Futurama Exchange
Perpetual Futures on Polygon
Futurama is a decentralized derivatives exchange. The pilot episode of Futurama will be launched with perpetual futures contracts priced on a virtual AMM (vAMM). Later, we want to build a fully-featured DeFi native derivatives exchange.
Perpetual Contracts vs Spot Markets Landscape
As of writing this article, 24h trade volume for perpetual contracts across 3 most popular decentralized platforms peaked at $682 million. In comparison, total 24h volume tracked across 56 exchanges is $163 billion or a 238x trade volume on centralized counterparts. For comparison, let’s look at spot markets. DEX 24h Trading Volume is $6.6B whereas the total trade volume is $126B or 18x.
We spot 2 opportunities here:
- Volume of perpetuals on centralised exchanges eclipsed the volume of spot.
- 0.42% of perps activity is on DEXs as compared to 5% for spot markets.
While, we have seen majority of innovation in DeFi focussed around lending and spot markets, we anticipate the next wave of DeFi primitives to be derivatives-based protocols. In the next 1–3 years, it is inevitable that derivatives trading will explode similarly on DeFi.
Futurama Season 1
- Pilot launch on Polygon with USDC-margined BTC, ETH perps based on a vAMM. These will be isolated margin. Read more about Isolated and cross margins here.
- A lite version of the app to manage margins and positions.
- Insurance fund
- Adding more markets.
Next Futumara seasons will have the following features
- COIN-margined perpetual contracts One of the first coins that we are exploring for coin margined positions is MATIC. This will allow traders who are bullish on MATIC to use it as collateral to trade perpetual contracts for speculating on other assets while maintaining complete exposure to Matic.
- Onboard DeFi smart collateral — aave tokens, curve LP tokens.
- Cross-margined Perpetuals Offset your losses in 1 position with profits in another; or use profit from 1 position to open new leveraged positions.
- Deployments on other chains
Eventually Futurama aspires to be a fully featured cross-chain derivatives DEX that offers a ftx.com like trading experience with a bunch of defi coins being able to be used as collateral. We believe that legos for cross-chain dapps are being laid out.
Research
- New vAMM mechanism that does better than the x*y=k vAMM by concentrating liquidity around the mark price.
- Efficient funding fee and liquidation mechanisms
- Tokenizing perpetual positions so that they can be utilised in other defi protocols As perpetual contracts become increasingly popular, composability will open up entirely new use cases in Defi. e.g. Use your profitable perps position as collateral on lending platforms.
