Thales community call hits record high attendance
On August 11th, around midday for those in UTC time, the Thales community gathered together to discuss our latest developments, share their input, and have some fun time!
We were blown away by how passionate and vibrant you all were during the call. Someone said that at peak time we were around 100 people in Thales’ Discord voice channel, but can’t officially confirm that as we were talking and not counting 😆
Well… for those who missed it, fear not
Recording of Thales’ second community call
Here you can find the recording:
Thales community call agenda (with timestamps)
00:00 Welcome 👋 / Thales council introductions
02:29 Jean-Luc introduction
03:06 Yannis Introduction
05:57 Dmonkey Introduction
06:20 Team expansion
10:04 MVP release review
13:32 0x related: ZRX staking pool details / 0x DAO grant ft. 0xSHA2 representing 0x
25:02 Formalize bug bounty
26:40 Presentation of USDT TIP
31:20 Next step: Token generation event and distribution
35:58 Next step: Expansion to L2
37:54 Q&A
45:21 Jean-Luc Introduction (continued)
46:33 POAP time
And if you still haven’t, subscribe to Thales’ Youtube channel so you get these recordings as soon as we have them available 🙌
Transcript of Thales’ second community call
We wanted to bring you a brief on written format regarding the call, so we prioritized speed with this one (kudos to acidbird who did the transcript and added the timestamps to the Youtube video in record time).
If you find something that isn’t clear please let us know in our Discord’s feedback channel 🙌
Without further ado, here it is.
Thales council introductions
Farmwell: I think that Thales completed maybe the first decentralized launch or one of the first decentralized launches. Basically, the Thales Council was able to very promptly pass TIP one and two, so yeah that was a really amazing achievement.
Jean-Luc: It’s absolutely fantastic to be on the Thales Council like super honored to be a part of the team and it’s really exciting to see the progress so far and I love it that you guys are trying to help include us, Aussies, with the time change, I really appreciate that.
Basically, I work for a company here called Koji and we’re a small arm of our parent company called Mycelium who’s building a whole lot of blockchain infrastructure in Australia and we’ve worked with Synthetix before and we’re massive fans of those guys and we actually started out as a node and an oracle for Chainlink so also just a massive fan of all the integrations that Thales has and super excited to help contribute to this and I also used to work for bookmakers in Australia so it really ties into the whole sports markets and binary options trading. Yeah, really excited to be a part of this community.
Yannis: Hey, hi guys, happy to be here. So I’m mainly on the tech side for my life I have been in academia for many years in the past, I was designing mainly multi-processor systems, low power systems mainly in hardware and you know, then at some point you get introduced to bitcoin and stuff many years ago and I realized that this is what I had to do and I started working in the space like four years ago, 2017, end of 2016, something like that. I was working for an oracle protocol back then and then I started getting into smart contracts more and more and I started designing a smart control wallet and about a year ago I became a core contributor at Synthetix and since then I have been helping with the integration of l2 like with optimism and everything related to that. I think Thales, the way the project started just shows how innovative and how big the Synthetix ecosystem can be and I was really excited and I’m really excited. And with the speed that you execute guys, I think this is amazing and I’m excited to see what we’re gonna come up with next and all the new products and features that are going to be introduced I would like to help as much as I can.
dmonkey: Name is D. I'm representing the marketing and comms at Thales. Just wanted to say I'm very grateful for your support and everyone who voted for me, you really rock guys.
Team expansion
Dusan: I’m a full-stack software engineer and I’ve been previously working with Daniel for three and a half years and when we discussed everything I was really excited and I’m happy to be here, happy to continue that collaboration and hopefully I’ll get up to speed as soon as possible with everything that’s going around here.
Acidbird: Hi guys I’m really honored to be on the team Probably many of you know me from different communities but now I am working with the team here and helping with marketing and community so thanks for having me and enjoy staying with us. Thanks.
padzank: Hey guys, I jumped on board to help farmwell a bit in the strategy department. Feels good to work with long-time friends, you can say, and happy to be here on board the Thales train.
Danijel: There’s one more developer who couldn’t make the call who joined recently. His name is Kirill, he will be working on solidity currently implementing the payless staking contract. It’s a real piece of art. He’s currently on a vacation and he has previous solidity experience, very happy to have him.
MVP release review
It was really exciting to get obviously the first few markets closed on Thales. We had six bitcoin and ETH markets close and these were the first-ever, so this was a historic past couple of weeks, and then also the first Olympic markets were resolved. Noticed there’s still some sUSD in those contracts, obviously there’s up to six months to claim the sUSD in there, but yeah it was super exciting to work with the Chainlink team and to get Olympic markets rolled out so quickly, so really pleased with the pace that everything came together and kudos to everyone that made it happen.
