The Defiant

Thales: Unleashing the power of positional markets

Sponsored

Thales market is both a protocol and a platform where you can participate in different positional markets with easy to understand derivatives.

By: Thales Loading...

Thales: Unleashing the power of positional markets [Sponsored]

Thales market is both a protocol and a platform where you can participate in different positional markets with easy to understand derivatives.

With over 5 million USD in volume and thousands of traders, Thales, along with the products built on top of it, are proving to be not only a great alternative or complement to perpetual futures and vanilla options, but also a world on its own full of possibilities for those that value decentralization, innovation, and simple but powerful design.

Ready to discover it?

Thales Market launched in early 2021 spinning out from Synthetix binary options. Since its inception, the smart contract architecture has been iterated and improved to accommodate more than two possible outcomes, leaving behind the binary options paradigm and leaning into the untapped power of 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.

Let’s find out more!

Thales’ edge

But first, why should you care and what makes Thales different?

DeFi AlphaPremium Content
Start for free
  1. Thales platform requires no registration. One web3 wallet is your passport to novel on-chain derivatives, with multiple forms of collateral (sUSD, USDC, DAI, and USDT).
  2. The results for the settlement of markets is provided by Chainlink. Having an integration with the industry-leader in decentralized data feeds means one thing: market results you can trust.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Thales is deployed on Optimism and Polygon networks, two fast, secure, and low-transaction-cost Ethereum scaling solutions.

Pretty cool, eh?

Now let’s take a brief look at the Thales platform.

Thales market

This is Thales protocol’s first product, everything started from here. Thales market was originally deployed on Ethereum mainnet, then moved afterwards to both Optimism and Polygon networks, taking advantage of their low cost transactions, security and speed.

Thales market provides users with a simple choice: Will some crypto-asset (like ETH, BTC or SNX) be above or below a certain price on a specific date?

If you think it will be above, you can buy UP positional tokens from Thales’ AMM on that specific market. If you think it will be below you can get the DOWN positional tokens.

Thales’ AMM will quote a price between 0.1 and 0.9 USD for UP and DOWN tokens, depending on the calculated odds via a Black-Scholes algorithm in combination with spread and price impact logic.

These positional tokens can be sold back to the AMM or held until the market is resolved via Chainlink feeds, where those holding the winning choice can redeem their positional tokens for 1 USD each. Losing positional tokens aren’t redeemable.

You can try Thales market platform here.

Live on both Optimism and Polygon network.

Ranged markets

The UP and DOWN positional tokens can act as money legos when combined, allowing traders to get into more complex strategies. Then the idea of having these strategies at users’ fingertips without needing to buy multiple UP and DOWN positional tokens was developed. And this is how Ranged markets was born.

In Ranged markets you can buy and sell IN or OUT positional tokens, which in the background are composed of multiple UP and DOWN tokens, to express your stance related to a crypto-asset price range.

If you think some crypto-asset price will be outside of a certain range (meaning it will be either below the lower end or above the higher end of the range) on a specific date, then you can buy the OUT positional token. On the contrary, if you think that crypto-asset price will stay inside a range (within the lower and higher limits) on that same date, you can buy the IN positional tokens.

Thales’ AMM for ranged markets works the same way as the UP and DOWN AMM, pricing IN or OUT positional tokens between 0.1 and 0.9 USD depending on the odds.

You can try Thales ranged markets here.

Live on both Optimism and Polygon network.

Thales Referral Program

If you don’t want to trade but still want to get a piece of the action happening on Thales protocol then don’t worry, we have a solution for that too: The Thales referral program.

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. You can read all the details about the program here and check the referral dashboard here.

This initiative is live on both Optimism and Polygon network.

But that’s not all. Wanna know the products built on top of Thales?

Overtime Markets

Meet DeFi’s first sports AMM!

Leveraging the Thales smart contract architecture and its AMM, Overtime Markets replaces crypto-asset price data feeds with sports odds and results feeds (also from Chainlink, of course) bringing the first decentralized sports markets platform to reality.

Overtime Markets was released in the middle of July and in its first month has already seen thousands of transactions and over 200,000 USD in volume.

With MLB, MLS, EPL, Ligue 1, La Liga, Serie A, and the recently added NFL-preseason and UFC matches, plus an ever-growing user base of sports fans, Overtime is getting ready for its prime time!

Many more leagues to come, including the much anticipated NBA and NHL.

You can try Overtime Markets here.

Overtime Markets is currently live on Optimism.

Exotic Markets

Exotic Markets is a clear example of the flexibility that Thales’ smart contracts (and its Parimutuel structure) allow, offering traders the chance to create and trade in markets around pretty much anything.

Market creators can submit a market question with a legitimate data source, a range of options to choose from, and collect trading fees for their market.

These unique markets are subject to a simple but effective review period, allowing anyone to dispute the legitimacy of a market. Once a market matures, anyone can resolve it, with that resolution also subject to community disputes. This process ensures fair and trustworthy markets that are limited only by the imagination.

You can try Exotic Markets here.

Exotic Markets is currently live on Optimism.

But that’s not all we wanted to share with you!

Optimism Summer

And if all of this wasn’t exciting enough, we present to you the icing on the cake: OP rewards for participating in Thales’ products, providing liquidity or staking THALES on Optimism.

Thales received 900,000 OP tokens from the Optimism foundation in their Phase 0 distribution for being an aligned early-supporter of the Optimism chain.

Thales committed to distribute those OP tokens among protocol users, liquidity providers and builders. Of those 900,000 OP tokens, right now there are 650,000 OP tokens plus 1,250,000 THALES tokens being distributed.

You can read all the details on how to participate in these initiatives in our official blog post.

So, what to do now?

If you are feeling the excitement about what Thales is building and wanna learn more we recommend you join Thales Discord, follow us on Twitter and try out Thales markets or any of the products built on top.

You can also learn more by following along one of the many video tutorials we have. This one, for example, guides you through Thales website showcasing how to use the platform:

Thanks for your attention.

Subscribe to DeFi Daily Newsletter and Get Smarter on DeFi & Web3.

80k+ investors informed every day.