Dec 23, 2022
Thales 2022 recap: A successful year in review
Get ready for this jumbo-sized selection of Thales and Overtime developments
This year has been the busiest ever for ThalesDAO, reaching an aggregated volume of more than 17.4 million USD among all the products built on top of the Thales protocol.
And sure, volume is great, but do Thales and its products generate fees?
The answer is simple: Almost 500,000 USD in SafeBox fees have been generated since inception.
We’ve prepared a detailed review, but if you wanna know right off the bat our Top 5 for 2022 developments, here it is:
- ⭐ Thales markets goes multichain: Now available on 4 chains Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, and BNBChain.
- ⭐️ Ranged market release (new DeFi primitive): Expanding the Thales markets offering, now besides choosing an UP or DOWN position you can also choose to position within a price range (IN) or outside it (OUT).
- ⭐️ Overtime release (DeFi’s first sportsAMM with Chainlink feeds) + ParlayAMM (first on-chain parlays): Totally new product for on-chain sports markets does 4.3m+ USD volume in less than 6 months (generating an AMM PnL of 140k+ USD not even including fees!). Since the launch of parlays (also known as accumulators) less than one month and a half ago, this ParlayAMM has generated 220k+ USD volume (and a whooping 1.2m+ USD notional volume). Yes, it’s Overtime!
- ⭐️ FIFA World Cup success: Not only Argentina (and Messi) were the clear winners of this World Cup, Overtime was too! With over 1.5m USD in volume spread among 14k+ transactions there is no doubt this was a win.
- ⭐️ Growth in numbers: 17m USD volume, over 80k transactions, 489k USD in fees acquired, 446k THALES tokens burned forever (1.44% of current circulating supply), 2k+ THALES stakers, and 1.2m OP tokens received in grants for both Thales and Overtime. Besides these numbers, you can also check Thales on DefiLlama, DappRadar (also tracking Overtime separately), and TokenTerminal (soon).
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ve got a lot to unpack, so we’ll separate this year’s developments into quarters linking to relevant TIPs (Thales Improvement Proposals), and then end this article with some glimpses of the opportunities 2023 brings.
Ready. Set. Go!
Quarter 1
SafeBox fees
Let’s start with one of the earliest, but most profound, developments in Thales AMM architecture, formalized on TIP-19: The introduction of the SafeBox fee to mitigate the AMM’s risk in case of major market events. The cumulative SafeBox fees gathered started being used in Q2, we’ll get to that.
Tale of Thales release
By the hand of the talented core contributor, Sanguine, Thales releases the first version of Tale of Thales: A Free-to-play onboarding game that puts the player in the shoes of historical figure (and all around Chad) Thales of Miletus, while he explores its city and learns about positional markets and how Thales platform works.
This launch included an Easter egg hunt and even a speedrun competition, where hundreds of players enjoyed exploring this pixelated version of Miletus. On January 2023, this release will have its 1-year anniversary, and as hinted before a Metaverse version is in the works 👀.
That’s all we can say for now!
You can play Tale of Thales here (onboarding version).
THALES token and staking contracts migration to Optimism
This was quite a feature to accomplish flawlessly, migrating the THALES token and the airdrop, staking, and escrow contracts to Optimism. All the details about this process were shared in TIP-20.
The successful migration required a lot of coordination between core contributors, token holders/stakers, and liquidity providers, proving that with well-designed, gradually executed plans and the support of its members, a DAO can thrive even when the situations are complex from a technical standpoint. Thanks to everyone who made this possible 👏
Once the THALES token was migrated, it was later formalized as the official ThalesDAO token on TIP-33.
THALES token gamified staking
After the THALES token was migrated to Optimism, the gamified staking initiative (championed on TIP-17) was implemented.
It aimed to distribute base THALES rewards to every staker, and bonus rewards for those also staking SNX on the Synthetix platform (maintaining our alignment with them) and those participating on Thales Royale Seasons (later changed to Thales products volume based on TIP-48)
The gamified staking approach has worked wonders, with more than 11,000,000 THALES tokens staked, and it’s still implemented to this day.
Thales Royale Seasons
After trialing this on-chain survival positioning game played in rounds on Ethereum testnet, and seeing how much fun people had with it, it was decided on TIP-13 to organize new Thales Royale events on Optimism mainnet.
And, oh boy we enjoyed seeing people engage with it and pick either UP (triangle) or DOWN (circle) each round.
We organized 9 Thales Royale Seasons and a special event called Royale of Royales, for previous events winners. Lots of features were researched and developed during this, including evolving on-chain NFTs and NFTs as entrance/vouchers (championed on TIP-29, later re-used for Overtime vouchers).
All in all, the Thales community had a blast with these and we were able to introduce the concept of positions in a novel way. Win/win.
