Looking Back and Forward — October 2020 edition
Autumn has come to DeFi! The yield farming craze has cooled down a bit, markets are down and space overall feels less hasty and intense. We believe this is a healthy pullback and it sets the stage for big things to happen in the space. Before we look ahead, let's dip into what October brought to Opium Network.
Team updates
Opium Protocol has closed a $3.25 million funding round
Opium Team is proud to announce a funding round was recently closed, backed by top investors from the industry. Amongst the backers are QCP Soteria, HashKey, Galaxy Digital, Rockaway Blockchain Fund, Meta Cartel Ventures, Alameda Research, Launch Hub, CMS Holdings, Kenetic, One Block, SevenX, Zee Prime Capital, and — besides others — some founders including Stani Kulechov (AAVE), Jordan Momtazi (Synthetix) and Trevor Koverko (Polymath).
The funds will be used to further build and nurture a professional ecosystem for decentralized analogues of financial derivatives. In addition to closing this funding round, Opium Team is happy to welcome Stani Kulechov (Aave) as an advisor to the team.
The funding round was covered by notable crypto media outlets, such as Coindesk, The Block, Chainnews and PANews. Read all about it in the official announcement post:
Opium.Network website now available in Chinese
As our project matures and attracts users, investors and enthusiasts from all over the world, we are now committed to making our products available for everyone in the major languages of the world. We started with a Chinese translation for our main website opium.network, which we'll also bring to our products. Once the Chinese translation is live we'll add more languages.
In which language would you like to see Opium Network? Tell us here on Discord!
Opium.exchange SDK
At the beginning of the month we launched the first version of the oex-js SDK — built on top of the Opium Exchange API. This is just another example of how we are building to improve the developer experience of Opium Protocol.
The use-cases for our new SDK range from building trading bots and market-making bots, to easy integrations with custom trading frontends. As market-making and LPs are currently all the rage in the Ethereum landscape today, we expect our SDK to contribute to enriching the Opium ecosystem and also the overall DeFi derivatives space.
Read more in the article below written by our full-stack developer Riccardo Dal Pio Luogo.
Contributing to crypto open-source
Every once in awhile our team stumbles upon an opportunity to contribute to open-source software development in DeFi. Last week our CTO Ali Nuraldin found a UX security treat when using his Ledger with Gnosis Safe. He implemented a script to mitigate the issue by enabling verification of Gnosis safe transactions using Ledger hardware.
The script is available for anyone to use and implement—check out the Tweetstorm below for more details.
Product updates
Liquidity mining program under development!
As featured in our whitepaper, Opium Protocol will soon move towards decentralized governance with its own governance token. One major feature that we'll introduce on top of this infrastructure is a liquidity mining program that will be essential to bootstrapping liquidity on Opium Protocol and making our products even more useful to users.
We've been inspired by the various types of implementations for liquidity mining seen in the past couple of months, and we're excited to announce that Opium will allow for both off-chain liquidity mining (through integrations with market making bots such as Hummingbot) and on-chain liquidity mining (through a simple web interface usable by the average DeFi user).
Our development team has made a lot of progress this month so stay tuned for the announcement which will drop soon in our Telegram chat.
Media & Events
FBG Defi EP01: How to Bring Fixed Income Products in Defi to the Next Level
Check out this high-quality panel discussion on fixed income products and DeFi, featuring thought-leaders from the space (including our very own Andrey!)
The discussion was invite-only but is now fully available on YouTube—find it below.
Amadeo Brands ON-DeFi talks with Andrey Belyakov
Amadeo Brands has been a source of light in the DeFi space when it comes to quality educational content and in-depth interviews. Amadeo recently interviewed our founder Andrey to discuss a range of topics including tail risks and potential crises in DeFi, regulations, governance and more. Thanks Amadeo for hosting! Watch the full interview below.
Stay tuned for more announcements!
Make sure you follow all official channels below to stay up-to-date regarding upcoming announcements and features.
About Opium
Opium is a universal and robust DeFi protocol that allows for creating, settling, and trading decentralised derivatives. Use our products today to speculate on opportunities inside and outside of DeFi, or hedge yourself against trading risks.
Explore Opium Protocol or try out Opium Exchange.
Stay informed through following us on Twitter, joining our Telegram chat and announcements channel.
