It’s time.
It is time we say goodbye to Mercury and begin anew. Our next destination: Venus.
Before we take off from Mercury, the Optional team would like to thank each and every one of you whether you are a depositor or simply a follower on our social channels on Twitter or Discord! In addition, we’d like to thank the Opyn team for helping us jumpstart the project and assist us along the way. The ride has been wild, but a wonderful experience. We can’t thank you enough!
Venus (v0.2) is built upon the lessons we learned from Mercury’s launch and deployment. If you don’t recall, we wrote a post about it! In short, we made a lot of improvements in both the frontend and smart contracts to better the user experience.
So what new features are we presenting? Let’s take a look!
Note: “Vault” and “social token” are used interchangeably in the context of Optional.
Minimal Proxies (EIP1167) and Upgradeability
Mercury’s original deployment method was that it would simply construct an entirely new social token which is a very expensive process, in addition, that it cannot be upgraded at neither the factory or social token level.
In Venus, we’ve changed it so that deployments are minimal proxies of the implementation that the factory is assigned to. The deployment costs as a result have dropped. Since it is a minimal proxy, the vault’s contracts cannot be modified.
However, we’ve added a function where the admin can change the implementation address for future deployments. If a social token is deployed, and the factory changes the implementation address, it will not affect the already deployed social tokens.
Put Support
We’ve heard some of our community members wish to see puts being supported on Optional. Since we’re agnostic in any market conditions, we’ve provided support for puts.
Enhanced Depositor Protections
A concern we addressed in our previous Medium post was that a lot of trust had to be made towards the manager to ensure they perform actions in a timely manner or don’t hold funds hostage.
As a result, we’ve made changes that allows depositors to withdraw from the vault if it is inactive (even outside the withdrawal window) and can trigger the withdrawal window to reopen if certain conditions are met.
In addition, anyone can call the “settle vault” function to both reopen the social token and settle the social token (provided all of the conditions are met).
Reserves
If the manager wishes so, they can add a reserve system so that users can withdraw during an active position, provided there are reserves left over. The reserves cannot be used to write options and cannot be ‘refilled’ if a new deposit comes in.
However, a concern about having reserves is that it can be used to exit the social token if it is ITM (in the money). As a precaution, we’ve made it so that if the vault is ITM, it will penalize the user exactly how ITM the social token is and distribute it to depositors.
Fee Generation
A concern that was made clear recently is the lack of ability to charge fees on users on both the protocol and social token level. The lack of revenue may make it difficult to operate, as well as a disincentive towards social traders.
With the upgrade, it is now possible to charge three different types of fees:
- Deposit
- Withdrawal
- Performance Fee (charged from selling options)
These three fees can be charged at both the protocol and social token level, providing revenue to Optional and the manager.
Fee Waivers
A feature we’ve decided to add is that users can receive a discounted fee against their deposits or withdrawals. Managers can set up their social token on Optional to provide a discount for those who hold an ERC20/721/1155.
As an example, if the vault charges a 1% deposit fee, but you hold a particular NFT, the manager can set it so that NFT provides a 1% deposit fee deduction. As a result, your deposit does not have fees applied to it.
However, these are NOT flashloan-proof at the moment for v0.2.0. We recommend managers to take into consideration on what tokens are allowed and at what discount.
We are excited to launch Venus very soon, and are aiming for October 21st!
We once again thank everyone again for following us on this amazing journey! With much love from the Optional team!
Also, credit to cloud for drawing up Venus!
Make sure to keep tabs with us on Discord or Twitter!
Optional: https://optional.finance
Discord: https://discord.optional.finance
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OptionalFinance
