Feb 202023
 

Latest News: Public sale is currently live at Camelot Launchpad. Sale ends 24-Feb-2023 1800 UTC. Update – this has ended now, although Camelot continues to have other sales on their launchpad.

What is Factor DAO?

Factor DAO is a core piece of the DeFi puzzle that has been gaining momentum on Arbitrum, an L2 built on Ethereum that is emerging as a core hub of decentralized finance (DeFi) in crypto. In a nutshell, Factor is an on-chain asset management platform. The way it is built and the features it supports are much more advanced that previous versions of ‘on-chain asset management’ (think projects like Melon during the 2017 ICO boom with the same goal). I’d classify Factor and some other DeFi projects in this category in the “DeFi 2023” category (DeFi 2.0 was such a marketing gimmick).

Arbitrum DeFi

Before jumping into the token, a quick description of DeFi on Arbitrum. During the 2022 bear market when several blue-chip tokens crashed over 90-95% and majors were down 80+% from all-time high (ATH), one sub-culture of builders kept building in DeFi. That was all on Arbitrum. This group gave us gems like GMX, a protocol doing one of the highest fees in the entire crypto ecosystem currently.

Factor DAO Protocol

Factor DAO provides tools for any asset manager, trader, and other protocols to build on top of it in a seamless manner. The core of the protocol is “Tokenized Baskets” but yield pools play a big supporting role and finally the derivatives market that can interact with them is potentially huge. All these play into each other.

The core of the protocol is “Tokenized Baskets”. These are defined in ERC-4626. It presents a standard for yield-bearing vaults that make it interoperable across the entire DeFi stack. It is a powerful standardization in the DeFi system, similar to what ERC-20 did for fungible tokens. An asset manager can define their own fees and multiple strategies from active to passive. These can then easily be integrated into the rest of the DeFi ecosystem including automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap.

Yield pools help create lending pools on the blockchain, compatible with existing yield-bearing assets (think a-tokens from AAVE). Then there is a whole suite of derivatives built on top of these tokens and vaults – fully customizable options and futures contracts, perpetual futures, etc. There is something there for asset managers, traders, and degens alike.

There are a lot more nuances to the Factor protocol. You can dive deeper in the Factor Docs.

What is FCTR Token?

The FCTR token is the native protocol token of Factor DAO. It has similar tokenomics as Curve, i.e. the “ve” flywheel. For those unfamiliar, you lock up your FCTR tokens to get veFCTR tokens. These are not tradable. However, these give you a % of the protocol revenue and is used to make protocol governance decisions. The longer your lock-up period, the more ve tokens you get.

The maximum supply is 100MM FCTR tokens, with the team allocation of 15%. The public sale will have 10% of the tokens sold to the general public via Camelot DEX. There is a 50% treasury reserve, with the rest essentially for ecosystem incentives. Team vests their token linearly over 3.5 years.

At launch, 12.5% or 12.5MM FCTR tokens will be out in the wild.

How to Buy FCTR Token?

The best way to buy FCTR token currently is via Camelot DEX’s Launchpad. This is the public sale round for 10% of the tokens. The price will start at 0.1 USDC i.e. a $1MM minimum raise. However, we don’t expect this price to last during the sale event and the final price will likely be much higher. Make sure to do your due diligence on the token, protocol, and sale mechanics before you put any money in the primary public sale.

If you do decide to go down this route, follow these steps:

Step-1: Go to Camelot Launchpad for Factor.

Step-2: Connect your MetaMask to Arbitrum. If you don’t have Arbitrum network on your MetaMask, add it from Chainlist.

Step-3: Transfer ETH or USDC to Arbitrum. You can use the official Arbitrum bridge or multichain protocols like Hop or Multichain.

Step-4: On the day of the sale, make sure you have USDC on Arbitrum in your wallet. Use Kyber as an aggregator for best pricing or go directly to Uniswap (usually the best price, but there are a lot of other DEXes on Arbitrum that might be cheaper).

