Cryptocurrency has become more attractive as an asset class over time, with firms such as Tesla publicly announcing support for Bitcoin transactions and holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet. As cryptocurrency rises in popularity, people have demonstrated an increased appetite to interact with the DeFi ecosystem in ways that model more traditional centralized finance — trading assets, staking tokens to farm rewards similar to an annuity or bond, and more. However, there has not previously been a high-quality decentralized solution for cryptocurrency options trading that offers the features of a traditional finance platform.
Options are an asset with a large market in traditional finance, with more than $300 trillion of notional volume traded every year. Options play a crucial role in allowing investors to hedge their positions, multiply their holdings via multi-option spreads, and more effectively match a portfolio to a model of potential future market volatility. Sophisticated traders expect to be able to construct complex portfolio positions and to move in and out of the buyer’s and writer’s sides of options with minimal friction. SIREN is currently the only DeFi platform that allows for this level of flexibility and composability of assets and their derivatives.
Why are you better than competitors?
SIREN fills a unique market niche by catering specifically to sophisticated parties interested in holding and actively trading tokenized options contracts. Unlike any other cryptocurrency options platform, SIREN has tokenized both sides of an option contract, allowing for elements of an options ecosystem. SIREN allows for both buyers and writers to mint, buy, and trade in and out of options positions at any time.
In addition to our unique tokenization model, we have also separated our automated market making (AMM) layer from the settlement layer, which allows us to continuously modify the design of our market making, pool administration, and pricing as the trading volume and liquidity of our platform grows over time. Under this paradigm, a strategy that serves SIREN in our early stage of growth with a limited number of markets and available liquidity does not need to be the same strategy that serves during future high growth periods.
Finally, we are a team of experienced developers and executives. Many of us have experience in previously successful cryptocurrency companies, some of which you have almost certainly heard of. We have experience writing software that protects billions of dollars, both off-chain and on-chain.
NOTE: This is a living document that will continue to be updated as SIREN evolves. To contribute, please visitSIREN on GitHub. Specific questions may be answered and technical guidance may also be provided from time to time in theSIREN Discordto those who are interested in building on top of the protocol.