A decade of Overtime
I don’t do this often (writing blog posts), but sometimes enough things pile on, and although I go above and beyond trying to relay my vision for Overtime to the community at every step, I do feel it’s best to put all thoughts in one place. Additionally, Thales community Discord has basically 2x since the Overtime release, so it should help to give some more context for the newcomers, and also introduce existing members to the Overtime road map vision, at least as I see it.
Time in Web3 and DeFi reminds me of the concept of dog years as 7 DeFi years will go by in one calendar year. That’s probably an understatement there.
Thales has pivoted so many times to date, that it takes courage to even make definite claims about the plans for the next few weeks. Yet, I dare talk about a 10 years roadmap. Arrogant, right? Well, I hope not, as the message I want to relay is not one of foresight, but integrity, accountability, and why this team is different from all the others you have encountered or will encounter in this space.
“Integrity and accountability”! I use that a lot. There is a reason I am doxxed where many have advised against it. That reason is not that I am an adrenaline junkie or an egomaniac, although I would not deny there is some truth to the latter. No, the reason is that I dare not hide behind anything while inviting people to trust my vision and follow. I lead from the front row, practically being offside all of the time while carrying the most risks, but let’s not dance around it, I am also poised to gain the most should we go all the way. Yes, I am admitting that I am here for personal ambitions even though I am making a statement on ethics. I don’t like giving generic advice, but this one I will allow myself: Never follow or work with anyone if you aren’t clear on his/her agenda. No human interaction or relationship will work well without aligned interests.
I’ve historically refrained from calling myself (co)founder or leader of this protocol. However, the tone above insinuates differently. So I want to elaborate on how, if at all, I see myself as a leader of Thales community. Those that have had the misfortune to work in corporate IT are quite familiar with the Scrum protocol. There is a role there which is called Scrum master and is best described as a Servant Leader.
I love that phrase, a Servant Leader! I am serving as a leader of this community. I am a servant to the token holders and to the THALES DAO. And my job is to lead.
But don’t take that “lead” wording too seriously. Everyone who has been around at least a bit knows that I am a sucker for DAO governance and will blindly adhere to whatever the DAO votes in. However, I do consider it my responsibility to share the vision, at least as known to me, of this interesting, unique protocol we built together. I want to do that by focusing on Overtime and its roadmap as I see it at this point in time.
Before diving into it, I just want to address the bombastic title again. The message I want to send is that this team is here to stay. No one is here to chase exit liquidity. Every single CC (Core contributors, those that receive stipends from treasury for contributing to the protocol) is loving the privilege to be serving this community. Something that is probably not known to most new community members is that the 4 years vesting we established for team members is much longer than the DeFi norm (which is up to 2 years). In addition, we even formalized in our TIPs (Thales Improvement Proposals) that no CC is allowed to market sell any of their vested tokens and stay a CC after that.
Senior CCs, those that have the highest token allocations, have committed to not stake their tokens to not reduce the staking APR for the rest of the community.
Personally, even though I have the highest share of CC tokens, I went ahead and doubled down on my THALES tokens by market buying a significant amount ever since IDO and ensuring I am one of the top stakers without staking a single token allocated to me from the CC bucket. I put my money where my mouth is.
Ok, back to Overtime and a decade worth of roadmap.
Since its inception two months ago, Overtime has generated more than 1m sUSD volume, had 1500 unique users, and 11k transactions via the Sports AMM.
We are thrilled with the result thus far considering that we are still in a beta phase, starting with a limited amount of sports and liquidity, and… Well, the macro market is a b.tch right now.
You can see all the stats in Overtime’s Dune analytics dashboard.
In order to rapidly go to market, we launched with a single Data Provider Chainlink node, TheRundown. TheRundown’s node is operated and maintained by LinkPool — who also built and maintains the integration that serves TheRundown’s data to our Sports AMM. TheRundown supports all the major US sports (NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB, MLS, NCAAF, NCAAB) and all major European soccer leagues (EPL, Bundesliga, Calcio, Primera, UEFA CL, Ligue 1). It soon added UFC per our request.
We were approached soon after by a company, called Apex146, that specializes in odds-making for racing sports such as F1 and MotoGP. They’re serving their data through a self-managed Chainlink node, so after some feasibility testing, we added unique F1 and MotoGP markets and are working with Apex146 to add many more. These types of markets are not available on any other books, centralized or other, in other words — exclusive to Overtime.
Ok, so here we are in October 2022. Let’s start talking about the future.
Year 1
Data aggregation phase 1
TheRundown will remain our primary source of data for sports schedules, odds, and results, but in the spirit of decentralization, both Chainlink and us don’t want to be relying on a single point of failure, no matter how reliable that point is. LinkPool is actively working on this very challenging task and has secured relationships with additional data providers which will be used for the first iteration of aggregation that will focus on results only. Aggregating sports data is unexplored territory, so we will also need the community’s help while figuring out all the nuances and mappings between different data providers.
FIFA World Cup
The biggest sports event of the year will be supported accordingly on Overtime. We have plans for souldbound NFTs representing your favorite national team that will drive bonus incentives if you take positions on that team using Overtime. Of course, it will also look pretty amazing to flex away when the time comes.
