Overtime is thrilled to introduce: Spongly!

Overtime Markets
6 min readAug 23, 2023

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If you’ve been along for the ride since the beginning, you’ll know that Overtime’s growth has been non-stop. From constantly offering new sports and position types to major milestones like going multi-chain, opening up the Sports AMM for liquidity provisioning and exceeding $30,000,000 in notional volume on Optimism and almost $4,500,000 on Arbitrum, Overtime has always kept the pedal to the floor. Through all this we’ve developed an incredible community with a real passion for decentralized sports markets. We want to encourage the community to take ownership of the protocol so we’re more than thrilled to welcome Spongly, the first independent front-end for Overtime!

Headed by the GoodRequest team which includes Thales Council Member CyberDuck, Spongly will provide traders with a fully independent web interface that features additional functionality such as copy trading and access to advanced trading metrics. Traders have been asking for a way to follow the lead of their favorite sports positioning influencers, and Spongly has answered the call by allowing them to find and analyze tipsters through trading metrics taken directly from their wallets. Traders can then use this data to choose which positions they want to copy. Spongly plans to expand on this functionality in a number of ways, with copy-trade vaults as an example.

Development on Spongly has been funded by a Thales grant as the project will provide several benefits to Thales and Overtime. Spongly will not only push Overtime further towards full decentralization but also intends to drive volume to increase protocol revenue. The end goal is for Spongly to be fully self-funded via referral fees.

With the launch of the platform coming very soon, we had the privilege to chat with CyberDuck about Spongly and get some of our questions about the project answered. If that’s not enough info for you, we’ll also be chatting with Duck at Greek Office Hours on August 28th at 3:30 UTC, so if you have any other questions or want more details, don’t forget to join the call.

Now, on to the questions!

Hello Mr. Duck. To start off, can you please introduce yourself? How did you get into crypto? How did you get involved in the Overtime Community?

CyberDuck: “I’ve worked in IT my entire professional career, mostly leading dev teams to deliver web apps. I got pushed into crypto around 2017 when eating lunch with a friend of mine. I paid the bill for the both of us using a card and my friend, instead of giving me cash for his side of the bill, chose violence, forced me to install an Ethereum wallet on my phone and sent me his side of the bill in ETH. I then forgot about it and few weeks later, procrastinating, I opened up the wallet and what used to be a burger worth of ETH, was now worth a full roasted duck that could feed a family, and that’s how I got hooked.”

How would you describe Spongly and what it offers to traders?

CD: “Spongly is an alternative Overtime frontend and more. In the MVP we offer basic copy trading functionality, where one can browse through a list of open tickets and chose to copy trade them with a click of a button. Spongly will iteratively grow with functionality, whether that’s more tipster analytics, wallet abstraction, a progressive web app, or eventually tipster vaults for automated copying. The list is long of what we can build. One small step at a time.”

Why do we need alternative UI’s for blockchain dapps?

CD: “Accessibility is the first thing that comes to my mind. Web3 protocols promise decentralization, but lack it in terms of UIs, often running with a single front end, that if goes down for any reason, it makes the protocol inaccessible to the everyday user. Then there is the overall adoption and onboarding. Different UIs offer different user experience, experimentation and innovation.”

Can you tell me a bit about the team behind Spongly?

CD: “It’s a coop of two web2 agencies, one from my side, offering business strategy and overall project leadership, and the other, GoodRequest, offering a very dynamic dev team. The partnership is working really well and I think Spongly is just the beginning.”

Why did the Spongly team choose to build on top of Overtime specifically? Did you consider working on any other protocols?

CD: “The answer here is simple. Spongly was my idea, I am a Thales token holder, Thales councilor, and Thales has funded the idea with a grant.”

How will Spongly find or attract tipsters/influencers? How will they be incentivized for participating?

CD: “We’re still primarily focused on the build phase; delivering a good user experience first as a precursor to adoption and a marketing strategy. I don’t think we’re at a stage where it’s sensible to invest a lot into marketing just yet. I find the status quo web3 UX still clunky with lot of friction. Going after non web3 native users makes sense after we abstract the blockchain part to a degree. Others are already starting to do it, there are good examples out there, and I am sure we’ll follow. You want the experience to be as close as possible to the traditional bookie experience.”

Does Spongly have a plan for developing a social media presence?

CD: “We started already lightly with out intern handling Twitter and it has delivered some meme-able content like the call out to “discuss all the importance with the power.” Jokes aside, as we launch the MVP release, we’ll put more attention on comms for sure.”

Do you foresee the need for additional grants to support Spongly?

CD: “That’s a good question. We haven’t considered asking for new grants to fund more development, but have been discussing internally that we will likely be writing few grant requests focused on incentives from Optimism, Arbitrum and/or Base.”

Can you tell us more about the plan to become financially sustainable?

CD: “Because the app is hosted on the Synthetix IPFS cluster, we pretty much have no operational costs to run the app. Any expenses will be solely for the purpose of further iterative development. While we do get 0.5% of all trading volume we refer, which is currently negligible, with incentives we hope that grows to something more meaningful. The Spongly team has also become a $THALES token holder and a LP in the AMMs and any profit upside from that capital allocation can be used for further funding Spongly as well.”

Finally, I have to ask, why did you choose the name “Spongly”?

CD: “(sea) Sponges — they suck liquid(ty), they replicate exact copies of themselves (copy trading), and are easily meme-able, the community can go crazy with SpongeBob off the bat.”

Is there anything else we should get excited about in regards to Spongly’s future?

CD: “We have a very fat backlog of tasks to make Spongly better. While we launch with MVP functionality only, I think one should get excited with every upcoming version release.”

Thanks to CyberDuck for his responses, as well as all the hard work him and him team have put into Spongly. If you want to learn more about Spongly, Overtime or the Thales platform, be sure to join the Thales Discord and attend this week’s Greek Office Hours.

You can also learn more about Spongly by visiting https://twitter.com/sponglyio or by joining their discord.

About Overtime

Overtime is the first fully decentralized sports platform. Overtime allows users to trade seamlessly with our sports AMM so there is always a position to be taken on your favorite games. Born out of Thales protocol, Overtime keeps pushing the mission of gamifying DeFi one step further and helping close the gap with the inclusion of real-life sport events.

Follow us, join our community, and start playing now!

Website : https://overtimemarkets.xyz/#/
Discord: https://discord.gg/thales
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OvertimeMarkets
Documentation: https://docs.overtimemarkets.xyz

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