Thales goes to Polygon and celebrates with a trading competition! đź’Ş
Polygon Journey
If we go back a few months, to the end of 2021, we can recall Thales’ first deployment on a scaling solution: Optimism.
So far, we’ve loved the experience of fast transactions and low-cost fees for the end-users, so we’ve been thinking about expanding to another chain where more users could discover Thales and have fun with their products while maintaining a satisfactory user experience.
After some deliberation Polygon was the answer, and today with TIP-40 approved we are ready to open the doors of the Thales platform to the Polygon community and continue preaching about the features and benefits of positional markets as derivatives.
And what better way to start on a new chain than an incentivized trading competition (with a total prize pool of around 45,000 USD 🏆)?
Interested? Keep reading 👇
Thales platform and positional markets
Before jumping into the trading competition details, let’s take a few minutes to recap what Thales does and what parimutuel markets are.
Thales at its core is a protocol that allows the creation and participation of parimutuel markets.
A parimutuel market is a market where the collateral (provided by different entrants, in our case stablecoins) is placed in a single shared pool, and the final payout to the winning participants is not determined until a market-settling event has occurred.
At Thales, those parimutuel markets where you can choose between two opposing outcomes (UP or DOWN) are called Positional markets, because for every market you need to pick a position in relation to two variables: a strike date (when the market is gonna be settled) and a strike price (the amount to be used as a reference by the smart contracts for market settling, this can be the price of a digital asset or the result of a sports match).
Regarding the collateral accepted by Thales platform, currently on Optimism the only collateral accepted is Synthetix’ stablecoin sUSD, as we highly value its uncensorability and decentralization properties. For Polygon release we decided to go with USDC as the collateral, making the firm commitment to support sUSD as soon as it's available and liquid on the Polygon network.
It’s also worth noting that the resolution and settlement of positional markets on the Thales platform on Polygon will continue to be done utilizing Chainlink data feeds, for its tamper-proof, availability, and decentralization properties.
To interact with Thales markets, and choose UP or DOWN positions you can do so through its AMM.
But wait a second, what’s exactly Thales AMM?
Thales AMM
Thales’ AMM uses the BlackScholes algorithm to determine a realistic price for a positional market. Based on that price and the skew, which represents the AMM's exposure to the market at hand, the AMM will offer to buy or sell quotes to traders.
Thales’ AMM always aims to rebalance its exposure, so if more UP positions are being bought from the AMM than DOWN positions, it will add a skew price impact to the UP position pricing, while offering DOWN positions at the base price.
The AMM still has a cap (limit) per market and the amount of positions that can be bought/sold at any time is limited. However, even if all positions on one side are bought from the AMM, more liquidity will be made available as soon as a trader buys positions of the opposite position.
If you want, you can check a detailed guide (with screenshots) on how to use the AMM here.
Thales’ AMM only supports trading on a market with calculated odds via BlackScholes above 10% and below 90% and up to 24 hours before market maturity to avoid edge cases and last-minute frontrunning, but…
For this Polygon release, we went the extra mile and deployed AMM v0.3 which includes some optimizations like: Improved skew mechanism, wider liquidity (range above 5% and below 95%), increased cap per market, and extension of liquidity uptime to 8 hours before maturity.
This new version of the AMM will be soon deployed to Optimism too.
Alright, all of this sounds pretty exciting so… let’s get to those trading competition details!
Thales trading competition on Polygon
It’s been a while since we organized our last trading competition, so we are pretty excited for this one.
We wanna thanks Polygon team for their support on this deployment and for co-sponsoring this prize pool with added MATIC rewards.
For this iteration, we’ve decided to have two main categories: Net profit and % Profit, so both whales and people with a tighter bankroll can participate, have fun, and have a chance to win some of those 50,000 THALES and 15,000 MATIC to be distributed.
All the information you need to participate in this trading competition on Polygon:
Competition duration: April 18th — May 9th (3 weeks).
Start date/time: April 18th, 3PM UTC.
Competition venue: Thales platform on Polygon
Competition markets: BTC, ETH, SNX, and MATIC.
Markets creation schedule: 6-day long markets are created every 3 days.
Participation eligibility: Any wallet that trades on Thales for the duration of the competition.
Minimal eligible volume for % Profit leaderboard: 10 USDC
Total prize pool: 50k THALES + 15k MATIC
Places paid: Top 50 in each category
Total prize pool for Net Profit leaderboard: 27,725 THALES+ 7,675 MATIC
Total prize pool for % Profit leaderboard: 22,275 THALES+ 7,325 MATIC
You can also find a brief with all the details regarding this trading competition in our documentation.
And to keep track of your position (or see how your competitors are doing) you can check this leaderboard for both categories.
Please take into account that this leaderboard is just a reference and not definitive until complete review by Thales team at the end of the competition.
With two different categories to participate in, even those with smaller portfolios can pick their positions and stand a chance. Just remember that the minimum cut-off for trade sizes to be eligible for participation is 10 USDC.
Are you ready to show your skills as a trader?
Closing thoughts
Before this release, Thales team has been very busy building and expanding. You can catch up with the latest developments in our previous blog post.
And as if what we’ve accomplished so far on 2022 plus this release wasn’t enough to get you pumped, we’ll leave you with some of the upcoming things we are working on, building products with parimutuel markets:
- Sports parimutuel markets platform with Chainlink sport feeds (NBA, NHL, NFL, UEFA, Champions League, etc)
- Exotic markets platform (still in demo mode), with the Oracle Council as the settlement and ruling body.
- Opening Thales platform AMM up for stablecoin deposits, to have deeper liquidity (final results of ongoing audits still pending).
- Deployment of range structured products (IN and OUT) on Thales platform.
- Deploy Thales Royale events on Polygon.
- Continue developing the possibilities of evolving NFTs for Thales Royale positions, and much more.
Are you excited now, anon?
What to do now
Our biased advice: Try out the Thales platform on the Polygon network, participate in the trading competition (remember 50k THALES + 15k MATIC up for grabs!), and join our Discord if you have comments, questions, or simply wanna know more about Thales and what we are building.
If you are looking for an engaged community that embraces non-stop building, then look no further and share this journey with us đź’Ş
And for this competition, may the odds be with you.
PS: Don’t you love the smell of new deployments in the morning? 🌅