So the MVP release was really amazing. We were on the lookout to see the feedback from the users and honestly, the feedback has been amazing. Everyone was able to get kind of introduced to the platform, used it successfully. It was really amazing to see that you can bid, buy some options, exercise the whole end-to-end thing so very happy to see the feedback.
We are keen to deliver some more markets obviously. We have the weekly markets and it seems like everyone is just buying long options which kind of I think makes sense right now. It seems like that yields the most volume but we are also looking out on more custom markets to deliver and there was that emoji vote in the feedback channel so if you guys want to make some suggestions or vote on the ones that we suggested would be good to get kind of a feel of what would be most attractive to the community. Obviously, the number of ETH burned for example, or the flipping or doing a collaboration with projects such as XYZ universe on the number of airdrop claims. I think Ampleforth was mentioned as well so we’ll be looking out with both Chainlink on what we can deliver with their oracles for some things. I think we can deliver our own trustless oracles where you can just put the data from the chain, yeah, really eager to work on that as well.
0x related: ZRX staking pool details / 0x DAO grant
ft. @0xSHA2 representing 0x
So, I’m part of 0x. We just started actually as a DAO and still in the early stages and our main focus here is to bring let’s say awareness around the 0x protocol and we are trying to do this through a system of grants and so Thales was one of the first projects to get a 0x grant and so we are working with Thales team to try to do onboarding, resolve different issues on how to use the protocol and give support and we are also helping on the staking part of the 0x.
So, the 0x protocol is mainly an order book based protocol and in the protocol there are these orders, they generate some revenues through fees and so the revenues are attributed to the market makers so in our case Thales is a market maker and in order to collect the revenues you need to use the staking feature of the protocol. Each market maker has the right to create a pool so as staking pool in the protocol that’s that will be associated with and all the traffic generated by the product and the revenues will be distributed on an epoch based system so it’s not similar to others staking mechanics like masterchefs or their stuff. We have epochs, it’s periods of five days where the protocol collects revenues and the end of each period the revenues are attributed to each market maker and so there is some I won’t go into the technical detail but there is some algorithm that tries to make it fair, to make the attribution process fair among the existing pools and so the fees are actually attributed according to how many revenues are generated and also how many 0x tokens are staked on the pool. So, on a given pool a project can stake an arbitrary amount of tokens but external users or holders of 0x can help the project by contributing it to the pool by staking their 0x tokens and so they get rewarded through revenue sharing. Basically, the deliveries will be split between the pool operator which basically the project here — Thales and the people that are staking helping increase the stake.
We have some pretty detailed documentation of how the staking works and also we have the portal where you can track the stack imbalances and the APRs for each epoch so this one is more user-friendly for this for the stakers. It enables them to track the evolution of APRs through the different epochs and manage as well the rebalance if they want to move their 0x. We are also working on future evolutions as well so as you know you are currently on the Ethereum mainnet but 0x is working on expanding on other trends as well as layer 2 protocols so we hope that in the future we’ll be able to help you onboard on the Optimism layer 2.
Danijel: 0x is also working on OVM on Optimism layer 2 in parallel with us and we are really you know hopeful to meet you there in a few months so I’m curious though sha, how would the protocol fee work on layer 2? As far as I understand on for example on Polygon there is no protocol fee yet, is there a plan on how the protocol fee on l2’s on side chains or whatever we want to call polygon how would that you know make its way to the stakers.
0xSHA2: This is a good question. On Polygon we don’t have the orderbook feature deployed so for Optimism there are some discussions that will impact the way the fees are collected and across the protocol. This is not yet, let’s say, finished, but most likely the mechanism will change regarding the fee generation. I cannot really share a lot about this because it’s mainly managed by 0x lab. For sure there will be a redesign of the mechanics and the goal is to simplify how this works and also optimize it for better protocol use. Just wanted to give like a preview to the community about what the future holds so l2 is coming. The protocol fee is likely to be reworked.
Danijel: With a smaller protocol fee and obviously of tiny fees on l2 I think the volume would really pump up and effectively there would be more fees for 0x stakers. For daily stakers once that is up and rolling and to circle back to a question from the community, Thales pool currently set up on l1 shares the most fees with its stakers at 40 percent I believe, the next after us is 33.
