
Also Read: GMX Solana Expansion Secures $110K Monthly Funding from DAO Treasury
Builder Fees Brings Developer Monetization
Builder Fees introduces an affiliate fee model that centralized exhange developers will be familiar with into spread out perpetual trading. Developers publish fee rates onchain, traders sign orders at the posted rate, and the builder fee is added on top of the market trading fee. For example, a trader trading a 1,000 dollar position with a 0.01 percent fee has 10 cents of the 1,000 dollar position added, which is paid out as a claimable developer treasury.
Valid orders include market and limit orders that open or reduce positions and stop loss orders that reduce positions; swaps, liquidations, and auto deleveraging are excluded. Routed orders use the same pools, oracle prices, and price impact parameters for consistent execution.
Source: Binance
This addresses a fundamental problem in DeFi, where front ends, dashboards, bots, and execution tools have volume to monetize, but it’s not always clear how to do so. Builder Fees offers transparent onchain revenue, giving flow to GMX Solana instead of Jupiter Perpetuals.
Also Read: Solana Tokenized Stock Volume Surges as SOL Price Eyes $120 Recovery
Next Steps For Stakeholders
For traders, the price is relatively small and transparent, but activity strategies must absorb a known step-up. So where next for stakeholders? Investors will be watching if reunification and Builder Fees are enough to support revenue growth, and the degree to which GMLabs-003 can pass muster with governance.
For institutions, perspective hinges on if routed execution maintains the liquidation, funding, and price impact profile as GMX maintains that it does. Developers have a pathway to monetize, and fee competitiveness will determine if the effort is worthwhile. Regulators are unlikely to target directly, though referral economics similar to exchanges in DeFi could inspire attention.
Source: LinkedIn
The immediate criteria are governance, metrics on builder adoption, and whether the merger can sustain volume leadership if execution remains intact, the approach could become a model for increasing scale of perpetual DEXes through developer ecosystems rather than liquidity subsidies alone.
Also Read: Solana Price Under Selling Pressure as Whale Moves $25.3M in SO
