Crypto Derivatives Landscape

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I have been researching the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape a bit and @nrpus on telegram provided a decent breakdown, but not exhaustive, breakdown of the current state of the crypto derivatives market.

So to give you a broad look of the crypto derivatives market, there are a few verticals and players on each one, categorized by how regulated they are.

Regulated markets:

  1. LedgerX (the go-to for retail investors, recently received also approval for physically-settled btc futures)
  2. ErisX (institutional)
  3. Bakkt (the crypto branch of ICE, targets institutionals, to start operating in july)

Un-regulated (yet) but not on-chain:

  1. Bitmex

For now the most liquid markets and with super low minimums
2. Deribit (best product offering)
3. Coinflex (by TradingTechnologies, one of the pioneers of electronic trading)

Decentralized derivatives:

  1. DyDx - Market Protocol on top of Ethereum but still without a reliable offering and almost no liquidity
  2. TradeLayer (tradelayer.org, by @duganist), on top of Bitcoin with a potentially really interesting take but still in alpha
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Not sure how this entire decentralized system will work?

Seems that we are currently very luck to be holding above 20 cents, though I imagine we will be taken back down to the 10 cent range, especially that there are so many competitors ramping up.

TradeLayer built on BTC will gain a lot of attention, hopefully ZP can connect with them and discuss a partnership or some type of agreement, as anything built on btc will be a winner and will take market share from ZP.

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Very interesting - Read this (the first line after the question sums ZP up perfectly) as this project really has streamlined a wonderful uncomplicated process, and are bringing a specific fair project based on BTC & LTC to market. @Shkembe

@mkultra thank you for bringing these projects to attention as TradeLayer is one that will do extremely well moving forward. I will be directing my focus to as it has been a long time since i have seen anything that rivals ZP and in this case TradeLayer is a heavyweight champion.

TradeLayer
Is this some ICO pre-mine founder-cash-in clusterjam?

ICOs mis-align incentives and impose a high cost of capital on founders who are them tempted to shirk responsibility. Not our jam. Our jam is doing an honest to god decentralized protocol with an organic coin emission schedule based on algorithmic, mathematically pre-defined issuance to actors on the network doing work that benefits the network. Instead of retaining a token for us to collect a portion of trading fees, trading fees will go to rebates and the community at large. There must be a fee that isn’t a rebate to give a cost to attempted wash trading. That cashflow goes to a native insurance fund that automatically accrues ALL or TOTAL from fee cashflow across all the TradeLayer contracts, token pairs and BTC or LTC pairs. We as a team try to make money by having a vesting token that accrues some of the native coin, participating in the ecosystem as liquidity provider to earn that inflation in competition with the other algo traders, non-custodial wallet hosting, oracle-feed partnerships, and watchtower services. The vesting tokens will accelerate accrual of ALL as cumulative volume rises through orders of magnitude, followed by a plateau. In a mature protocol, the founder reward will dilute to being <5% of the total money supply, and the liquid part will be very low until there’s real momentum. Open-ended or front-loaded founder compensation is not ethical enough for our standards. Trying to live up to the Satoshi Standard by at least 2/3rds, that’s not bad. Also the founder made the pledge on Marty Bent’s Tales From The Crypt podcast to do the Byzantine Challenge and HODL 2/3rds of the Vesting Token position for decades. This position was accrued by investing 100% of the founder’s liquid net worth into paying developers. When the protocol supports Trust-like addresses with more robust controls, timelock mechanisms will be used. If this fizzles, it will be of consequence to the people responsible for designing and developing it, there’s no disingenous ask for the public, other than participation in