AMA with AMA Lovers Club — April 13th, 2020
Aim -amaloversclub: Can you please introduce yourself and your background, also introduce the team working on Options-Market?
Fraser: Yes sure. Paul and I have been working on the perfect crowdsale solution since 2018. We focused a lot on curation during the dark years (2018–2019). Some of you might know dontbuymeme.com. We launched Degen.VC right after seeing their launch and did not look back.
Options.Market is the latest project we launched. My background is Engineer, MBA, Olympian. Have worked in innovative finance (traditional) before going down the blockchain rabbit hole in 2016
Paul: I am an ex-bank Treasurer with 20 years of Banking experience most of which spent in the derivatives an options markets.
This includes all asset types so crypto is another opportunity to bring my derivative skills to a new type of asset.
Co-founded $DGVC with Fraser in August of last year. Since then we have launched seven projects and a number of others in the pipeline.
$OSM is most exciting for me as I get to leverage my banking experience and 18 years of derivatives expertise — and in crypto! Life goal achieved!
Here’s what our ecosystem looks like:
Can you introduce Options-Market, what critical problems does it solve that existing solutions are not solving and what’s the competitive advantage?
Paul: Like Fraser said, Options.Market began life as a fork of a VC-backed anon-project called SirenMarkets.com, which is an open source mainnet, decentralized options trading solution for ERC20 tokens.
However, I have given a tremendous amount of thought to all of the derivatives projects in the market and come to the conclusion that they are almost trying to be too clever. I’m a first-principles person.
We will be offering up to $25,000 in awards and grants during the Gitcoin Hackathon that Degen.VC is sponsoring, running from April 26 — May 17, to relook at the entire market and start from first principles.
Mini-alpha leak — it might well create a brand new use case for the OSM token beyond governance. Massively exciting.
Fraser: I think it's worth mentioning more about our approach, almost philosophically. Something like Options.Market that aims to and could become a protocol layer for onchain options should not be VC controlled with massive bags controlled by founders. It should be highly distributed from the outset This is what we did in fact and it sets us apart.
Paul mentioned the hackathon. We will attract top talent on innovation this way as opposed to rewarding “founder devs” with 50 million dollars worth of tokens
Can you briefly describe the top milestones you have achieved and your target milestones with timelines, also share your roadmap?
Paul: We published quite a detailed roadmap in mid-March, here: https://medium.com/options-market/option-market-roadmap-2021-deb82330e2de
We have completed the #alphadrop — we gave 18% of total supply to $DGVC LP’s at zero cost to them — this is an airdro pof course but we believe we are delivering pure alpha to our community.
We added another 10% to our innovative Dual Accelerator Vault smart contracts.
This is how we build liquidity — and why you can see that $OSM has built up a very good amount of liquidity through the community’s efforts!
Fraser: Yes its stable at about $1million right now on the UNI-V2 pair so the token is not like a whipsaw
Paul: The rest of the prior roadmap is now under review and we will get a substantial amount of knowledge from the hackathon to include.
I’m really excited for what the skills of 80,000 Ethereum devs can bring innovation wise. I’d also love to develop structured derivative investment products…so much scope!
Can you briefly describe your PARTNERSHIPS so far?
Fraser: Degen.VC takes an ecosystem approach to DeFi and one of our first projects, Behodler.io is an innovative DEX provably allowing swaps 50% cheaper on gas than Uniswap
So in our ecosystem we now have a major emerging DEX that can leverage an options trading protocol off course. Many partnerships will arise out of the hackathon especially given the size of the prizes we are offering to kick start collaboration with devs
Paul: We are looking at 4–5 prizes totalling $25,000 as I mentioned. This is a huge incentive in hackathon terms and we have no doubt that this will result not only in outstanding code, but many opportunities to partner across to ecosystem.
Can you give an overview of your Tokenomics, and the UTILITY of the $OSM Token?
Paul: Sure. Our approach to tokenomics is all about fair distribution and launch, and to ensure that multiple utilities come from how we position our tokenomics.
Distribution was easy — flip VC economics on its head and empower the retail user to be able to own tokens in great projects at $0. We have achieved this.
The balance of tokens are being held to use as community rewards for liquidity provision on the options market pairs.
This totals 32.5% which will reward liquidity providers. This is 5x rewards of Siren with no lockup once live!
Utility is always interesting for us — we start at governance, as it is the easiest for people to understand. Hold tokens, have a say in how decisions in the business are made.
I mentioned a new use case — OSM as a settlement layer (under development).
Fraser: We use a technology called liquid vault to distribute value to the community of token holders. Trading fees will be sent to a liquid vault and people can send ETH to it and get back UNI-V2 LP tokens at a discount. This is way better than staking or burning because it increases the liquidity on the pair. (The discounted LP tokens are locked for a period)
Community Q & A
Q: One of your medium article says “Options.Market has been designed in such a way to render the use of pricing oracles and other interfaces obsolete”. Could you tell us some of the issues with these tools that made you want to render them obsolete? And, what approach will you be using to help make it possible?
A: The real issue with the use of price oracles is that they are generally controlled by 3rd parties — that is, organisations outside of our ecosystem and therefor not within our control. This opens up project risk — what happens if one day they stop functioning as integrated in our smart contracts, change code without announcement or any other factor one could think of?
The project suffers risk that is unquantifiable. Our approach is to internalise all of these factors so that they are native to our code base, and therefore reduce risk as much as we possibly can. There will still no doubt be some external linkages, but these will strictly be to code we know is constantly updated and optimised.
Q: Options Market Although built as a fork of VC powered anon-project, it will need to gain “trust” as a new project. How will you reassure experienced investors and users to work with your project?
A: I think Paul will answer the more technical questions. For me this is important. We start with a really small token price. In fact, we airdrop tokens to our community free. The price of our tokens grow and grow therefore. We deliberately do not talk up token price and dissuade price talk on telegram. The project will keep delivering and the market will keep doing what it does — determining its idea of what the token price should be. DeFi is becoming ICO like now with high prices early on and retain getting crushed. We are the complete opposite
Q: Why There was NO private sale of IDO of Options.Market? What are the reason?
A: Because we don’t need it. Projects that sell tokens without kyc or to US people will get an injunction and be told to send the money back. We would only sell tokens into a defi market rather than by offering. Its our model and its much safer for our token holders than those naively buying IDO tokens as if the regulator suddenly fell asleep or something
Q: What is your vision for the market today and what is your vision for the market for the next year?
A: Our vision for the near term is to build a massively suprerior product offering using my 20 years of derivatives market knowledge, and to massively increase innovation in the space.
Longer-term, we aim to enable the trading and transaction of options and derivative strategies on any and every token in the market — even autonomously thereby allowing users to make their own markets through the AMM functionality we will build, or co-design with Behodler.io. The future in this space is so bright and opportunities so bountiful, who knows where the limit might be!
Globally options is an annula $300–1,000 Triliion market!! Depends on your stats, but this is the opportunity folks!
Q: 1. What’s the difference between sToken and lToken?
2.Can the underlying collateral be purchased and sold at will on Options.Market?
A: 1. These tokens are the collateral-based tokens of the market as currently designed, and frankly a feature that I’m not a fan of. Since we forked Siren, we did follow most of their code but the opportunity to innovate beyond them is so clear to me, as a derivatives expert, that I see these features being rapidly replaced in the future. For now, they are but long and short side of the collteral market — long = buyer and short = seller.
2. Yes, these 2 tokens are ERC20 tokens that will be tradeable on Uniswap as required. Secondary markets are always very interesting to us given how we have built our ecosystems and this will be no different.