Step-5: Make sure you get your strategy of when to enter the sale figured out. Sale runs from 20 February 2023 at 18:00 UTC to 24 February 2023 at 18:00 UTC. Everyone will pay the same price at the end. The starting price of 0.1 USDC might not hold (unlikely in our opinion).

After the primary public sale ends, FCTR will trade on the secondary markets. We will update the post with those markets.

Here are the socials of Factor DAO if you want to stay in the loop on updates: Twitter, Telegram, Discord

Update-1: With 2 days remaining, the price of FCTR token has risen to over $0.5 per token, or a fully-diluted valuation of $52MM. However, the circulating marketcap would be around $17MM. There are still 2+ days left.

Mar 262021
 
Buy BANK token from Float Protocol

This is a guide on how to buy BANK token from Float Protocol and diving deeper into how Float works, what the protocol is trying to accomplish and the role of BANK token in the ecosystem.

What is Float Protocol?

Float protocol is a new “stablecoin” protocol except it is trying to be a crypto-native unit of account with low volatility as opposed to a traditional stablecoin like DAI that wants to be pegged to the USD. The token that does this is FLOAT. The advantage of a crypto-native denomination is that with minimal day to day fluctuations, the FLOAT token can become the default unit of account in the space while retaining some upside as the crypto market rises. An additional benefit is to reduce the risk of the US government clamping down on traditional stablecoins. In that scenario, an independent unit of account unpegged to the USD would be very valuable.

For the Float Protocol to accomplish its goals, it needs the BANK token to absorb some of the upside and downside volatility as the crypto markets see-saw. BANK is also the governance token of the protocol. Therefore if you are bullish on Float, then buy BANK and not FLOAT. The comparison here would be that BANK is similar to MKR and FLOAT to DAI.

It belongs in a category that several other projects are building too, notably RAI and FEI. However, Float Protocol seems to have several advantages such as a team that has delivered to date and a fair launch of the BANK token with really active community of holders and voters.

Float is also notable in creating a very fair initial token launch that rewarded active Ethereum protocol users as opposed to Whales. During the initial Phase-1 mining of BANK token, the team implemented a whitelist of addresses that previously participated in governance of other protocols. In addition, each address could stake at most $30k. This created a huge number of early satisfied users who have continued to remain active. Float has seen some of the most active governance participation rate in the entire DeFi ecosystem, which is a huge plus for it going forward especially compared to some VC coins. This has been instrumental in its steady rise in value since launch.

BANK price chart since launch

How to Buy BANK Token?

Step-1: Go to 1inch BANK exchange pair and select the token to pay with (ETH or another ERC20)

Step-2: Connect your Web3 wallet like MetaMask

Step-3: Accept the confirmation on MetaMask and wait for the transaction to get mined

Note: If you are paying with ETH, you can also directly go to the Sushi exchange to buy BANK. Currently, the Sushi pool is incentivized and not Uniswap, so although Uniswap also trades BANK, you are better off trading via 1inch to get the best order routing across all DeFi exchanges.

At the moment, BANK has a yield farming operation via the BANK/ETH LP on Sushi. This can earn you some BANK by being a liquidity provider for BANK with ETH on Uniswap. In order to participate, you will need to add liquidity to the existing BANK/ETH Uniswap pool. This will give you the UNI-LP tokens for this pool. Stake them here to start earning BANK.

Other Links

BANK etherscan

Float protocol homepage

Float protocol Medium blog

Float Discord

Mar 082021
 
buy alchemistcoin token

This is a guide on how to buy AlchemistCoin before the official release.

As you probably know, this crypto season DeFi is the hottest thing in town, and then NFTs arrived as hotter still. Everyone from Bloomberg to New York Times is writing about NFTs.

So naturally, as with all things crypto, the next biggest thing is to combine NFTs and DeFi in an ever exploding hype cycle while taking advantage of the market. Welcome to crypto 2021.

One of the hotter such projects is the AlchemistCoin. Speculation abounds on VC interest and connections to Paradigm. We are not interested to write about that, but we’ll help you buy the token if you’re not deterred by the above aka a true degen.

