ESD is a novel Algorithmic stablecoin https://www.emptyset.finance/ that is an attempt at a fully decentralized stablecoin that is hyper scalable and pegged more tightly over time in theory.
There have been a number of expansion and contraction cycles to date and the long term viability remains unclear. That being said the nature of the system makes this a perfect 2 sided market. There are actually like a half dozen reasons some actor in the system would want to use a perp, here are some examples
Bonded ESD holder who is unlocking shorts to mitigate any losses during unbonding
Coupon holder longs when under peg to add buying pressure and make coupons more likely to redeem
LPer hedges out downside IL risk by shorting
Key Metrics
Uniswap ESD/USDC Liquidity $13m (was $140m when over peg)
Uniswap ESD/USDC 24hr Volume $6m
Very heavy DeFi native holder base
INCREDIBLY risk-on userbase who will use every piece of ESD risk exposure possible to play the game
I’m not a huge fan of listing low liquidity, low distributed, low ranked and relatively unrecognized/unknown tokens on a DEFI platform that’s ironically itself in that category. Not because the token isn’t legitimate but because there are so many choices out there to pick from that has more name recognition. Image plays an important role to the reputation and growth of a platform so do we want outsiders to look at the exchange wondering why these tokens are being listed over others whether its out of being misinformation or just out of jealously their larger more well known coin isn’t listed?
That being said, this is one of those examples where I’d still be ok with listing it if those who are proposing its launch are willing to stake an isolated insurance fund for it themselves or gather enough people to do so. At least as far as optics, we could say the pair exists for this reason and anyone who opposes are free to make their own proposal and stake their own PERP to launch the pairs they want. This also protects PERP holders from getting too much risk/exposure to pairs that are too new to know enough about as I’m sure many of them hold PERP but don’t really pay much attention to governance.
I really like ESD and hope the project succeeds. And that’s the main problem! If ESD succeeds as a stablecoin it will fail as a perpetual market. So, either ESD fails and it will not be good for PERP or it succeeds and it will not be good for PERP.
I think we should keep our eyes on ESD and if they succeed in making it stable, we will welcome the token as a collateral in PERP along with USDC. But not as an asset.
This is interesting. I’ve seen markets before for like DAI/USDC or USDT/USDC which we could theoretically do, but are you saying there isn’t enough volume here?
DAI/USDC trades between a very narrow price range, and if you want to make any profits you would have to use very high leverage. I just think these stablecoin to stablecoin trading pairs are a niche market, and that we should instead focus on listing more “normal” trading pairs in the beginning.
@tongnk I’m a big fan of your proposal to use a framework with objective metrics to evaluate new trading pairs. To me it looks like we need different/specific frameworks for different types of assets (governance-tokens, L1-tokens, stablecoins, stocks etc.).
I agree with various frameworks. I was thinking something similar to:
New tokens (less than say 1 month trading history?)
Non ERC20 tokens
Other ETH tokens
Though it’s a fair point if we use a different formula for vAMM - say stablecoins we should use something else instead of the regular x * y = k formula.
What do you think of the categories though? Would be good to start thinking of how we want to think of them
@will_sheehan@shumwhere@bardur@mykha2 I think this market has more risks to be manipulated than other tokens/markets. Like a whale can long/short on Perp first and make sure ESD’s price moves in his/her favor when rebalancing.
This is partly why I rather the protocol lists well established tokens that’s more broadly known in the crypto community with a more diversified token distribution first before dipping its toes into more experimental projects. Especially when this protocol is itself still early in its infancy.
