The epic journey continues: Thales’ next steps
L2 deployment status, Thales Royale, Thales game, new whitepaper, and governance overhaul
Have you ever heard the phrase:
“Looking backwards might screw up your neck”?
Well, after last weeks’ event we took this phrase by heart and, in this post, we’ll update you on the current status of Thales’ development moving forward, focusing on the next milestones we are aiming to complete with the support of the Thales community and the Synthetix ecosystem.
Are you ready?
L2 deployment
As you might already know, last week the Optimism network went through a successful regenesis that introduced several key changes for projects aiming to develop in this network, including the highly-anticipated EVM equivalence.
This upgrade removed the custom compiler and over 25,000 lines of code aiming for a minimalist approach where other projects could deploy their contracts without having to adapt to the set of rules imposed by it. This release also makes it possible to work with lots of the same tooling used for development on Ethereum main net (like Hardhat, Vyper, etc)
You can take a look at the full list of changes here.
We are pretty excited about the successful regenesis event and seeing so many great projects now being whitelisted on Optimism (Thales got whitelisted a few weeks ago).
As of now, Thales’ contracts are ready for Optimism deployment, only waiting for a limit orders module to be deployed on this network.
Where others might see a problem we see a challenge and an opportunity. This is why while we wait for the limit orders module provider to be up and running on Optimism, we decided to work on some other related things in parallel, being the most notorious the development of Thales Royale, a sequential guessing game played in rounds that doesn’t require an order book, and the first steps in the development of a custom AMM for Thales’ markets.
We’ve also continued working in the background with the amazing crew at Chainlink Labs to bring on-chain sport feeds to Optimism. Soccer fans might be in for a surprise soon… ⚽️
Thales Royale
After the first Thales’ trading competition on mainnet ended, we clearly understood one thing:
Ethereum mainnet it’s just too expensive (in gas terms) for the average user at this point in time.
We also learned a few other key things, like the need to have fewer qualifying markets for competitions, so liquidity can be concentrated, and that many users preferred not to join because of the Twitter verification (we used this as a way of preventing Sybil attacks).
So, taking into account what we learned from this last competition we decided to run the Thales Royale trial in a different way.
First of all, Thales Royale is a sequential guessing game played in rounds, where every participant has to choose an outcome based on a specific asset, a strike price of said asset, and a strike date that’s close in time. Those who guess right, advance to the next round, those who don’t are eliminated. The one(s) who reach(es) the final round get the whole prize pool divided among the number of winners.
We expect to have Thales Royale ready very soon for you to try out. The first iteration of this game will be held on Optimism Kovan (no fees, free to try, we’ll have a faucet live) and will be incentivized with some THALES tokens as a reward to those who reach the final round.
The registration and verification process will have an alternative procedure that doesn’t necessarily involve Twitter.
We’ll release more details about it (dates, registration, prizes, and how to participate) as we get closer to the big day.
Expect us.
Tale of Thales: Gamifying finance
For those who frequent Thales’ Discord it's no surprise that one of the recent additions to Thales core contributors, Sanguine, it’s a game developer with over 10 years of experience in the field.
What started as a community-driven project soon began to grow in both scope and engagement from Thales’ core contributors (what can we say? we love games!).
Tale of Thales will present our beloved character (yes, you guessed it right, it’s Thales!) and its adventures exploring Miletus town.
He’ll be learning about how positional markets work, exploring this new pixelated world, and interacting with every character in sight (because who knows which one has the alpha in here!).
Hold on a minute, positional markets? Say what?
Thales Whitepaper v1.0
As we continue developing Thales, we felt the need to encompass our current offering into something that let us expand into new, untapped markets, while still giving potential users clarity about the scope of the platform.
It’s for this reason that Thales is officially moving ahead, presenting it’s first whitepaper, and expanding it’s current offer with an unifying term: Parimutuel markets.
From Wikipedia: Parimutuel betting (from French pari mutuel, “mutual betting”) is a betting system in which all bets of a particular type are placed together in a pool; taxes and the “house-take” or “vigorish” are deducted, and payoff odds are calculated by sharing the pool among all winning bets.
The advantage of going with this approach is that we are no longer constrained to binary outcomes and we can start developing multiple-choice markets, for example: “Which team will win the Champion’s League?”
But wait a minute… you said Positional markets.
As part of the rebranding of some terms used on Thales’ platform we are gonna be using the term Positional market instead of Parimutuel market because it’s easier to grasp for those who aren’t familiar with the Parimutuel term. In the same way, the name of the tokens (previously sSHORT and sLONG) that represent the position are changing into Positional tokens: pUP (positional UP) and pDOWN (positional DOWN)
You’ll see all of this changes reflected on the platform UI when it’s time to make the full reveal (not yet!). For now, you can start by grabbing a cup of coffee and going through the whitepaper.
👉 You can check Thales’ whitepaper here.
All your comments, questions and doubts regarding this (or anything else on this blog post) are welcome in Thales’ Discord.
Exciting stuff, right?
Rebuild and reconstruct
And that’s not all, some other things that are being worked on are:
- The Thales’ documentation is currently being reworked to match the new naming convention presented in Thales’ whitepaper.
- Governance site is also being reworked in preparation for the next Thales Council elections, which is going to be conducted using staked THALES for voting power. A massive step for ThalesDAO, stay tuned!
- Discord revamp: Thales’ Discord is known for it’s bot integrations (having the botmaster kinda helps, ngl) and as of now it counts with even more useful bots than the old Discord. Be sure to check those out!
We are very happy with how things are progressing and giving out our best every day to make Thales something to be remembered 💪. Big shoutout to the Thales’ community for their support!
That’s it. You already know how we continue…
Upwards and onwards!
