GUM: Giant Unified Market

Imagine a world where all desirable assets including memecoins, forex, real estate, shares, crypto assets and commodities live in a single unified market - and where billions of users anywhere in the world can switch from any asset to anything else with near zero transaction cost.

This “any asset, any where, any one” vision has long been the pipe dream of finance - and it is finally becoming possible because of the transparent, open and composable nature of decentralized finance.

Importance Of GUM

This idea of global unified market is extremely important to crypto for a number of reasons:

1. It showcases for the entire world what is only possible on decentralized networks and impossible in centralized finance , which consists of isolated, centralized, fragmented, uncomposable markets.
2. It dramatically opens adoption for new types of crypto assets by millions - think of a person in Indonesia rotating memecoin profits into US real estate as easily as doing a swap on Jupiter.
3. It makes crypto actually useful and relevant to a user’s daily life - think of this decentralized marketplace replacing the insanely opaque and inefficient forex marketplaces that “power” key things like remittances and all international transfers, allowing anyone to become market makers for any currency pairs they have access to
4. As of today, crypto is excellent at creating new virtual assets that tons of value. This unified market will put crypto assets in the same transactional framework as assets that interact with the real world
5. Markets in GUM will be composable, not just with fellow markets, but also with other protocols, enabling crazy awesome txns like taking a loan to pay for something with a stable immediately.

When the global liquidity market exists, we can literally replace all the major financial backend frameworks (SWIFT, SIBOR, interbank forex, REITs) with a single exponentially more efficient, accessible and cheaper endpoint.

Assets, Markets, Access

There is a very strong focus in crypto today on assets, but the thing is, assets alone are not useful at all - we need 3 key dimensions to make this a reality - assets, markets, access.

For assets, we need a lot more trusted and reliable assets in the same network - and that is where having a really strong network of trusted partners that withstand the test of time are very important.

But of course, assets do not transact by themselves, what you really need of course, are highly transparent and liquid markets for these assets - and that is where we need a full range of market making systems, market makers ready to make the required markets and sufficient incentives to bootstrap these markets.

And lastly, markets alone are wholly insufficient - imagine one market in Tanzania, one market in Antarctica, and one market in the Amazonian rainforest - the cost, effort and difficulty of accessing these markets will

What you need of course, is all these markets to exist in a single execution environment, to be able to transact across all of them in an seamless transaction, and for users to be able to access all these in a single unified interface.

G.U.M

And that is exactly what our signature G.U.M effort is all about - rallying all the key assets and markets in a single execution eniviroment, and then allowing users to access and transact across all of them via a single interface with absolute minimal hassle or transactional cost.

The amazing thing is, from a technical point of view, we are not that far away from this vision - over the last 10 years, our industry have built up the necessary technical expertise, operational experience and collaborative networks to create the necessary foundation for this.

And as this G.U.M gains critical mass, a set of virtuous effects will come into play:

• Asset issuers will have the necessary critical mass of users leveraging their assets
• Market makers will have the necessary platforms and volume to sustain profitable operations
• Solana network will have an extremely strong network effect compared to all other layer 1s
• Jupiter will take a major step towards becoming the everything exchange for users and a liquidity infrastructure capable of powering key use cases

Most importantly of course, users anywhere around the world will to play on the same level playing field no matter where they are from free of arbiritary constraints and fees that bind the operating system of finance today.

Patience

The most common critique we face here obviously, is that crypto despite our best efforts is still 99.99% about virtual asset creation, and links to everyday life minuscule at best.

To that, it is important to understand that in anything that involves network effects, things happen very very slowly at the start - then suddenly all at once. What might be seen as a pipe dream now, in terms of assets, liquidity and adoption -> might happen extremely quickly once the fundamental pieces come into play and user trust builds up.

This is true for once budding ecosystems like solana or ethereum, true for new wrapped/stable assets like WBTC\* or USDC, and certainly will be true for a pan-ecosystem effort like GUM.

So let’s use the most under leveraged virtue in crypto - patience - and build up this global unified market one asset, one market and one user at a time.

With some luck and plenty of patience, it might just happen ;)

Meow

* When starting WBTC, we put in the necessary technical structure, operational framework and ecosystem support at genesis. After that, it was a very slow grind and incremental built up of credibility. However, after a critical mass of developer support and user trust has been built up, a flywheel effect kicked in and eventually resulted in WBTC being where it is today.