What is the AlchemistCoin?

The AlchemistCoin is a new way to yield farm. It is a way to provide LP tokens to get an NFT that you can then use to stake multiple LP tokens. This provides for a more flexible paradigm for yield farmers.

It actually has nothing to do with gaming or art NFTs that are hot, but in this hype, does it even matter? It combines NFTs and DeFi. This is its current chart –

Alchemist coin trading

The token hasn’t been widely released to the public and even sites like CoinGecko don’t currently have it listed. Their website isn’t even live at the moment. We’ll try and update the article with more information as it comes out.

How to Buy AlchemistCoin

Step-1: Go to 1inch and select your token to convert to ETH. Alternately, you can get ETH from centralized exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. If you already have ETH, skip to Step-2.

Step-2: Go to Uniswap app to buy AlchemistCoin with your ETH (direct link).

Step-3: Connect your Web3 wallet and finish the trade. Make sure to set a reasonable slippage threshold.

In case you’re starting from BTC or other non-Ethereum based tokens like Litecoin, use Binance to convert to ETH first, then withdraw to your Web3 wallet like MetaMask. Then use that ETH to participate in the DeFi ecosystem. Learn how to buy fractions of Ether.

Make sure you buy the right token since this is not yet listed on places like CoinGecko. This is the Etherscan link to the token. This is the Uniswap info page.

Feb 192021
 
DeFi on BSC yield farming

This is a guide on how to yield farm on BSC and an overview of DeFi on BSC. BSC, or Binance Smart Contract Chain is a new blockchain from Binance that is smart contract enabled and is compatible with EVM among other things, making it easier for Ethereum app developers to move to. It has seen a dramatic rise in usage and popularity among crypto users of late.

A lot of this interest is due to the fact that Ethereum gas prices have become really high.

A simple borrow from AAVE could set you back by $200 or more even if you are willing to wait for several hours for the transactions to complete. This is not sustainable for the small users. Even if you have a million dollar portfolio, and assuming you invest 1% of your portfolio i.e. 10,000 USD into a position, getting in and out and harvesting your yield farming assets could easily eat up 2-5% of the position size, a significant amount.

Unsurprisingly, users are looking for an easy way out of this. DeFi seems to be the first to make the move in a big way. DeFi on BSC has been increasing at an exponential rate, along with the price of BNB over the last week.

As an amazing milestone, it seems that Pancakeswap on BSC overtook Uniswap on ETH volumes. Some volume could be manipulated, but this is still a mind blowing milestone that most people in crypto would never have imagined even a month ago.

Pancakeswap overtakes Uniswap DeFi on BSC

Obviously, the DeFi on BSC ecosystem is not as mature and well developed as Ethereum, but lots of users are moving to BSC in search of low fees and alpha.

BSC vs. ETH – Pros and Cons

Let’s be very clear – most current DeFi on BSC projects are copycats of similar projects on Ethereum. However, most of the “food farming” on ETH were also copies of others. For example, once Sushiswap came out with SUSHI there was a whole host of other food farms that were simply copy-paste. So we should not dismiss BSC outright.

As with most things, this will likely drive innovation forward in the entire crypto space. Hopefully the ETH projects can learn from some of the successes of projects on BSC.

Our take right now is simple – gas on ETH is making it unusable for a subset of users who are moving to BSC. However, projects need to prove themselves beyond simple yield farming on BSC by innovating. The jury is still out.

Pros of BSC

  • Cheap gas. Transactions currently cost around $0.10 or 10 cents for yield farming, which about 100-1000 times less than on ETH.
  • Faster confirmations. BSC users proof of authority/proof of stake so transactions get confirmed faster than ETH.
  • More potential upside for yield farming. Newer projects with lower marketcap means the degenerate yield farmers have more fun and higher potential returns while the music plays.

Cons of BSC

  • BSC is centralized. Pretty much all nodes that can build on the blockchain are whitelisted by Binance.
  • BSC lacks the robust ecosystem of Ethereum.
  • Most projects currently are copy-paste from Ethereum projects.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into how you can yield farm on BSC and explore the DeFi on BSC worlds.

