AMA with Gem Collectors — March 29th, 2020
Host Questions
Crypto Gunter: Welcome Paul & Fraser thanks for participating :). Gents please introduce yourself to our community and elaborate your role within the team!
Fraser: 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 five projects and a number of others in the pipeline.
Crypto Gunter: Five projects that’s some impressive work guys! Your banking background perfectly fits in the ‘’options’’ aspect of the project.
Could you tell us more about the initial idea behind the founding of options.market? And the market opportunity?
Paul: The genesis of this is the reason why Degen.VC exists. Our sole desire in the world is to put the kind of alpha returns that VC’s earn typically into the hands of retail investors. As Fraser mentioned prior, we have been trying to solve for the perfect crowdfunding solution for years and has now come up with the way of doing this.
Our motto is “We front-run VC’s”…
Crypto Gunter: hahaha amazing motto!
Fraser: 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.
Crypto Gunter: So you guys give non VC’s a change to participate in the big money
Fraser: These days its not so much an idea as reality
Nearly $15mm in value has been alphadropped to date
Fraser: Options are vital in crypto because they more complex portfolio positions in DeFi than are currently possible
Crypto Gunter: Some of our community members don't know what a ‘’VC’’ is. Could you explain it?
Paul: Venture Capital is that sector of the investment landscape where small group of very wealthy individuals or companies get the opportunity to invest in awesome projects at the seed funding phase, and therefore get the chance to make most of the Alpha returns.
Options came into being and became popular because they allow traders to take positions on assets that give them the right, but not obligation, to exercise their position should the market conditions be favourable. It also creates opportunities to hedge price risks and speculate on price fluctuations in a cost-effective manner.
The dovetail of my particular skill in this sector and Degen.VC’s ability to rapidly fork projects and launch far more crowd-friendly tokenomics made adopting this project a no-brainer.
Instead of giving allocations to VC‘s at 5 and 10 X cheaper than the crowd we give the majority allocation to the crowd at 0 cost as long as you are a DGVC LP!
Crypto Gunter: Yes let’s talk about the key features of options.market
Paul: The high-level explanation is that Options.Market is a protocol layer for creating, trading, and redeeming options contracts for any ERC-20 token on Ethereum.
Options.Market has been designed in such a way to render the use of pricing oracles and other interfaces obsolete. The issue with the use of such tools is that they are provided by 3rd parties, and as a result a project is bound by the rules of these 3rd parties as and when they change. This does not make a project failsafe.
So we tokenize both sides of the buy/sell trade via a fully-underwritten liquidity pool per toke offered on the market.
Crypto Gunter: Thats understable. Could tell us more about the vaults?
Paul: Yeah the LiquidVault technology is such a fundamental game-changer in the market.
Fraser: We have covered LiquidVault tech elsewhere, so we are going to just straight into its specific application for accelerating the OSM market.
Here is the deep dive on the dual accelerator vault.
Crypto Gunter: So could you explain the process of the vaults for crypto ‘’newbies’’
Fraser: Yes, my pleasure
1. Imagine a smart contract with project tokens sitting on it
2. You can send ETH to this smart contract
3. The smart contract takes your ETH combines it with its tokens and gets LP tokens from Uniswap which then belong to you
So!
If you were to get LP tokens normally you would supply ETH and buy tokens too. But here you supply half the value and therefore the LP is 50% discounted
That is the simple part and the many, many other things this innovation allow us to do are covered in a number of articles. The one above elaborates on the more complex features of the dual vault on OSM.
Let me give you one example of something cool we do with it
1. Reduce the 50% discount to 20% by requiring the user to send more ETH
2. Use this ETH to market buy more tokens creating buy pressure
3. When the user claims his LP tokens send some LP to the 0x address to create a sink of perpetually locked tokens
Liquid Vault is a core technology leveraged on all our launches now and always tailored to suit the project's goals and community
We are doing a hackathon next month in partnership with Gitcoin and Consensys so will invite 80,000 devs to bring new ideas to this innovation as well as all our projects opensource code obviously
Paul: The Hackathon is booked and paid for and runs from April 26th — May 17th. All our projects will be featured in some way and form plus new ideas in our pipeline.
Fraser: Paul alluded to the capacity Degen VC now has to fontrun VC financed opensource DeFi projects. Options.Market is an example. You can only buy tokens for the project we forked for 10x the price of OSM because their tokenomics are designed to protect the VCs investment. We gave away as many tokens as they locked up with VCs so the opportunity exists for the astute to get in on the ground floor. #NFA #DYOR.
Its a bold move of course. But fortune favours the bold
Crypto Gunter: Are there any competitors active on the market? And what future developments will increase value of the project?
