AntiMatter team held an AMA last Sunday (9th of January 2022), here is the written transcript of all questions and answers.
Q1: Why do we see the recent pivot to Structured Products?
“In what way should DeFi derivatives grow?” is the question we asked ourselves. AntiMatter has experimented and researched the subject and we believe structured products should be the first step into DeFi derivatives.
Structured products are pre-packaged investments that normally include assets linked to interest plus one or more derivatives. Structured products offer retail easy access to derivatives.
There are a few reasons:
- Most DeFi users are retailers which have a good amount of financial knowledge but aren’t sophisticated traders. They can participate in easy-to-understand structured products without huge barriers for entry.
- Structured products are a gateway for institutions to get retail liquidity into institutional trading in a natural way.
The long-term goal for AntiMatter is to build an infrastructure for efficient DeFi derivatives with low barriers of entry. Our short-term goal is to build products on top of existing environments to let the DeFi community be involved in derivatives in an easier way. We believe structured products are the gateway for this to happen.
Q2: Could you please tell us more about the team’s vision? We have seen many projects with a very good start but then they give up on the project. What is your strategy to increase the traction of your project?
For those who have been here for long time, we had a rough 2021. Although there is noise and comments from others, we never give up or are depressed. Instead, we tried very hard to face issues and solve them. We want to reemphasize that we are here to stay and not give up because of past. On the product side, we had some math problems with our previous models. With the help of the community, we quickly changed the logic and relaunched it. Also, we changed our strategy to be more flexible on the product side and introduce a suite of products to prevent a single point of failure. We will keep improving product interfaces and also launch more products that fulfill the demands of many. On the team side, we increased our team size in Q4 2021. The newly onboarded devs allow us to move things faster and have more room for improvements and product research. Decentralized derivative is a difficult area to develop, but we will keep our spirit and strive for success.We put more resources on products side because we want to make sure users are very satisfied with it and then we will gradually do more marketing. Marketing is important but without a good foundation, it will be only short term
Q3: How does Antimatter differ in comparison to its competitors? Why is Antimatter better than others?
There are indeed many protocols in the DeFi derivatives space, specifically option space. Each project is different on the product, technology and mechanism level. I think the one big difference for us is that we work like a product hub. DeFi derivatives is still in a very early stage and we have explored and looked into a variety of models. One thing we found is that apart from DYDX’s order book model with a mix of Onchain and Offchain execution, the rest of models are still not proven to be successful. To prevent a single point of failure, our strategy is to innovate and launch a variety of products under Antimatter. Each product has its niche in the derivative space. Nonfungible, Oracle-less Bull and Bear and Structured Products etc. We think this is the right strategy to play. On the technical level, we have decided to tackle Structured Products first because it is the bridge between DeFi and derivatives. Derivatives is a more institutional product and this means institutions like to stick to the old model which is order book model. However, they can attract liquidity through Structured Products offered to retails. Structured Products are packaged in the way which DeFi users like: earn yield on idle assets. This should be the most efficient way to get DeFi derivatives traction. Finally, we like to study and learn from our competitors. Since we are in the early stage, we should not call it competition. In addition, I don’t think we should call derivatives in this stage a competition. Sure, there are some protocols that have multi million TVL in AMM model. But what is unclear is that: unlike spot trading, derivatives are more dynamic, this means assets are always moving around. This is why institutional traders use a variety of strategies to execute instead of putting one order like spot. From our perspective and research, we think order book model makes more sense than AMM in the case of DeFi derivatives. We will be doing more research and working more on the order book side in the option market creation.
Q4: What happens to the $MATTER that US residents staked since they cannot access the website right now?
We will provide the staking contract to allow you to call functions through Etherscan and unstake your tokens. You can access through https://etherscan.io/address/0x2ee6ad8fdad5850f730f8e390da1707b8711a8e2#writeContract
Q5: Is token buyback planned? Will you do any LP rewards for higher liquidity?
Currently the three applications in the Antimatter Hub generate fees. The most recent Structured Products bring about 3% fees from profits and these fees are stored in the vault for buyback preparation. There are two paths for these fees: buyback and distribute to stakers or buyback and burn. In both cases there will be a buyback and governance proposals will be initiated soon to let community decide on this. In terms of liquidity, most of liquidity is on Uniswap and on CEX our market maker is providing liquidity. We do not have plan for liquidity mining in the short-term because many DeFi projects have proven that this incentive mechanism is a wrong approach. As we grow our products this year, we will propose to introduce more mechanisms to boost liquidity in both DEX and CEX. In addition, we will be actively seeking opportunity for more exchange listings.
Can the team make a proposal in the DAO to:
1. Use the protocol fees to buy back Antimatter tokens from the market.
2. Use the buy-back to redistribute to stakers in the DAO through staking rewards.
Yes, these two governance proposals are definitely on the table. We will soon propose once we see more fees accumulated through structured products and others.
Q8: Dual Investment is similar to a covered call, but it is difficult to understand why it is similar to selling both a call and a short
For Dual Investment, it has two sides. Let’s say if the target asset is in BTC then you will have two products underneath: BTC upward exercise or BTC downward exercise. For BTC upward exercise, you are essentially selling a call option, for BTC downward exercise, you are selling a put option. You can do either one of them or play a mix by subscribing to both. So, Dual Investment is not only selling call but also selling put.
Q9: Will we see Dual Investment launching on Polygon? Polygon has a lot of daily active users.
Yes, we plan to go multichain when things are more stable on BSC. Also, we need to verify the liquidity such as the Polygon version of BTC. It is one of the tasks we are working on.
We will have such AMA’s more frequently in 2022. So please look forward to it!
About Antimatter
Antimatter is a hub for decentralized on-chain financial products, such as DeFi derivatives and financial NFTs. Being community driven, innovative and simple forms the core of AntiMatter.
