Thales officially expands to Arbitrum
Because every rollup-centric solution deserves its own positional markets
Thales journey
So far, Thales has kept building and accomplishing every major milestone set up in the past 💪
As of now, Thales (and the platforms built on top) has racked more than 8.5 million USD in volume between Optimism and Polygon network.
The users seem to love using Thales in an environment with fast transactions and low-cost fees, so with an ever-growing userbase, passionate communities, and a great team behind, Arbitrum was the next logical step in Thales' expansion.
Let’s see what this entails!
The decentralized governance body of Thales, called the Thales Council, voted in and approved the TIP-79, which entailed Thales markets (plus ranged markets) platform to be deployed on Arbitrum.
We highly appreciate the welcome (and great vibes!) from Offchain Labs and the Arbitrum community when we told them Thales will be expanding there 🙌
But let’s rewind a bit for those that are new to Thales and its markets.
What is Thales and how does it work?
Thales is both a protocol and a platform, named after the famous Ancient Greek philosopher, where you can participate in different positional markets with easy-to-understand derivatives.
Wait a second, positional markets?
Positional markets are based on the Parimutuel structure where participants pool collateral in exchange for positional tokens. When a market resolves the winnings are divided by the holders of the winning positional tokens. Basically, every positional token is priced by Thales’ AMM (Automated market maker) between 0.1 and 0.9 USD, depending on the odds it estimates based on Black-Scholes algorithm. The lower the odds, the cheaper the positional token. When the market resolves, holders of the winning positional tokens can redeem each one for 1 USD. Losing positional tokens aren’t redeemable and hold no value.
This simple mechanism makes it easy to understand the risk and reward of a position and is flexible enough to serve as a money lego for several types of markets, including crypto-asset prices, sports results, and real-life events.
For this Arbitrum release, we decided to go with USDC and USDT as collateral, making the firm commitment to support sUSD as soon as it’s available and liquid on the Arbitrum network.
What does Thales bring to the Arbitrum table?
We’ve talked about what Thales is, and how it works, but we also wanted to share what makes Thales different and where its edge is:
- Thales platform requires no registration. One web3 wallet is your passport to novel on-chain derivatives, with multiple forms of collateral (USDC and USDT for Arbitrum).
- The results for the settlement of markets are provided by Chainlink. Having an integration with the industry-leader in decentralized data feeds means one thing: Market results you can trust.
- When you buy positional tokens (UP, DOWN, IN or OUT) there are no liquidations involved, you can only lose what you risk on each market and no more.
- You can sell back a positional token to the AMM and exit your position at any time up until 24 hours from the market target date, provided there is liquidity in the market. Basically, there’s a possibility for early exits or profit-taking.
- Thales DAO has an amazing community very involved in decentralized governance practices, with engaged members and very smart individuals which help iterate and improve the protocol and platform(s) every day. Resilience is the name of the game.
Can Arbitrum users find something novel in Thales' offering?
Short answer: Yes!
New tokens: MAGIC and DPX
Once the Arbitrum deployment was decided we started researching and looking at Arbitrum projects (with their own tokens) that fulfilled two criteria:
a) They had a passionate community behind
b) They had a Chainlink feed live to be used on Arbitrum
So, besides going with the classic duo (ETH and BTC) we also added support for both MAGIC (Treasure DAO) and DPX (Dopex).
Cool stuff, eh?
Ranged Markets
For this deployment, we are including both the Thales UP or DOWN markets and the IN or OUT ranged markets.
This isn’t a minor feat for Arbitrum users, because now they will not only be able to position based on a direction (UP or DOWN) but also to position within a range of prices for the selected crypto-asset.
To our knowledge, there isn’t any other DeFi product right now on Arbitrum that lets you position in (or outside) ranges as easily as on Thales, given the simplicity of interacting with an AMM that ensures plenty of liquidity.
On-chain referral system
And last, but not least, we feel super proud about the referral system Thales has championed.
This is the first, to our knowledge, fully on-chain referral program where those who refer people obtain a percentage of the volume generated by traders that they’ve referred directly into their wallet immediately after a trade is placed.
If you have a large social media following, a website that many people use, or a media venue where people listen to you then this program might be of interest.
Here you can generate a referral link and see a leaderboard of those who have earned the most through referrals.
And here you can read all the details about the referral program in our documentation.
How to interact with Thales dapp?
So far we’ve explained what Thales is and what its competitive advantages are, but that’s not enough for us. We want you to understand it and use it, so we’ve prepared these resources for a deeper dive.
If you are an avid reader you can check our comprehensive documentation.
Or if you prefer to learn by watching, you can grab your favorite hot beverage 🍵 and enjoy these 2 videos:
Thales AMM walkthrough (UP or DOWN markets):
Ranged markets AMM walkthrough (IN or OUT markets):
So, how can you participate in Thales markets on Arbitrum?
Simple as going into Thales markets (UP or DOWN) or Ranged markets (IN or OUT), and selecting Arbitrum network on the top right corner of the dapp.
This is just the beginning of our Arbitrum journey and everyone is welcome to be part of it. Check Thales Discord if you have any questions, wanna share your experience, or learn more.
On to more developments and adventures!