Parlay AMM beta
This is planned to be released in time for the World Cup and is the biggest addition to Overtime. While there might be other protocols that claim to be a decentralized Sports AMM, we are fully assured that this will be the first actual on-chain Parlay AMM with decentralized feeds. It will use the underlying Sports Markets AMM to ensure each Parlay is fully collateralized and guarantee solvency with instant payout on resolution.
The contract development for this is already very advanced, so fully expect it to be ready soon, pending UI work and more detailed testing. The beta will have relatively low limits on the number of markets that can be combined in a Parlay and the total payouts, which will increase as we get some data on the performance and reliability of the implementation.
Player Props markets
TheRundown is working diligently for the last few months on adding support for these types of markets and we expect it will be available in their API very soon. When it is, there will be work on both Chainlink’s and our side to adapt the contracts to support these markets, but we fully expect to have it on Overtime soon after Parlays.
More sports
Overtime will always aim to expand its offering, so this will be an ongoing and recurring thing. Notably, we want to expand more towards Asia markets and are interested in markets for Horse Racing, Cricket, Chinese Super League… As stated many times before, we just need the oracles, and that is coming.
ESports
Our community has requested Esports integration into Overtime, and we are happy to inform you that LinkPool is actively talking with data providers that have this data in their offering, and we are positive that Overtime will support Esports in the near future.
Expect major LOL, CS:GO and DOTA2 tournaments to be included.
Year 2
Native Mobile App
The community has expressed interest in trading Overtime via a native mobile app. While such non-custodial and decentralized native apps aren’t fully figured out in web3-mobile yet, we have some ideas on how to get this done and are eager to start working and delivering. One approach would be to generate a hot wallet during the app installation and have users deposit to that wallet while being asked to store the private key offline for backup. Another approach is leveraging existing mobile wallets. We obviously still need to do some feasibility checks and planning, but when we set our minds to something we deliver, as those sticking with us through the journey know already.
Aggregation phase 2 and beyond
After the first phase of aggregation is successfully implemented and results are aggregated, we will move on to aggregating schedule and odds data. When that is also done, we will aim to have more data providers included in the aggregation itself. By “we” here I mean both LinkPool and Overtime teams, as at least with regards to this, we work as one, and this is a great chance to throw a shoutout to Chainlink and LinkPool for just being amazing allies to Overtime and supporting us around the clock 🙏
Parlays phase 2 and above
As we gain more confidence with Parlays AMM and the overall oracle solution, we will keep increasing Parlay limits in both the number of games on a ticket and payout.
Overtime vaults
Ok, this has definitely not been done before: Decentralized non-custodial sports vaults. Automated trading strategies that e.g. buy discounted positions to balance the Overtime AMMs.
Live markets
Many users have asked about this, and while there is obviously a great challenge to implement this while making sure AMM has covered its flanks frontrunning-wise, where there is a will there will be a way, and hopefully it won’t be a solution too similar to Fee Reclamation (Synthetix Spartans know that pain).
Overtime will always aim to innovate and have many cool and dynamic initiatives such as evolving and soulbound NFTs, sports trivia, sponsored weekly markets, etc…
Years 3 to 10
Ok, I really wanted to do a decade worth of road map, but I definitely can’t do it in a fine granular way for all the years to come. However, I do have a vision, an end goal if you will.
Overtime is to be THE LIQUIDITY HUB for ALL Sports’ positioning.
But do not be mistaken here, I do mean ALL sports’ positioning liquidity, both centralized and decentralized. Let me elaborate.
How much money do centralized bookies pay for odds-making? How many people, funds, or whatever other resources do they have to account for to cover risks and hedging?
All of that can be replaced by using Overtime in the background. Bookies will have 0 risk, as they will use Overtime to make sure every position taken by their users is solvent and they will scoop up those referral fees and any additional fees. With the minimal spread that Overtime offers, there should be room for plenty of profit for those that integrate it.
There are also very interesting projects in the works that will do aggregation across decentralized sports books. One of them, Purebet, has already reached out to Overtime to inquire about technical integration, and during their feasibility testing, they found out Overtime offers the best odds 9 out of 10 times. No surprise there.
Let’s touch on the topic of regulations here. Obviously, many are concerned about how Overtime will be robust and decentralized enough to ensure it can not be stopped. Well, the answer is that it already kinda is, as all contracts and feeds can run fully immutable and without any admin control. We definitely want to enforce full on-chain governance through time and give total control to token holders.
The point of concern is probably the frontend here. The current frontend is deployed by an anonymous community member and running on IPFS. However, as we learned from the Tornado Cash example, IPFS isn’t as decentralized as we want it to be.
Luckily, there are many new solutions for actual decentralized frontends, one of which Thales is already working with Armada by Dispersed labs.
But ultimately, and as stated above, Overtime protocol can be the settlement and hedging layer, with centralized sportsbook/companies running frontends on top of it. This is a very organic use-case for web3, blockchains, smart contracts, and oracles and is for all intents and purposes, the future we are building.
Do you want to join us in this epic adventure taking sports to the new frontier in web3 developments?
Then look no further than joining Thales Discord and let the game begin!
- Danijel, your servant leader
