[IDEA] Social Trading Platform (Optional)

[AlphaSerpentis]

Idea: Social Trading Platform (Optional)

Introduction

Optional is a decentralized social trading platform that makes use of Opyn's protocols that enable for American and European-style options trading. Optional allows social traders to essentially "follow" the moves the social trader makes or follow other social traders that you trust.

Details

Optional uses a vault-style mechanism to allow a social trader to manage their followers' funds in an efficient manner. When a user decides to "follow" a user, they deposit the necessary funds to the social trader's token, and mint a social token that represents a share of the vault.

A social trader can then use the deposited funds to make moves on either Convexity or Gamma (or even both) to appeal to all types of option traders.

Social traders can also set up token-level fees to incentivize them to perform well:

• Minting fees
• Take profit fees
• Withdrawal fees
• Active position penalty fees

Monetization

Optional has protocol-level fees for minting, take profit, and withdrawal. There's no solid setting at what the protocol-level fees may be, but current idea for protocol-level is:

• Minting: 1.00%
• Take Profit: 0.00%
• Withdrawal: 0.25%

Values are subject to change.

[AlphaSerpentis]

Here's what has happened so far:

• v0.1.2 launched contracts on June 16 with public release on June 18. At the peak, we approx. held 1 ETH in TVL.
• v0.2.x is under work to both the frontend and backend.
  • One of the critical components that we need to address is the clarity and design of the frontend. The frontend was considered to be rudimentary, scattered, unclear, and "bloated." We're currently undergoing a massive redesign of the frontend.
  • Backend lacks some necessary features to prevent malicious managers. We're addressing this with mechanisms to release user funds in the event of an abandoned vault under certain circumstances.
  • We've added monetization to both the protocol and vault-level. Deposits and withdrawals are enabled for both the protocol and vault-level has a performance fee that is taken when selling options.
  • Some quick tests and a minor change in code now properly allows for covered puts to be enabled.
  • For cheap deployments, we've switched to EIP1167 (minimal proxies) heavily reducing the cost to deploy the factory itself and deploying new vaults.

Our primary focus is on safety, frontend redesign, and adding more features to better benefit both the depositor and manager.

You can follow our developments over @ https://github.com/Alpha-Serpentis-Developments/Project-Mimic and https://optional.finance