Quarter 2
Polygon deployment and co-sponsored trading competition
After migrating from Ethereum mainnet to Optimism Layer 2, Thales continued its plan to become a multi-chain platform, and Polygon was the first network chosen for this, per TIP-40.
Polygon network was also kind enough to co-sponsor a trading competition on Thales markets launch with 15,000 MATIC (coupled with 50,000 THALES) 🙏
Thales markets volume in Polygon has exceeded 800k USD and keeps going.
A new DeFi primitive is born: Ranged markets
Continuing its product expansion in the positional markets’ realm, TIP-45 was proposed to create tokenized positions for price ranges instead of around a strike price.
Ranged markets was released in May on Optimism, and it started offering this via an AMM solution where you can buy or sell IN or OUT positions.
This was (and still is) a very novel approach to simplify structured products and make easy-to-understand derivatives for everyone.
Exotic Markets release
The first product built on top of Thales protocol (besides Thales markets) was Exotic Markets per TIP-28, where you were able to create custom parimutuel markets on real-life events (politics, sports, pop culture, etc).
Since its launch, it saw over 330 different markets created, with more than 3400 positions taken, and an overall volume of around 136,000 USD.
On November 1st, it was decided to shelve the platform for the time being, according to TIP-98, to focus development resources on platforms built on top of Thales which use capital-efficient AMMs (Automatic market makers). These AMMs are the Thales markets, ranged markets, and Overtime (currently deployed on Optimism, more on this later).
We had lots of fun with the different Exotic markets created and learned a lot during the implementation of this novel system. If in the future Chainlink provides the right kind of feeds (political elections, pop culture events, etc) we might see Exotic Markets resurgence.
First on-chain referral program
Thales decided to take things to the next level by developing the first (to our knowledge) on-chain referral system to potentiate user acquisition.
But that’s not all. This referral system was designed to be highly efficient, so basically if someone uses your referral link to start trading on Thales, you get a percentage from each trade of the person being referred, paid in sUSD (Synthetix USD) instantly and directly into your wallet (no need to claim, just share the link and accrue referral trading fees).
We’ll say it again: Directly into your wallet. No need to claim. In other words, for the tech-oriented: Atomically.
You can check the referral page and generate your link here.
Burn baby burn: THALES token buyback & burn
It all started with TIP-50, which proposed to use part of the SafeBox fees accrued to buyback and burn THALES periodically 🔥.
As SafeBox fees started to ramp up, there were subsequent TIPs (59, 71, 78, and 106) which followed suit and increased the buy back frequency.
As of now, the frequency is set to 300 sUSD every 4.8 hours (around 547k USD annualized) and the total amount of THALES tokens burned is 446,000+ (1.44% of current circulating supply).
Now, onto the second half of the year… things keep getting hot!
Quarter 3
Thales receives 900k OP token grant
What better way to start the second half of the year than receiving a grant for a high-conviction deployment? 💪
The Optimism protocol released its OP token as part of its decentralized governance initiative and in its Phase 0 distribution considered aligned projects which support Optimism by deploying and maintaining its products on this network since its inception. And Thales of course is one of those!
The distribution of these 900,000 OP tokens was discussed among the community and it was crystalized in TIPs 53, 55, and 56.
As of now, the majority of the OP tokens have been distributed, and the results in terms of volume, number of users, and transactions have been pretty awesome.
We are very grateful to have received this grant. Thanks Optimism 🙏.
PS: Overtime markets also got 300,000 OP tokens grant approved later during 2022, on phase Round 1, to incentivize usage and onboard new users to Optimism. For this grant (and for all the support we got!) we are also very grateful.
Overtime goes live on Optimism!
This was already shared as one of out top highlights, but it might as well be our favorite for 2022 in terms of impact, fee accruals, and fun! 🏆
Overtime is DeFi’s first sportsAMM built using a modified version of Thales AMM, basically replacing the Black-Scholes pricing model for Chainlink Sports Feeds covering pre-match odds and match resolution.
With less than 6 months live (launched on July 14th), more than 4.3m USD in volume, and over 230k USD accrued between SafeBox fees and AMM PnL we can consider this first stage of Overtime a total success in bringing sports markets on-chain.
As of now, Overtime supports markets for NHL, NBA, NFL, UEFA Champions, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, La liga, Serie A, MLS, EPL, MLB, among others. The FIFA World Cup was also covered, but we’ll get to that soon ⚽️.
👉 Check Overtime here: Overtime sport markets
Arbitrum deployment of Thales markets
The Thales community championed this initiative, looking to expand Thales positional markets into one of the top Layer 2 networks, not only in terms on volume, but also in terms of community engagement and passionate builders.
