A brief journey down memory lane
The bear market definitely feels like it is (over). I’ve been through 3 of those at this point, but this one felt like the longest one. Its humble beginnings aligned almost perfectly with the inception of Thales DAO about 4 years ago, when we were all still in denial grasping on Kain’s words:
Alas, Kain remains a role model, but he can be wrong. Very.
So yes, Thales DAO has only known the bear market so far. But, it’s still standing. A thing to be very proud of, surviving a bear market, especially if you launch near its beginning.
In these 4 years, we’ve fought tooth and nail to come out at the top, we’ve overcome fud, challenges, and obstacles, and through it all, we are now standing strong, emancipated by the journey and filled with know-how and motivation to reap the benefits of all the struggle.
You might still not believe it, but Thales is indeed 4 years old at this point. It started as a Binary Options spin-off, where its sole purpose was to build an orderbook for users to trade the said Binary Options built by Synthetix DAO.
No smart contract work was planned for Thales at that point. It delivered that first goal within months, and then kept on delivering non-stop, and actually earned a reputation in doing so.
We then built the first and still the only decentralized automated market maker for binary options. The Thales AMM contract, built in a moment of Christmas frenzy 2021 by yours truly, has processed over $60,000,000 premium volume.
The team of very capable core contributors was still eager to experiment towards improving its know-how and finding the best product-market fit, so we iterated on a number of very fun products, such as:
- Thales Royale — a “winner takes it all battle royale” smart contract in which users needed to correctly predict the next price movement of BTC/ETH/SNX to survive the round. Motivated by the mega-hit show “Squid Game” at the time and Fortnite.
- Tale of Thales — Not only are we video games enjoyoors, but we managed to build our own indie-like game, which takes the users through the brief history of Thales’ inception and binary options, and serves as a trading tutorial of sorts. You can still try it here, you won’t regret it.
- Exotic markets — We took a stab at custom prediction markets with our Exotic Markets framework, where users could create, curate and trade on markets for just about anything they can think of. Perhaps our timing wasn’t ideal for such a product, but it’s getting a rebirth soonish as a new project which is showing great promise (no formal association with Thales apart from using the Exotic Markets contract for bootstrapping).
Just realized while writing this post that the dapp URL still works, if you want to check out our version of 50 Shades of Purple.
So many nice memories from this time. For example, the unforgettable Thai Governor elections candidate with the most perfect crypto name ever: Chadchart.
Basically, someone told the Thai crypto community they will get an airdrop if they bet on that exotic market (prolly the guy who created the exotic market), and the volume for that market skyrocketed.
We learned a lot from these iterations, but most importantly, we learned when we need to pivot, which is the essence of this blog post.
One thing we knew we wanted since the inception of Thales, was to tie the binary options product with sports betting, but the infrastructure for it just wasn’t there. Enter Linkpool and their sports data oracles in mid-2022. With Chainlink serving sports schedules, odds and results onchain, the idea of Overtime was seeded and the development began.
It started with the FIFA World Cup 2022 and only moneyline markets and house-seeded liquidity.
Two years later Overtime has:
- Over 100 sports and leagues available
- Over 10,000 markets on any given day
- Over $200,000,000 in premium volume
- Over 50,000 users, none of which were ever denied a payout
- Offers a multitude of collaterals to bet with
- Offers anyone a chance to “be the house” and participate in liquidity providing
The juicy part
Thales DAO recognized the potential of Overtime as the best use case of web3 technology and principles to improve a vastly unfair 102 billion-dollar industry.
Sports betting accessible for anyone, anywhere, with no KYC, no limits, bans, denied payouts, or any other unfair advantages traditional sportsbooks have against their users. Within Overtime, users and liquidity providers are valued the same (highly), and the protocol serves as the middle man, ensuring all transactions are transparent and atomic.
As Overtime organically grew, so has our dedication to it become a primary focus within the DAO. At this point, Overtime accounts for 99% of all weekly protocol volume and fees, and such is our attention to it as well.
The momentum has especially picked up with Overtime’s V2 release in June this year, where we rectified early design flaws, as well as applied changes needed to adapt to the Dencun Ethereum upgrade and blobs. Overtime V2 added a plethora of new markets, leagues, sports, and live betting. I’ll cut it short here, ’cause frankly the chart says it all:
The offering and new features on Overtime are shipped faster than we can announce them, but here is a tweet I recently wrote that elaborates on the most important short-term upgrades of the platform that will further boost user acquisition and trading volume
Early on in Overtime’s inception, we made a decision to decouple it as a brand. A good decision for that time in the spirit of decentralization, but the tides are changing, and it feels like it is the perfect time to achieve brand singularity.
