What is Trader Joe (JOE)?

rader Joe (JOE) is a decentralised exchange that was first launched in June 2021, by co-founders @0xmurloc & @cryptofishx (can be found on X). The initial idea was to grow with the rise of Avalanche (AVAX), as the main destination to trade your assets. Starting from just a DEX, Trader Joe has grown to be so much more.

The Trader Joe DEX allows users to earn from its native token JOE, which we will go into further detail, down below.

In this article we will cover everything that the Trader Joe Protocol has to offer:

Swapping/Trading
Liquidity Pools
Farming
Launchpad
Lending
Staking
NFT’s & Marketplace
MORE!

How Does Trader Joe Work?

Let’s go through all the cool features and how they work on the Trader Joe platform:

Trader Joe Swapping/Trading

Where the journey began. Trader Joe first launched as a DEX that allows anyone to trade any token/asset on the AVAX network.

The Trade/Swap user interface is very clean, simple and easy to use for anyone new or advanced in the space.

To perform a trade/swap, simply select two tokens to swap to and from eg. AVAX - JOE and click swap. Trader Joe has an extremely minuscule trading fee of 0.3% when completing a trade/swap.

It is broken down like so:

0.25% – Paid to LPs in the form of a ‘trading fee’ for liquidity providers.
0.05% – Sent to the JOE token farm.

Trader Joe uses the fees to pay out to its community who are supporting the protocol by staking, providing liquidity and so on.

How To Swap on Trader Joe DEX AVAX to JOE

Trader Joe Liquidity Pools

As mentioned above, the 0.25% paid to LPs by the ‘trading fees’ are paid to users providing liquidity in a pool of two different tokens e.g. 50 in AVAX and $50 in JOE tokens. The amount earned depends on the APR% of the pool.

You can choose to provide liquidity in other pools, some of which may have a higher APR%. Here are some current Liquidity Pools on Trader Joe:

JOE - USDC - 40.65% APR
AVAX - USDC - 512.61% APR
JOE - AVAX - 235.14% APR

As you can see, Trade Joe Liquidity Pools offer very enticing rewards and has many pools suited for different risk tolerances. If you don’t understand the risks of Liquidity Pools, I highly recommend doing so by reading our article here.

Trader Joe Farming

If you are interested in increasing your rewards and earnings from liquidity pools, then you can deposit your LP tokens into Farms to earn extra yield in JOE tokens! There are also Farms specifically for your Staked JOE tokens (more down below).

Trader Joe ‘Farms’ currently offer APRs up to 88%—however, the higher the APR% the higher the risk.

Trader Joe Staking

There are 4 different Staking methods, each providing different utilities:

sJOE – Stake sJOE to earn USDC Stablecoins. Staking sJOE provides an average of 4.49% APR every 7 days.
rJOE – Is used as an allocation token to enter exclusive token launches on their Launchpad, ‘Rocket Joe Launches’.
veJOE – Stake JOE into veJOE to earn more veJOE over time. Staking veJOE will also boost your yields on certain farms. The veJOE token will also act as the future governance token.
xJOE - Stake your JOE tokens and turn them into xJOE which has no impermanent loss and earn JOE just by leaving your staked xJOE tokens to do the work.

As we can see there are various ways to earn JOE and other cryptocurrencies. It can be very worth while if you are an avid Trader Joe user.

Trader Joe Staking (JOE, sJOE, veJOE, rJOE, xJOE)

Lending/Banker Joe

A popular feature on the Trader Joe DEX is the power to lend out cryptocurrencies. This enables users the ability to either ‘Lend’ or ‘Borrow’ assets such as AVAX, wBTC, LINK and many more. Some risks must be factored in, be sure to research before following through.

Trader Joe is one of the most popular destinations to borrow or lend on the Avalanche network.

Trader Joe Launchpad

As mentioned above, rJOE is the main token for ‘Rocket Joe’ (Launchpad). If you want early access to upcoming projects on their launchpad, you must deposit rJOE into a “Rocket Joe Launch” project.

100 rJOE = 1 AVAX allocation. The 1 AVAX token can then be used to deposit in a Launch Liquidity Pool of the chosen project.

NFTs & Joe Pegs NFT Marketplace

Trader Joe seriously expanded its platform by opening an NFT marketplace, JoePegsNFT.

JoePegsNFT launched 100 FREE EXCLUSIVE NFT’s called ‘Smol Joes’, today it has a floor price of 169 AVAX! The platform hosts over 120 different collections of NFTs.

Avalanche has seen an incredible rise in NFTs due to the demand becoming so popular. Trader Joe’s NFT platform JoePegs has become the ultimate location for NFTs on the AVAX blockchain. There are consistently new and cool NFT collections dropping on their launchpad almost every week!

Trader Joe Multi-Chain

Without a doubt, Trader Joe is and has always been the number DEX and protocol on Avalanche since its launch. Now, we can see Trader Joe on other scalable cheap and fast blockchains such as:

Arbitrum - Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer-2 Scaling solution which has its own blockchain Arbitrum One that is used to bundle transactions on the Ethereum network, and send them to Arbitrum where the transactions are finalised at a much cheaper cost. Trader Joe is perfect for Arbitrum and they definitely made the right move, due to the incredible spike in Arbitrum wallet addresses.
BNB Chain - The BNB Chain is also known as the Binance Smart Chain. The BNB Chain is the blockchain for the number 1 CEX in the world, Binance. The BNB Chain is home to many famous and popular DeFi protocols. It is also dominated by the PancakeSwap DEX, so it will be interesting to see Trader Joe directly compete with PancakeSwap on their home ground.
Ethereum - The most recent network integration on TraderJoe was the Ethereum mainnet. Most commonly used on Ethereum is Uniswap, however, TraderJoe is known to have more features and better fees, therefore, Uniswap could find itself becoming the 2nd best DEX in existence.

I can guarantee they will not be stopping at the BNB Chain. I would predict that Trader Joe will eventually integrate over to:

Polygon
Fantom
zkSync Era
Linea
Starknet
Moonbeam

And many more…

How To Buy Trader Joe (JOE)

There are two main ways to buy JOE, but either way, you will always go through a centralised exchange (CEX). Here are the options:

Option 1- Centralised Exchange

The JOE token is available on most of the largest centralised exchanges.

Here are some Centralised Exchanges we recommend:

Binance - The most popular CEX in the world ($CAKE available here)
ByBit - EARN UP TO $30K in DEPOSIT BONUSES
BitGet - Trade on BitGet and receive 0% Deposit Cashback + $5,000 DEPOSIT BONUSES
Coinbase - Spend $100 and Get $10 back!

Option 2 - DeFi Wallet & Decentralised Exchange

Firstly, you will need the Avalanche Network connected to your DeFi wallet like Metamask.

You can watch our step-by-step tutorials on Youtube, using these links:

You can swap JOE tokens on the AVAX network using the Trader Joe decentralised exchange (DEX) to perform the swap of either AVAX/JOE or USDC/JOE for example.

Trader Joe DEX Tutorial

Conclusion

The $JOE token currently has over 50K holders, with a Total supply of 500M tokens and a Circulating Supply of 363,048,710 tokens.

At the time of writing, $JOE has a price of $0.3283 and a market cap of $119M+. In Nov 2021, $JOE hit an ATH of $5 and peaked at a market cap of $587M! JOE has an incredible chance of exceeding its previous All-Time-High as it plans to dominate other major blockchains.

It seems like Trader Joe is only getting warmed up.