On September 19th, Thales markets, ranged markets and the affiliate program were officially deployed to Arbitrum per TIP-79.
In just 3 months, and without any incentive, there’s been more than 450k USD in volume, spread among 1,200+ trades, so we consider there’s interest for these kind of products on Arbitrum. Who knows what 2023 may bring!
Special note: In this quarter, both Thales markets and Overtime reach 5 and 1 million USD in volume respectively. Cheers to those milestones! 🍻
Quarter 4
Parlay AMM
This one cannot be understated: Overtime is the first sports markets protocol to add totally on-chain parlays (aka accumulators) through it’s novel AMM 💡.
For this initial release, detailed in TIP-72, a ticket can be built with up to 4 markets. You can mix different matches and leagues without problem. The minimum buy-in is 10 USD with a minimum quote of 0.05 (max return of 20x).
The beauty of this Parlay AMM design is that besides the contract being fully transparent on-chain, it does not use fractional collateralization and always has every position and ticket fully collateralized.
👉 You can read all the details about Parlays in Overtime docs here.
Even when this initiative has been around for less than 1.5 months, it’s AMM has already seen more than 220k USD in volume, collected 13k+ USD in SafeBox fees from 4,500+ trades done by 500+ traders.
You can check all these numbers (and how they evolve) in the Parlay AMM Dune dashboard here.
FIFA World Cup: Absolute success for Overtime
Frankly, we were blown away by the response Overtime got with its World Cup coverage.
Overtime run its World Cup Zebro NFT campaign where people could mint these cool Zebros (Overtime’s mascot) representing the 32 countries in competition, and with this be able to compete on the Zebro leaderboard for 50,000 OP and 30,000 THALES tokens.
So, what are the results for these World Cup markets?
Besides the unquantifiable amounts of fun we had with the Thales and Overtime community on Thales Discord during this World Cup, we can proudly say that the numbers are:
- 1.56m USD in volume
- 14k+ transactions
- Average transaction amount of 109.6 USD
- Highest USD volume on a match: 55,111 USD on Portugal vs Uruguay
- Highest tx count on a match: 347 transactions on England vs France
- Total PnL for the event including SafeBox fees: +183.7k USD 💸
Thales and Overtime vaults
Here come the automated trading strategies!
With the introduction of vaults, users can now choose to deposit their stablecoins on smart contracts who follow a strict set of rules to buy positions whenever certain conditions are met (like a certain discount percentage or position pricing). Currently, there are 3 kind of vaults for Overtime and Thales. All the deposits into the vaults count as part of the “Protocol volume” bucket of gamified THALES staking.
👉 You can read all the details about vaults in our documentation here.
Vaults are currently capped at maximum 20,000 USD each, but it’s likely these caps will be lifted and/or new vaults are added soon. Best way to stay tuned is to join Thales Discord.
BNBChain deployment
And to finish the year strong, Thales markets was deployed to BNBChain in its pursuit of expanding the gospel of positional markets and giving access to everyone to easy-to-understand derivatives.
The decision to expand to BNBChain was made on TIP-80 and it was motivated due to the EVM-compatibility, fast transactions, and the vibrant ecosystem it has.
We are happy to have landed here and see what the future entails in this chain!
Thanks to y’all
It’s been an amazing journey so far, so we wanna thanks everyone who has made this possible:
The Thales and Overtime community, Core contributors, Thales Council (all previous and current one), Strategic partners, Synthetix and its ecosystem. Also, we wanna thanks Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum and BNBChain for welcoming us in their homes 🙏. Special thanks to all the builders out there who keep going and trying to do their part to bring the dream of open and decentralized finance one step closer ✊
What’s next?
There are many things that we are excited about for 2023!
For Thales, to continue expanding its reach and integrations, enhancing Thales AMM capabilities to eventually open up for everyone to be a liquidity provider, potentiating referrals and user acquisition, optimizing for mobile users, and to keep developing its vaults, among other things that we won’t share now to not ruin the surprise. On the DAO side, always looking to decentralize the processes and structures in place.
For Overtime, you might want to check this blog post for the mid to long term vision. And for the short term scope, what’s being worked on is the addition of new market types: Double chance, spreads (aka handicaps), and totals (over/under), all provided by Chainlink Sport Feeds. Besides this the integration of fiat on-ramps through an onboarding wizard, constant mobile optimization, addition of new leagues, and of course coverage of your favorite sport events. You can follow Overtime’s Twitter and Medium to stay in the loop.
But what we most expect from 2023 is to keep building and feeling we are making our part to advance DeFi towards scalable, useful, and fun dapps with y’all!
Wishing you all a blessed end of the year and, hopefully, some quality time with your families and loved ones 💙
Get ready 2023. Here we come!