Fraser: Apart from Siren Markets that we forked, Opyn is a nice project, well run. But the AMM tech Paul described is killer. Options are a $300 tn market in finance. There is plenty of room @cryptogunter
Paul: What’s really interesting is our approach to tokenomics
The project Fraser mentioned that we forked is offering liquidity pool providers rewards of 6.5%. Options.market is offering liquidity pool providers rewards of 32% which is 5X greater.
Liquidity pool providers are critical as they provide the liquidity for the AMM to function and create fully collateralized options market that’s in effect underwritten on both buy and sell side. This creates stability in the market for operations to proceed efficiently and effectively.
Fraser: We have massive team and dev experience in AMM and bonding curves through one of our projects Behodler.io ($EYE) which incidentally was 100X in the past few months once it pushed its v2. I mean options is an enormous play
Degen Labs has the resource to make sure we get a good foothold there for the benefit of our community
Crypto Gunter: Good team, enough funds and a working product. All the ingredients are their…
Fraser: Alongside Behodler it strategically builds into the DeFi ecosystem we want our community to own a major part of. Long road and not easy is the reality too. But it's not our first rodeo. We have been resilient in the space since the pre-ICO days
Crypto Gunter: Will their also be a DAO structure?
Fraser: Yes, And I have strong feelings about this, expressed here.
“Protocols for the decentralized finance world do not need to be owned and controlled by venture capitalists. Their tokens, that will power DAO voting on key protocol direction and parameters, can and should be as widely distributed as possible from the outset. A buoyant DeFi market enables this and Degen VC launched Options.Market as a fork of SirenMarkets.com distributing OSM tokens widely and freely and leveraging Uniswap to discover a fair price for the protocol token in its nascent form.”
Fundamentally, the way we launched OSM gets to DAO governed protocol sooner and in a way that actually looks like it is intended to get there
So many projects — and your smart community knows this — are touting “governance token” in the same way ICOs touted Utility. They have no idea how to get there.
Behodler implemented a DAO called Morgoth. We are building on this concept for our governance of Degen projects. It's close to our teams heart to do that part well.
Crypto Gunter: Could you please share the roadmap?
Full Roadmap. Here’s the roadmap summary:
- A Gitcoin Hackathon, where Ethereum devs globally will have the chance to ideate the version-next of Options.Market — early Q2.
- Ongoing UI/UX improvements to the Website: Q2.
- Adding Options pairs and creating Liquidity Pools for these pairs: April/May 2021. This will include a variety of DeFi and non-DeFi tokens in order to capture previously untouched markets for DeFi projects.
- Commencement of the Liquidity Pool Provider (LPP) rewards program for the options trading pairs — LPP’s will have the chance to earn a total of 32.5% of $OSM supply via liquidity provision, WITH NO LOCK PERIOD. Note that this is 5x the total of Siren, who also implemented a 3-month lock period on accrued rewards: April/May 2021.
We took a poll on our Telegram
Overwhelming the community wants Aave options so that’s what we’ve started working on…
Crypto Gunter: Community decides! Should we head to the community questions?
Community Questions
Nafiz Ikhsan: Options.Market will begin life as a fork of a VC-backed anon-project.Confidence is very important at work. So what makes investors, clients, user feel safe when working with your project? And how will you gain the trust of the many users who have negative thoughts about blockchain? @PaulScott5
DegenVC is a fully doxxed team and Fraser and my LinkedIn profiles are available on our website for anyone to view. We have launched six projects including launching DegenVC at the beginning and our community has grown to over 2000 strong and they all have confidence in us that we run solid projects that are fully transparent and there is no risk of any rug pulls happening.
Jin_ Drugs: Accelerator Vault (AV) users have a discount of 20% while Hodler Vault (HV) has a 50% discount, why are these two mechanisms different from the existing discount percentage, and which one is more profitable to choose, what should I do to be able to become one of the users of the AV and HV mechanism?
The two vaults have different discounts in order to incentivize different behavior. The Accelerator Vault is designed for people who want shorter lock periods and want to claim a OSM tokens. The Hodler Vault is a longer lock Where people can claim ETH, and for the longer lock there is a greater discount!
It’s all about preference and we like to give our community choices.
Octopus: Many blockchain projects and companies focus on making very complex systems but easy to use, say they will revolutionize the society, and help the unbanked. Since you work directly in the area, how realistic do you think such statements are?
Paul: Not only do I think this is realistic, I think it is an absolute imperative.
At Degen.VC I’ll goal is to empower the retail sector to be able to earn VC alpha. By doing this we are giving the kinds of people that you describe the opportunity to get investment in projects such as options.market so that they can benefit as greatly, and perhaps more so than VC funds do.
