Just tried out PaperTrade and realized this thing isn’t some so-called 1000x PerpDEX—it’s more like a supercharged version of the EOS/Tron gambling Dapps from a few cycles ago. PaperTrade doesn’t have an order book or an AMM pool. It’s purely a setup where players collectively act as the house and bet against traders. Compared to those ancient gambling Dapps, PaperTrade has upgraded its tokenomics. It ties token release speed to the pool’s profit and loss, limits the position size and opening rate for individual accounts, and firmly avoids TGE and VC funding. This means that people bullish on Paper can only acquire it through manual trading. And the losses of these traders become profits for the collective LP pool acting as the house. The generous dividends from the joint house pool then attract more users to trade and acquire Paper, forming a perfect Ponzi loop. Now, Ponzi doesn’t necessarily mean malicious. Even pay-as-you-go social security systems are technically Ponzi schemes. The key to whether it has value lies in whether the system has positive externalities. Back in the day, the mining craze sparked by Fcoin in 2018 eventually found its resolution in the DeFi Summer triggered by Compound in 2020. As a seasoned crypto enthusiast, my gut tells me PaperTrade might repeat the mistakes of those ancient gambling Dapps. Paper might follow in the footsteps of Polymarket or Opensea, never doing a TGE and squeezing the last drop of blood from airdrop farmers. But on second thought, I can’t deny the possibility that it could replicate Compound’s success and kickstart a new paradigm in crypto. After all, PaperTrade launched as a highly polished product straight out of a major studio. So, I’ll throw in $1,000 and give it a shot. Finally, here’s the best method I’ve found so far: Start with $20, use 100x leverage, and open both long and short positions. This way, you avoid long wait times (super high at 5 seconds) and minimize losses from picking the wrong direction. The downside is that the time gap between opening long and short positions makes it impossible to achieve complete delta neutrality, which incurs some costs. Currently, the official Paper minting rate is 1:20, and this method can achieve 1:100.