As for your question will more fees be generated that’s completely up to the users of the platform. I’m pretty sure as the platform matures, we deliver more markets as we eventually roll out some competitions some incentives I’m pretty sure the volume will spike. However, we do need to coordinate that with l2 and you know see exactly where we focus more efforts. In any case, it does sound like even l2 volume would make its way back to 0x stakers through some mechanism. So, yeah, I mean that’s what I can say about that topic and as for whether 0x stakers would get a share of Thales I would say that’s still discretionary and, yeah, we would not be revealing such information until the token is released and that event happens. I do want to say that Thales will surely appreciate all the early support it can get from adapters from stakers from anything, so we do want to be known as such a project.
Formalize bug bounty
Basically, the bug bounty is totally open now for various levels of intensity relating to an issue found. There’s an updated piece in the docs. Basically, any issues relating to the smart contracts are within scope of the bug bounty. Definitely feel free to come through the contracts and if you see something, either follow up through email at bugs@thales.market or feel free to drop a note in the discord. Contact us or post in the appropriate
channel and we’ll be happy to assist you and see if what you found qualifies as a bug or not.
Presentation of USDT TIP
Padzank: So basically I and dmonkey co-authored a short and sweet TIP (Thales improvement proposal) and I just dropped a link in the chat so you can check it out.
Basically, we are proposing to add Tether USD as a supported asset on Thales and enable users to create markets revolving around the price of USDT. This way we want to start introducing markets for people to trade binary options on specific stable coins keeping their peg. Chainlink already has USDT price feed, so this implementation should be easy to carry out if voted on by our Thales Council. This provides us with a unique opportunity to maybe attract users that would like to express their beliefs regarding a possible and popular topic that is USDT collapse. And, yeah, this was a popular topic for many, many years in the crypto space, and who knows, maybe people potentially see Thales marketplace as a tool for hedging their USDT exposure.
So it’s pretty straightforward and for any questions regarding this TIP we invite everyone to join in and create an account on our research site and join the discussion there and hopefully bootstrap that part of our project. We are pretty excited about this and we welcome everyone to join into the research forum and give us opinion on this. We will be discussing about which is the price for the threshold, what strike date makes sense — six months, one year, etc. All of those details are up for discussion. So yeah, we can discuss it here in discord too, but I think a more structured way of discussing is the research forum. So, whoever wants to participate in that, welcome. Yeah, and this is a TIP just to allow people to implement the possibility of creating USDT markets. So yes that’s a very important distinction this introduces the possibility of a market creation with the USDT as the asset to be observed but it doesn’t imply that we are going to be the ones creating it so that’s important.
Next step: Token generation event and distribution
We are focusing our efforts primarily on the token. The token really is a unique one. I’m very eager about it but it does entail a lot of moving parts, a lot of work. So we’ve got the SNX distribution 35 percent as previously discussed split across the retroactive distribution and ongoing. There’s a bunch of work there working with details, including everyone from l2 from xSNX from Yearn. We really did our due diligence and legwork there and kudos to hinkypunk who is driving the effort mostly on that one. It’s very attractive distribution, it’s pretty much ready but we have to go through audits, so we’ll see if that pushes it back a little bit. It’s looking rather good to be honest. The numbers are looking organic and healthy. The next steps would be working on the ongoing distribution which would entail a weekly amount going to all the SNX stakers. For that one again we’ll likely include l1 and l2. I think it’s a bit of an overhead to include access and x and year in that one but it’s still TBD so don’t take it as a final decision yet.
On the parallel, we are also working on the staking contracts so it’s likely that we would release those a bit after TGE so a month or a bit later to get the token liquid and just out there and then start the staking. The staking would be a condition if you want to partake in Thales governance you’d get your voting power through the staking mechanism. It will be incentivized with rewards and also, of course, everything is pending Council approval so it has to go for governance but Thales stakers would likely have a share of the fees if that TIP is passed.
We also have Thales liquidity rewards. We are talking with some DEXes and getting pretty good support on possibly double rewards for something like that so really eager to have that running. We are also discussing a public sale. I wouldn’t be comfortable disclosing more details now until we figure out how we do it exactly but since the community seems very eager to get their hands on more Thales, even people who haven’t stayed with SNX and it does seem that it’s fair to allow people who haven’t staked SNX but want to partake in entails or just want to get more Thales it does seem fair to allow them to do that through a public sale.
Just you know as a TGE estimate we’re still eyeballing September but as I said there are nuances and there’s audits to clear. But if there are more questions regarding the token timeframes and stuff you can always ask us in any channel or check the dedicated Thales token channel, that’s the channel we’re gonna update first. If you set that channel to notifications on you’re gonna be the first to know anything regarding the token so that’s some alpha for you.
