Tips for Builders of On-Chain Trading Products

Creating a trading product is no easy feat. A single wrong decision can doom the product, while a well-made choice can be the key to its success. From ideation to development, business strategy, content, coding, hiring, fundraising, and beyond — every step presents its own set of challenges.

If you’re building a derivatives product or planning to, this article is for you. We’ll share key lessons learned and valuable insights to help you navigate the journey and increase your chances of success.

Let’s dive in!

Hype vs. Longevity: Build a Sustainable Product

Being part of a hyped narrative isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can give your project a head start, attracting attention early in its development and even making fundraising, partnerships, and community building easier. Riding the right wave at the right time can accelerate growth — but only if you have a solid foundation underneath.

The real problem arises when hype becomes the core focus, overshadowing fundamental aspects like product sustainability, user retention, and long-term value creation. Many projects skyrocket in attention during peak hype cycles, only to fade into irrelevance once the narrative cools down. Ask yourself: Is the narrative you’re following built on real utility and demand, or is it just speculative excitement that will vanish in a few months?

To build something that lasts, you need to think beyond the current trend. Consider:

• Market Cycles: Is your product still valuable outside of the hype cycle? Can it survive a bear market?
• User Adoption: Are you solving a real problem, or is your product just appealing because of speculation?
• Revenue Model: Can your business sustain itself beyond token incentives or temporary excitement?
• Community & Ecosystem: Are you building something that fosters long-term engagement and loyalty?

Ask yourself: Do you want your app to be relevant for 3–6 months, or do you want it to stand the test of time? If longevity is the goal, focus on a sustainable long-term strategy by choosing narratives and products with proven market fit, real use cases, and resilience against shifting trends.

Branding: Your Protocol’s First Impression & Long-Term Identity

Your branding is the very first impression your protocol makes, whether it’s on potential VCs, traders, partners, or the broader community. A strong, well-defined brand isn’t just a “nice-to-have”, it’s critical for your product’s success. Web3 is very competitive, so branding is what makes your project stand out and resonate with the right audience.

Good branding goes far beyond just a sleek logo. It’s about crafting a cohesive identity that reflects your protocol’s mission, values, and positioning. Every element, like colors, fonts, messaging, and tone of voice, should reinforce how you want people to perceive and connect with your product. Are you building a high-performance trading infrastructure? A new kind of derivative? Your branding should clearly communicate that at first glance.

Key Considerations for Branding:

• Consistency is Everything: Your design, messaging, and tone should be uniform across all touchpoints: X (Twitter), Discord, website, whitepaper, and even product UI.
• Positioning Matters: Align your brand identity with your value proposition. A serious institutional-focused protocol requires a different visual and messaging style than a playful project.
• Culture & Community Fit: Web3 thrives on memes, innovation, and authenticity. A cold, corporate tone might not work in a space that values creativity and community engagement.
• Differentiation: With thousands of projects launching, how does yours stand out? What makes your branding instantly recognizable?
• Don’t forget to make it cool: Web3 is all about fresh, forward-thinking branding that sparks curiosity and engagement, so aesthetics matter.

Community: The Ultimate Growth Engine in Crypto.

There’s no better marketing strategy in crypto than building a sticky, engaged community: one that actively interacts with your product, social media, and campaigns. A strong community becomes an organic marketing force, spreading your project’s values and unique selling points across Crypto Twitter, Telegram groups, Discord channels, and beyond. This creates a network effect: more people discover your product, join the community, and further amplify its reach.

A perfect example of this is Monad, an ecosystem that has built a powerful, self-sustaining community. The strength of its ecosystem lies in its members, who create incredible art, participate in ecosystem campaigns, and spread the NAD message globally. This level of engagement turns community members into brand evangelists, driving awareness and adoption in ways that traditional marketing never could.

How to Build a Strong Community:

• Leverage Campaigns & Contests: Reward participation through trading competitions, art challenges, or referral programs that encourage organic engagement.
• Sense of Ownership: Give your community a sense of belonging by involving them in governance, product feedback, and ecosystem decisions.
• Create Strategic Partnerships: Collaborate with influencers, DAOs, or other projects to expand your reach and attract like-minded users.
• Encourage Organic Content: Memes, artwork, and user-generated content create cultural value and help spread your narrative.

There’s no strict formula for building a sticky community, but one thing is clear: if you cultivate a committed audience from the start, your project’s chances of long-term success will grow substantially.

Focus on UX: The Key to DeFi Adoption

User experience (UX) remains one of the biggest barriers preventing users from transitioning from traditional finance or CeFi to DeFi. As blockchain technology evolves, UX improvements, especially through smart abstractions like gasless transactions, account abstraction, and seamless onboarding, are becoming essential for mainstream adoption. The more you integrate these innovations, the more intuitive your product becomes.

