FTX Overtakes Coinbase, Tarot Optimism Pools, Decentralized Derivatives

Chart of The Day: FTX Exceeds Coinbase on BTC Spot Volume Trades

• Since the middle of May, FTX’s aggregated daily volume for Bitcoin spot trades has exceeded that of Coinbase.
• According to Coinbase’s company filings, monthly transacting users on Coinbase came in at 9.2m in the first quarter of this year, down from 11.4 million in the previous quarter. Trading volume also dropped from $547 billion in Q4 to $309 billion in Q1.
• Volume data from Skew showed that the trend of declining volumes continued to persist in Q2 as crypto markets tumbled further in May.

Airdrops, Auto-Compounding, Lending & Staking on Optimism

[Excerpt from a Delphi Insights Report]

• Tarot is a decentralized lending protocol on Fantom and now Optimism, where users can participate as lenders or borrowers in isolated lending pools. Lenders can supply tokens to any lending pool in the Tarot protocol to earn passive yield without impermanent loss. Borrowers can deposit LP tokens in a lending pool to borrow additional tokens in the token pair. This enables borrowers to leverage their LP tokens for even more LP tokens, allowing more leveraged yield farming and enhanced LP rewards. Learn more about it here.
• Yield calculations are provided here. To access Tarot, you’ll need to configure your MetaMask to run Fantom Opera using this guide.
• Bridge: You can deposit and withdraw assets onto Fantom Opera using:
  • Synapse Bridge – Cross-Chain liquidity network
  • Bungee Exchange – Bridging Aggregator
  • StarGate – Multi-network bridge for Stablecoins

• Tokenomics:
  • Total Supply: 100M TAROT
  • 59% (59M TAROT) of the total supply is reserved for Farming Rewards

• Notable Unlocks: TAROT tokens are not locked but rather have longer vesting schedules
  • 19% (19M TAROT) is vested over 4 years for Protocol Growth
  • 13.3% (13.3M TAROT) is vested over 4 years by the Core Team
  • 3.2% (3.2M TAROT) is vested over 1 year by LGE Participants
  • 3% (3M TAROT) is vested over 1 year by Early Tarot Users

• Vaults:
  • Tarot Supply Vaults are lending aggregators that use automated strategies to earn yield across multiple Tarot lending pools. With a single deposit in a Supply Vault, users can automatically earn yield across multiple lending pools.
  • Supply Vaults use automated strategies to earn blended supply rates with increased liquidity.
  • They offer the following benefits:
    • Simplified single-token staking
    • Enhanced yield by supplying into multiple lending pools
    • Increased liquidity for withdrawals
    • Automated rebalancing
    • Yield optimization strategies
    • Collateralization via a single composable “tToken”
  • There is a 10% performance fee on earned yield

Tutorial: ETH/USDC Velodrome LP Staking

1. Go to Tarot’s Markets tab. Select the “Velodrome ETH/USDC” Vault.

2. Here you’ll find all the important Vault details such as Total $ Supplied, Borrowed, Utilization Ratio, APR and more. Select “Deposit” under the Borrow tab.

3. Deposit your LP tokens received from Providing Liquidity in Velodrome (see tutorial above for Velodrome). “Approve” your transaction and then select “Deposit” to start farming.

• As always, please exercise extreme caution if you intend to participate in these opportunities. Happy farming everyone!
• For more information, Delphi members can see the full Market Insights here.

Re-Evaluating The Decentralized Derivatives Landscape

[Excerpt from a Delphi Pro Report]

• Decentralized exchanges (DEX) are arguably the most successful applications in the smart contract era. Blockchains are built to secure high value transactions, and applications like Uniswap consistently account for a large portion of Ethereum’s everyday usage. DEXs, at large, have established themselves as marquee applications across each and every smart contract platform.
• Being a successful DEX is no easy feat, especially when you look at the broader crypto ecosystem, including centralized competitors. In this world, DEXs must offer similar speed, fees, and liquidity to customers in order to rival centralized counterparts. All this while dealing with the current scaling limitation of blockchains.

• Currently, the top DEXs account for nearly 11% of all crypto spot volume. This figure has been slowly growing, sitting at roughly 6% a year ago. As these products become more advanced alongside the underlying blockchains, we expect activity to expand and DEXs to capture more market share.
• DEXs have had significant improvements since the launch of Bancor and Uniswap’s X*Y=K liquidity pools in 2018. We are now unearthing more efficient models like concentrated liquidity and, if the chain is fast enough, oracle-based pricing as well as orderbooks.
• However, the end game is not yet in sight for DEXs. There’s still a long, arduous path of painstaking innovation and consumer adoption to make these platforms truly competitive with CEXs like Binance, Coinbase, and FTX. Blockchains are beginning to find their feet in the race to build scalable distributed systems. As we expand the speed and amount of activity these networks can support, the design space for DEXs progressively becomes more inviting.
• Derivatives are cumulatively the largest market in the world by notional size. Crypto is no stranger to this phenomenon, with volume dominated by derivative instruments.

• The most popular derivative contract within crypto is the perpetual swap, or perpetual future. If you’ve been in crypto for more than a few months, you’ve definitely at least heard of “perps.”
• For those who are unfamiliar, perpetual contracts are derivatives that constantly settle and have no expiration. This contract allows users to go long or short assets with significant leverage. They anchor themselves to the underlying asset’s market price through a funding rate mechanism. When the price of the perpetual contract is higher than the underlying’s spot price, the funding rate is positive – meaning longs pay the funding rate to shorts. The opposite occurs when the perp contract trades lower than the underlying spot price.
• There are indeed decentralized perpetual swap contracts, however, their traction relative to centralized platforms isn’t quite there yet. Constructing instruments like perpetual futures is a more complex process than simple spot swaps.
• As a result, the shift from centralized to decentralized will take some time. However, this also presents a potential opportunity to investors. If you expect the trends of the spot market to be reflected in the burgeoning derivatives market, decentralized derivatives platforms suddenly look a lot more interesting.

• The top five decentralized perp exchanges accounted for 20 bps (0.2%) of total volume a year ago and have grown to ~2% today – a 10x increase with way more room to grow. The following are the top five decentralized perpetual trading platforms by recent volume: dYdX, GMX, Perp v2, Perp v1, and Drift.

• This post examines the top models for on-chain trading and touches upon their pros and cons from the perspective of three entities: traders, liquidity providers, and token holders. We will examine four different models: vAMMs, vAMMs with real liquidity, oracle pricing, and orderbooks.

• For more information, Delphi members can see the full Pro Report here.

Notable Tweets

Critical Bug Found on Osmosis

A critical bug has been found on $OSMO /@OsmosisZone which could have potentially drained all liquidity pools.

It has been discovered after a post on the subreddits /r/CosmosNetwork and /r/OsmosisLab.

The chain was halted under immediate emergency to avoid further damage.

🧵

— Junønaut (@TheJunonaut) June 8, 2022

Frax Proposal to Buy $20m of FXS

Frax proposal up for buying $20m worth of FXS via TWAMM. Feels like a pretty big show of confidence as other major projects like Lido and Fei look to liquidate their treasury holdings

h/t
@imnarrating

—dcf intern (@dcfintern) June 8, 2022

Impact of The Merge

The Merge is a substantial change in supply / demand forces most people underestimate.

Multiple $Ms of daily sell pressure on $ETH will be replaced by buy pressure. Every day we will need new sellers to prevent the price from going… up!

Let that sink in.

More details: 🧵👇

—korpi @korpi87) June 8, 2022