About

SynFutures is a decentralized derivatives exchange platform that allows users to trade futures contracts based on various assets, including cryptocurrencies, altcoins, indices, NFTs, and real-world assets. The platform offers features such as 30-second asset listings, single-token liquidity provision and trading, and rigid risk management. SynFutures has strategic investors and aims to provide accessible DeFi services to retail investors.

History

Following the large success of the Automated Market Maker (AMM) model, decentralized exchanges have become a driving force in the crypto space. In January 2021, Uniswap reached a trading volume of $30 billion and has even surpassed the daily volume of centralized peers such as Coinbase a few times. This success story has proven the feasibility of open financial services and has inspired many other DeFi projects.

Following this trend, SynFutures has set its focus on building an open and trustless derivatives market. A derivative is a contract that derives its value from the performance of an underlying. The underlying could be anything: your favorite stock, interest rates, or even coffee beans. Today, derivatives are mainly used by traders and businesses. The former use the contracts to speculate and the latter use derivatives to protect themselves against unfavorable changes in the prices of their inputs and outputs. By buying a derivatives contract, the price of the underlying can be locked in and the risk can be hedged completely.

The problem with derivatives today is that most of these complex financial products are only available to professionals and large institutions. By providing ordinary retail investors with the tools to trade derivatives, SynFutures seeks to democratize the market. In addition, with options and futures transactions accounting for 70% of traditional trading volume in 2019 according to the Bank for International Settlements, SynFutures believes there is a large opportunity in bringing derivatives to crypto. Moving to DeFi, the total value locked in derivatives reached its peak at 4.2 billion dollars in May 2021. Traditional derivatives estimated to be a whopping 560 trillion dollar market, the team may be right about the market opportunity.

The selling proposition of SynFutures is providing a permissionless derivatives market. Following this idea, the platform will allow arbitrary trading pairs to be created and traded at arbitrary maturities. The first version of the protocol will be a futures market and will initially only support ETH, USDC, USDT, and DAI using price oracles Uniswap and Chainlink. Over time, additional oracles will be introduced to eventually enable the trading of any asset with a price feed. SynFutures allows on-chain parameters to be securitized and its first product in this category is the hash rate futures contract. Finally, thanks to the project’s innovative Synthetic AMM model, users can create a new trading pair by simply providing liquidity in one asset.

After the futures market is launched on Mainnet, the team will focus on product upgrades with the goal of becoming a Swiss Army knife for derivatives trading. Shared-margin futures and a more advanced trading UI are scheduled for Q3. To further boost capital efficiency of the protocol, cross-margin futures are anticipated for Q4. Concurrently, the team will continue to integrate with new networks to become a true multi-chain platform.