Have you ever asked yourself what all successful DeFi protocols have in common? Great UX. It’s nearly impossible to scale a DeFi product without making it accessible, intuitive, and frictionless for users.

UI: A Crucial Part of UX

Your UI (User Interface) plays a huge role in the user experience. A clean, well-organized interface ensures that traders can quickly find the features they need without unnecessary complexity. A cluttered or confusing UI will drive users away, no matter how powerful your protocol is.

What Makes a Great Trading Experience?

• Simplicity & Accessibility: Users should immediately understand how to interact with the platform. No steep learning curves.
• Seamless Navigation: Essential trading features should be easily accessible, with minimal clicks required.
• Speed & Performance: Slow interfaces and failed transactions kill user retention. Optimize for efficiency.
• Frictionless Execution: Minimize unnecessary steps in the trading process. Smooth order placement, portfolio management, and analytics make a huge difference.

If your protocol nails UX and UI, you drastically increase your chances of success. The best technology in the world means nothing if users find it frustrating to use. Prioritize UX, and adoption will follow.

Security: A Non-Negotiable Priority

Security is one of the most critical aspects of building smart contract-powered dApps. While smart contracts enable trustless, transparent, and automated execution of transactions, their immutable nature means that any vulnerabilities or bugs become permanent once deployed. A single security flaw can lead to massive financial losses, reputational damage, and loss of user trust, all of which can be fatal for a project.

Why Smart Contract Security Matters

1. Financial Risks: Smart contracts handle large sums of digital assets, making them prime targets for hackers. A single exploit can drain liquidity pools, manipulate token prices, or steal user funds.
2. Reputation & Trust: Security breaches erode user confidence and can lead to abandonment of the protocol. A single high-profile hack can permanently damage a project’s credibility.
3. Immutability: Unlike traditional software, smart contracts cannot be easily patched once deployed. Fixing a critical vulnerability often requires contract migration or even a hard fork, which is costly and complex.
4. Open-Source Risks: While transparency is a core principle in Web3, publicly available smart contract code can be analyzed by attackers to find weaknesses before they’re even noticed by developers.

Essential Security Measures for DApps

To mitigate these risks, every project should implement rigorous security practices before and after deployment.

• Smart Contract Audits: Engaging third-party auditors to review code helps identify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Multiple audits from reputable firms are highly recommended.
• Penetration Testing: Simulating attacks against both smart contracts and infrastructure (APIs, nodes, front-end) helps uncover weak points before malicious actors do.
• Secure Data Management: Minimize storing sensitive data on-chain and use encryption when necessary to reduce exposure to potential breaches.
• Private Key Protection: Implement secure wallet integrations and encourage users to follow best practices for safeguarding private keys. A compromised key can lead to total loss of assets.

How Zaros Empowers Builders

Building a derivatives product involves much more than just a market-making engine. While liquidity management is critical, success also depends on factors like user experience, community growth, and sustainable incentives.

Zaros eliminates the complexity of building a market-making engine, saving you 1,000+ hours of development which, as you know, isn’t cheap. This allows you to focus on what truly differentiates your product and attracts users.

With our unique yield-bearing LP model, you get deep, sustainable liquidity across multiple trading pairs, avoiding common problems like fragmented liquidity and costly TVL incentives.

Beyond infrastructure, we actively support our integrators by showcasing their products in our Super Derivatives App, driving direct traffic to your platform and strengthening our ecosystem.

Want to learn more about integrating with Zaros? Visit our **“Build on Zaros”** page on our website.

Final Notes

Building a successful on-chain trading product goes beyond tech — it requires strong branding, a loyal community, seamless UX, and sustainable liquidity.

At Zaros, we simplify liquidity management, saving you 1,000+ hours of development with our yield-bearing LP model and deep liquidity solutions. Plus, we help drive adoption by showcasing integrated products in our Super Derivatives App.

Hope you have enjoyed this article, see you next time!

About Zaros

Zaros is the Derivatives Powerhouse on Monad and Arbitrum. Our ecosystem supports yield-bearing assets, such as LSTs and LRTs, to provide liquidity for third-party protocols through our Market Maker and Perpetual Futures engines — helping them save up to 6 months of development time, plus all the effort of ramping TVL from scratch. For users, Zaros offers a complete derivatives ecosystem in one place: the Super App. With a user-friendly interface and seamless integration, it provides all the derivative tools you need in a single, easy-to-use platform.

Our recent funding round saw participation from prominent venture funds, including SNZ Holdings, Seven Capital, Cogitent Ventures, and DCI Capital. Angel investors such as Antony Sassano, Fernando Martinelli, Kieran Warwick, Andy Chen, and Kevin Lu also contributed, underscoring the strong confidence in Zaros’ potential.

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