I'm happy to have worked with my colleague Ryan Tian to investigate what we think will be the next big wave of DeFi opportunity in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space - decentralized options.
There are a lot of players in the space so we first had to get our bearings a bit before being able to provide advisory support to the FinNexus devs who are currently coding out the FNX decentralized options platform on Wanchain as we speak.
The result of all that research is contained within this Medium article, thankfully published by Coinmonks today. It's well worth a read if you need a primer on this topic. We tried to provide a comprehensive overview. Of course, that can be quite difficult in crypto as things change literally every hour. For example, the Synthetix team announced details yesterday on their heretofore un-fleshed-out options platform and that they're going live with it on June 30.
But that's how it is.
I honestly wouldn't have it any other way. The DeFi space moves so damn fast it'll make your head spin. Here's a comparison table to get you started on our research findings. We provide a lot more detail in the Coinmonks article, but if you don't want to spend half-an-hour reading it, I totally understand.
If you're not familiar with these options terms, we provide links in the article to our other work that explains the basics.
Our basic thesis is that while Compound (COMP) and Balancer (BAL) have taken the crypto world by storm lately, they're still just a money market protocol and an asset exchange protocol. Surely, they'll play an important part in the DeFi landscape of the future, but it is but one piece of the vast array of DeFi protocols we anticipate will increasingly become viable replacements for financial services that are now only available via centralized solutions.
There are so many more critical DeFi niches to be filled. We at FinNexus think that these types of building blocks lie at the very basic layers of the DeFi protocol stack. There will be a Cambrian explosion of new DeFi innovation to come that will bring the functionality of Ethereum to other chains and vice versa, as well as developing as-yet-unforeseen ways of stacking these Money Legos together.
One of the contenders for the genre of DeFi protocols and platforms to be the next wave to attract large amounts of capital are decentralized options protocols. If you've been interested in the space, I encourage you to check out our comprehensive overview article now where we cover the platforms of Opyn, Hegic, ACO, Primitive, Opium Network, Pods and the aforementioned grandaddy Synthetix.
I hope you get something out of this research. One of these protocols could just be the next 50x in DeFi Land.