Announcing the Laminar Turbulence testnet & cross-chain trading competition with Acala
By Ruitao Su
Laminar’s first public test network Turbulence is launched, supporting cross-chain stablecoin Acala Dollar (ticker: aUSD) as the base trading currency for synthetic forex, gold and crypto margin trading. We await the upcoming cross-chain trading competition in collaboration with Acala 🚀
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Laminar Chain testnet — the Turbulence Network — as well as a cross-chain competition in collaboration with Acala. We have been hard at work preparing the launch and we are very excited to have users taking it for a test drive!
Laminar delivers decentralized finance protocols that bridge on-and-off chain liquidity and users. We’re creating an open, transparent, and trustless trading platform with a variety of financial assets designed to serve traders from both the crypto and web2 mainstream finance worlds. Laminar’s trio of protocols — synthetic assets, margin trading and money market protocol — will be deployed on both Ethereum and (Substrate-based) Laminar Chain and will later be connected to Polkadot and other networks in the broader web3 ecosystem.
The Ethereum smart contract implementation is primarily served as a value gateway, allowing us to leverage Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem while contributing liquidity and trading variety to Ethereum. The first version of the testnet was launched in November 2019, since then we have done a lot more research, financial audits, and protocol revisions, each one a step closer to a mainnet launch.
Laminar Chain Trilogy Networks
To deliver a high-performance trading experience to the masses while retaining trustlessness and security, Laminar is also building a Substrate-based Laminar Chain that will connect to Polkadot as a parachain. The goal with this is to leverage Polkadot’s shared security and the DeFi ecosystem by using Acala’s stablecoin aUSD as the base trading currency.
The Laminar Chain will serve as a specialist trading platform bringing off-chain liquidity, mainstream users, and a rich variety of trading instruments to the Polkadot multi-chain ecosystem. The evolution of the Laminar Chain will be marked by trilogy networks:
- Turbulence Test Network: as the name suggests, expect turbulence and unannounced reboots on this risk-free and value-free playground. This is the place to experiment and break things!
- Reynold Canary Network: is an unaudited release of Laminar Chain that will be connected to the Kusama network. It will have an economic value represented by REY. It will use Acala’s canary network stablecoin kaUSD as the base trading currency.
- Laminar Mainnet: will be connected to the Polkadot mainnet. Its network token LAMI will serve as a governance token and as incentives to network participants. The Laminar mainnet will use Acala’s mainnet stablecoin aUSD as the base trading currency.
Turbulence Network
Expect Bugs and Turbulence.
As the test network for Laminar, Turbulence allows users, developers, and other networks to test-drive its trading facilities, and build integrations in a risk-free environment.
The Turbulence Network is launching with the following features:
- Generate and trade (1:1) synthetic assets including five major forex assets: EUR, CHF, JPY, CAD, AUD, also Gold (ticker: XAU), and synthetic crypto assets — Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Margin trade up to 20x leverage with these assets
- Multiple liquidity pools as trading counterparties to provide liquidity for a variety of trading assets with different spreads and risk profiles
If you would like to become a liquidity provider, please get in touch. Find out more in the Turbulence Wiki. Or jump-start by getting test tokens from Laminar Discord Faucet and test-drive Laminar’s Flow Exchange Web App.
The Flow Protocol
Laminar’s Flow Protocols are generalized for any type of synthetic asset and margin trading. The Flow Protocols offer the following properties:
- Instant liquidity: traders trade against liquidity pools instead of order books, and orders are instantly executed. This is a particularly important consideration as it could be a long wait before your odd 15x short USDJPY be taken by someone else in an order book design, at least in the bootstrapping phase.
- Asset efficiency for traders: while all positions are collateralized, traders only need to put up collateral for the value of the positions. The rest of the risks are taken on by the liquidity providers. In return, liquidity providers earn the spreads in the trades.
- Better trading experience: Flow Protocols enable transparent pricing and counter-party actions governed by the protocol and the community while providing an excellent high performing trading experience comparable to the off-chain services.
The Synthetic Asset Protocol allows users to mint non-USD stable-coin fToken e.g. fEUR or fJPY using USD stable-coin e.g. Acala Dollar (ticker: aUSD) or equivalent as collateral. The protocol requires over-collateralization in order to protect the position from exchange rate fluctuation hence stabilizing the fToken.
Read more on the protocol here and the whitepaper here.
The Margin Trading Protocol has been revised since its first version to massively improve capital efficiency for liquidity providers. It uses a fractional reserve mechanism with a set of risk parameter instruments to ensure solvency for both traders and liquidity pools. For example, the liquidity pool is required to have a certain Equity to Net Position Ratio (ENP), and Equity to Longest Leg Ratio (ELL), to ensure the pool has sufficient equity to cover all closing positions in the worst-case scenario (e.g. traders closing all winning sides at once) while maximizing asset efficiency.
From a trader’s perspective, their risk profile is established for each liquidity pool that he/she is trading in. Trader’s margin level must be above the required margin call level otherwise no new positions can be open. And if the trader’s margin level falls further below the stop-out level required, then his/her positions will be liquidated.
Read more on the protocol here and the whitepaper here.
Cross-chain Trading Competition
Laminar is joining Acala’s Mandala Festival Season 3 to spice up the cross-chain DeFi fiesta 🎉
Users will be able to send their Acala Dollar (ticker: aUSD) from Acala Network to Laminar Chain, and use it for minting synthetic assets and margin trade forex pairs, gold or synthetic BTC and ETH with up to 20x leverage. After trading, aUSD can be sent back to the Acala Network to pay back the stablecoin loan or swap for DOT to participate in staking. The possibilities are truly endless.
Spoiler alert, users will be rewarded for simply transacting using either platform, with further rewards allocated to top traders, bloggers, and bug bounty hunters — there’s something for everyone!
About Laminar
Laminar is a financial institute backed decentralized finance protocol company. It aims to create an open finance platform that will provide better access to trading instruments, and enable developers to build more open financial services. Laminar’s Flow Protocols bring both synthetic assets and margin trading on the blockchain. It helps solve the challenges of opaque pricing and price manipulation in current financial markets, bridges on and off-chain parties, and ultimately boosts on-chain trading liquidity, exposure, and variety.
Learn more about Laminar on laminar.one, Medium, Twitter, GitHub and Laminar Wiki. Join the discussion on Discord, and Telegram. Any inquiries please email or DM us.
