Dec 22, 2021
Thales L2 deployment, 2021 in review and next steps đź’Ş
And here it comes… the big moment 👏
Thales started this year with a mission and an initial roadmap, which was set to be accomplished with the deployment of Thales dapp on layer 2, specifically on Optimism network.
After TIP-11 (AMM beta release on Optimism) and TIP-12 (which formalizes Optimism L2 dapp deployment) getting approved by the Thales Council we can proudly say:
Today is the day đź’Ş
We know there’s much expectancy such wow waiting to read about this deployment of Thales dapp with a little AMM twist…
And just to get your juices going, we can tell you that the initial markets will have 20,000 THALES as incentives to be distributed among AMM buys until Jan 7th at 8:00am UTC.
But before jumping head on, we’ll share a compilation of Thales’ crucial 2021 moments so we can remember the epic road that brought us here.
Ready. Set. Go 🚀
Thales dapp on layer 2 wasn’t built in a day
This year, 2021, has been pretty crazy for Thales (and for the whole web3/defi crowd to be fair), from first steps heading into the public to developing a custom AMM for the layer 2 release.
In between those two events, there are many things that happened during this year. We’ve selected a few to commemorate.
Are you ready to go back in time?
- Formalization of Thales Council as the governance advisory body of Thales voted in by SNX stakers, inheriting the legitimacy of another tightly-aligned decentralized governance structure.
- Thales dapp MVP launch on ETH mainnet, with more than 60 different assets to create markets with and some never-seen-before sport markets đź‘€. Powered by Chainlink oracles and 0x orderbooks, taking only flagship Synthetix stablecoin sUSD as collateral.
- The Olympics markets, released with Thales dapp MVP launch, were the first fully on-chain sports market ever (at least to our knowledge). Quite the accomplishment, eh?
- The much anticipated THALES token release (and subsequent distribution with native THALES token staking already developed and deployed)
- Coverage of US Open 2021 🎾 with fully on-chain markets (another first for Thales!)
- The development of some exotic on-chain markets like the amount of ETH burned 🔥 or betting on the Ethereum flippening. Both of these new markets were settled with Chainlink feeds and also part of Thales first trading competition.
- Those who participated know the thrill it was… Thales Royale, survival of the fittest! This sequential prediction game was a blast and we had so much fun playing it with the community. There is an in-development TIP that aims to have Thales Royale as a regular scheduled event. Exciting, eh?
- And last but not least, the recent Thales Council election (congrats to the elected members, btw!) trialing the new governance site, expanded seats (7) and the ability to distribute voting power with staked THALES tokens.
Thales’ community has been fundamental in this year’s development. The mighty Titans have supported us when we had to overcome a few challenges along the way, engaged with us to get the different Thales POAPs and NFTs on various events, and constantly gave us their feedback to improve and iterate the dapp, the protocol and the governance process.
Maybe this is a good time to pause and say:
Thank you, Titans! đź’™
Now… are you ready to try out Thales on Optimism and get ready for 2022?
Optimistic Thales, with a twist
Aight, let’s get to the chase.
Thales dapp has been deployed to Optimism network (make sure to choose Optimism network on Metamask) after a successful test-run of the protocol on Kovan OVM (Optimism testnet) with the Thales Royale initiative.
For this launch we decided to trial a beta version of Thales’ AMM, a smart contract that aims to improve liquidity, which can be best described as:
Thales’ AMM uses the BlackScholes algorithm to determine a realistic price for a binary option.
Based on that price and the skew, which represents the AMM 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 long options are being bought from the AMM than short, it will add a skew price impact to the long option pricing, while offering short options at base price.
As the AMM is in beta it has a cap (limit) per market and the amount of options that can be bought/sold at any time is limited. However, even if all options on one side are bought from the AMM, more liquidity will be made available as soon as a trader buys options of the opposite position.
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.
And to encourage people to try it out we’ll be running a campaign that will incentivize AMM buys for the duration of the initial markets until Januray 7th at 8:00am UTC, with 20,000 THALES to be distributed, pro-rata, among everyone who does a a qualifying trade (again, that would be only an AMM buy to discourage wash-trading).
Please remember that the AMM feature is in beta phase, so use it at your own risk.
We are also rolling out this release with orderbooks, this time integrating 1inch’s module for those users who want more fine-tuning with their orders, although only AMM buys will be incentivized for this trial.
You’ll find a switch on top of every market, where you can choose if you prefer to use the AMM (remember, beta version) or the orderbooks.
This release will also continue to utilize Chainlink feeds on Optimism for market settlement, hence why for now the list of possible assets to create a market is more limited than on Ethereum mainnet.
We are also reminding people that to use Thales dapp you’ll need to get ahold of some sUSD on Optimism network. You can get sUSD on Uniswap, 1inch, by minting it staking SNX, or directly in Thales dapp.
And as if this release wasn’t enough to get you drooling about the possibilities with Thales we present you, our tentative roadmap for what’s coming on Q1 2022:
- New Thales Council (7 seats) — more heads, more ideas, forging a path together
- Thales Royale as a scheduled event, incentivized at first, with buy-ins
- A Tale of Thales game continued development and first release
- Thales’ AMM refinement and auditing
- THALES token migration to OP (plus possible interesting incentives to provide liquidity there)
- New landing page (with new parimutuel markets terminology)
- New version of Thales dapp
- Sport markets on Optimism
- More trading competitions, more community events, more POAPs and NFTs for the collectooors, and definitively more fun.
And yes, you did read that right, that’s only for the first quarter of 2022, for the rest of the year we are looking at:
- More assets support on Optimism
- More sports added in cooperation with Chainlink
- Custom markets and formation of prediction committee
- Speed markets
- Mint your own binary option feature, e.g. do a parlay of “BTC>50k and ETH <5k @….”
- Sport parlays
- More gamified decentralized events such as Thales Royale
- A tale of Thales v2.0
Please remember that this is only a tentative roamap, but ultimately Thales is still being shaped the by the community’s feedback with core contributors being but humble executors.
So… what to do now?
If you are excited as we are right now we definitively suggest to jump in and start playing around with Thales dapp on Optimism, trial the AMM, and give us your valuable feedback in our #product-feedback Discord channel.
Building this together, focusing on DAO participation, and giving the tools for initiatives to spring on top of Thales protocol is part of our endgame. The world of possibilities that parimutuel markets brings is stunning and we want to invite everyone to be part of it.
With over 20 core contributors, a newly elected governance body, and an amazing community of Titans we are eagerly waiting for 2022 to come.
Onto the next year, onwards!