Next step: Expansion to L2
Moving forward after the token part I think the next thing that everyone in the community is wondering is when l2.
We got started on that we have a line to Optimism obviously. We have a lot of help from Synthetix who already went through this process and they had to change their contracts. So, from just the early steps we took, we realized it will take some effort, likely some contracts have to be adapted to match the gas limits and the rules that OVM imposes and with that in mind and prioritizing token as the first step, I’d say l2 is likely to follow a bit after the token. I still find it realistic in the next few months. Yeah, so we will be on OVM, we’ll be whitelisted to deploy on OVM. However, we do think token is the first priority. In a sense, our governance is semi-legit without a token process, so that’s the first priority, and then straight after that, we’re working on l2 if there is room we’ll do some things in parallel.
Questions and answers
There’s a question regarding sports markets on Thales it’s a pretty good one. So, in the feedback channel yesterday there’s a bunch of sports markets that we were thinking about. One thing that was kind of asked is individual games. At the moment with l1 I don’t think individual games make sense, unless it’s like a final. If we are talking NBA season I don’t know what’s the number of games but, like 82 per team and then 30 teams or so. So that’s a pretty large number of games to get liquidity started for so without solving for that liquidity and being on l2 I think individual games do not make sense. However, I do think it’s pretty cool to have all these markets.
I’m also very keen on soccer myself being from Europe, so I would be very happy to see markets on who would win individual leagues, who would, for example, win the champions league. All of those would kind of be long-term markets which is something that works for Thales on l1. Now, still people might ask it doesn’t make sense to lock up your capital long term. I think if the odds are good, you still want to do that, but the important thing is that Thales is a trading options platform. If you bet on a certain team and that team is just rocking it, the odds for that team are lower and effectively you can sell your option for a higher price, so you’re not really locking your capital. You are buying an option at a certain price and then you can resell it as the tides shift for a higher price.
I think Spreek suggested having something like a chess championship market for Magnus vs Nippo and I’m very surprised that doesn’t have more interest. I would be also keen on that one, I think there were a few more markets mentioned, but feel free to drop a few hints on in the feedback and then see if something else interests you but just as a rule of thumb, I think you know it we are looking more into the long-term markets as I explained with the exception of perhaps NFL where you have games once per week and it’s like 15–16 games in the season so maybe for that one we could try to accommodate something even on a weekly level.
I do agree about Boxing and UFC as events unfold that maybe we could try to accommodate those as well. Boxing about Kain versus Kieran, I don’t think we can do that, and I think polymarket did a market on that so we really don’t want to have such ambiguities you know and such things that maybe they might happen they might not happen it’s more about you know having precise oracle so people knowing when something will happen, when they will get the chance to exercise their options and yeah that’s what they want to say. It is a very important point down that we need to avoid ambiguity when defining the question regarding the binary. So as much as we like many of your suggestions in the community chat, this chat is really on fire, lots of suggestions, but maybe some of those have this quality of ambiguity that it's kind of hard for us to implement in the right way.
The Dota 2 international, I think Dota 2 sounds very interesting. I think there is no ambiguity, so not even only the international, we can probably do majors as well if that’s something that interests community. It would be probably very unique to be betting on esports on-chain. I love that idea, to be honest. For sure the esports is going to continue growing and if we can attach ourselves to this kind of market that would be great.
Closing remarks
We’re pretty pumped about Thales development, we are we’re excited about the team expansion, we are excited about you guys giving us ideas so I don’t know what else to say besides thank you from the deepest deepness of our hearts!
Danijel: There’s a funny thing happening in the community where it seems like l2 would be preferable compared to the token effort. I just wanted to comment on that. So, there’s some benefit to just letting l2 kind of mature a little bit as an example Chainlink has only the three feeds on l2 right now which are Bitcoin, ETH, and Link which you might say enough but on l1 we’ve got like 60 feeds possible. You know the same goes about the potential of rolling out custom feeds and then you know there is some time needed to get 0x limit orders on l2
So, I still think the estimate of let’s say two-three months is quite realistic and I think that’s something we will be able to deliver, so we will keep looking at that and we thank you for your feedback guys.
Looking ahead
We are pumped to continue working at Thales, iterating with the community, and moving this ship forward to fulfill what we set ourselves to do: Bring binary options on-chain in a secure, decentralized, and permissionless way.
And we couldn't be doing this without you.
So, if you still haven’t joined the Thales Discord, now is your time!
Thanks for your attention ✌️
