Derivatives
DeFi derivatives allow investors to limit their exposure to risk and benefit from underlying assets' price movement in a trustless environment.
Creates a market for hedging, leveraging, or downward speculation.
Through more advanced strategies, users are able to manage their risks as well as maximise their potential rewards through derivative assets such as futures, perpetuals, synthetics, options, and rate swaps.
Principles
Majority of derivative implementations involves the creation of a token representing the derivative. Given the pseudonymous nature of DeFi, these assets are usually created upon the smart contract securing funding (i.e. collateral). The derivatives are then free to be traded while the protocol is protected from insolvency through a liquidation market.
Benefits
Exposure to price movements of any asset (i.e. a synthetic asset that tracks the price of a stock); Enables short selling; More fine-tuned risk management options
Providers
- DYDX
- Synthetix
- Opyn
- Perp
- Barnbridge
Questions
What is the most important question this topic raises that current discourse tends to avoid or understate?
- Which assumption in the standard framing of this topic is most likely to be wrong in a 5-year horizon?
- How does the DePIN or agent-native lens change what matters most about this topic?
- Which first principle, if violated, would make the analysis of this topic fundamentally incorrect?