Marketing both Thales and Overtime has been an uphill battle, where the latter mostly prevailed. Try to make an elevator pitch to someone explaining both Thales, Overtime and then delving into the association…
🔔 PING, the time is up. 🔔
Attention is the most scarce resource in crypto. It’s always very noisy, mostly for the wrong reasons, but as we are standing at the cusp of a bull market, it’s time to make a big bang of our own.
Frankly, Thales branding is just not doing it even for me anymore. When someone spots Thales’s merch at a crypto conference, there is a much larger chance we get associated with a French defense contractor Thales, than revolutionizing the sports betting industry. Believe us, it happened aplenty.
It’s indeed $OVER, the beginning of it.
I’ve written a governance proposal aiming towards a full DAO and token rebrand to capture the momentum Overtime is having and simplify the discovery of both product and token, as we aim to 1000x our number of users. Some of the wording in this blog post and the proposal is repetitive as I try to address different audiences.
Here is a TLDR of the proposal’s specifics:
The proposal suggests renaming the protocol to Overtime DAO and migrating the token to $OVER. The new token will be a simple ERC20 token, with a fully preminted and final supply of 69,420,000 $OVER tokens. THALES token will be exchangeable one way for an $OVER token 1 to 1 at any time. Once exchanged, the THALES token is burned.
The discrepancy between the current fully circulating supply of THALES (~94m), and the circulating supply of $OVER, will be resolved by DAO treasury burning around 25m THALES tokens. ~6 million THALES tokens were burned to date via buyback and burn mechanics and from Overtime trading fees, and the dynamics of burn especially picked up since the Overtime V2 release.
As we focus on account and chain abstractions to onboard the next 1 billion users, so must we abstract any token complexities. I am therefore proposing deprecating the THALES staking module. The new $OVER token will have deflationary tokenomics. All fees accrued through DAO products will be used for $OVER buyback and burn.
There are more arguments and reasoning in the governance proposal for this deprecation, but for the purpose of this blog post, suffice it to say that getting full exposure and benefits of the $OVER token is as simple as holding it in a wallet.
$OVER token remains a governance token, and a utility token that will allow users better payouts when using Overtime products. The DAO treasury will remain the sole liquidity provider for the $OVER token, thus ensuring that all the fees and the realized house PnL are burned immediately.
$OVER token will be available on Optimism, Arbitrum and Base with liquidity ensured via treasury’s VeVELO, VeAERO and VeRAM positions, as well as protocol-owned liquidity.
It’s clear from the above that the tokenomics of OVER will be focused on scarcity and aggressive burn mechanics, which would leverage the sharp odds and house margin toward continuous token deflation.
Overtime DAO will inherit all smart contracts previously owned by Thales DAO. It will therefore still offer 3 products:
- Overtime Markets, an onchain, fully decentralized peer-vs-pool sportsbook
- Thales Markets, a digital (binary) options automated market maker
- Speed Markets, a dynamic platform offering prediction markets on the next BTC or ETH price movement in short time spans
The DAO will organically mostly focus on its flagship product, but I feel all our products have great promise and I can see a future where it all gets unified within a single dapp, offering a unique opportunity to bet on both sports and crypto prediction markets within a common UI (maybe even parlay them together).
Endgame
If I haven’t been abundantly clear on it by now, let me say it again: I am and will always be a gamer. And every gamer knows the actual game begins in the endgame (just ask Elon).
In these 4 years, we’ve experimented, iterated, chewed through a number of products and ideas, and finally found our golden egg with Overtime. We will now embellish it and ride it to Valhalla.
This journey has been nothing short of transformative. From our humble beginnings in the bear market, crafting tools for binary options, to discovering our stride with Overtime, Thales DAO has continually evolved and adapted. We’ve embraced challenges, iterated on ideas, and honed our vision to emerge as a leading innovator in the decentralized sports betting space.
The proposed rebrand to Overtime DAO and the launch of the $OVER token mark a pivotal moment in this journey.
It’s a move designed to amplify our impact, simplify our narrative, and position us at the forefront of the next market cycle. The shift reflects not just where we’ve been but where we’re heading — a future where sports betting is fair, accessible, and aligned with the principles of Web3.
As we move forward, the focus is clear: to scale Overtime, onboard the next wave of users, and ensure that $OVER embodies the value we’ve worked tirelessly to create. The bear market might be over, but for Overtime DAO, the real work is just starting.
It’s truly $OVER, but also, so much more has just begun.
- Danijel, your servant leader