How to Yield Farm on BSC (DeFi on BSC)

We’ve outlined a 5-step procedure below on how to yield farm on BSC with the emerging DeFi on BSC. This assumes you are already familiar with yield farming and DeFi on Ethereum. If not, we wrote a guide for Bitcoiners on DeFi.

This is not totally a beginners guide, so if you’re stuck at any stage, leave a comment below and we’ll try to help.

Note that BSC users BEP20 token standard similar to Ethereum’s ERC20 standard for fungible tokens.

Step-1: Set up your environment

Install MetaMask on Chrome/Brave. If you already have MetaMask you can use the same address on BSC (although we suggest creating a new one for privacy reasons). You will need to configure your MetaMask for BSC.

To do this, click on MetaMask > Networks (center top) > Custom RPC. Then enter the following values:

RPC URL: https://bsc-dataseed.binance.org/

Chain ID: 0x38, 56 in decimal

Symbol: BNB

Block Explorer: https://bscscan.com

Here’s the complete guide if you’re stuck.

Step-2: Buy some BNB from Binance

Register an account with Binance and buy BNB using any other crypto or fiat. You can withdraw up to 2 BTC worth of BNB without KYC but make sure you’re not logging in from US (use a VPN if you’re in US).

Easiest way is to buy BNB using BTC but if you have ETH, you can easily swap ETH to BTC and then to BNB. Alternately, Binance has a simple ‘Swap’ functionality like Uniswap these days but the fees will be higher.

Step-3: Transfer BNB into your MetaMask on BSC chain

Once you’ve purchased BNB, withdraw it to your MetaMask account. You can confirm the withdrawal via BSC Scan. This should also show you any other BEP20 tokens you hold.

Step-4: Find out the yield farming projects on BSC

This of course is where the real alpha is. These are the resources that we currently use:

You can get into specific Discord and Telegram channels to try to get ahead of the game.

Step-5: Start yield farming and sell your harvests

Since the transaction fees on BSC are low and a lot of projects are currently in the “fly by night” mode, you would be wise to yield farm and sell your harvest frequently. This is especially true if you are yield farming in pool 2 or death pool.

Also, always remember to check 1inch for the best price. This is because similar to Uniswap/Sushiswap dynamic and others like Bancor and 0x on Ethereum can split liquidity, the same is happening on BSC as well. Therefore, the best way to buy BEP20 tokens is via 1inch. Since the gas is so low on BSC, the higher transaction fees that 1inch generally has is not a concern on BSC.

Here is an example of how 1inch can route a trade on the BSC network. This is to convert from BUSD, the stablecoin on BSC, to BNB token.

Order routing on BSC via 1inch

Useful protocols and resources for DeFi on BSC

Pancakeswap to sell your harvest. Similar to Uniswap or Sushiswap

Venus to borrow BNB or other BEP20 tokens like stablecoins, similar to AAVE or Compound.

Sign up to Binance to buy BNB and other BEP20 tokens quickly and cheaply.

Buy BEP20 tokens on 1inch.

Feb 132021
 
DeFi Guide BTC

Introduction to DeFi to BTC Hodlers

Bitcoin is a decentralized, censorship resistant store of value. DeFi, or decentralized finance is a while suite of financial applications all accessible to anyone with an internet connection. All these “DApps” are censorship resistant smart contracts on Ethereum and can work with all sorts of assets – ETH, tokenized BTC, tokenized USD (e.g. USDC, USDT, DAI, etc.) and a host of other assets.

Together, these form a web of interoperable protocols that have capability far beyond what’s possible in traditional finance.

You can use “tokenized BTC” as collateral to enter the DeFi world if you still want to retain BTC exposure. The way to do this is via WBTC or renBTC. More details below. However, note that these tokens have additional counterparty risk than simply holding BTC on the Bitcoin network.

Getting Started

Make sure you have your Bitcoin or fractions of Bitcoin ready to use for your DeFi journey.

The first thing you’ll need to do before you get started in DeFi is to set up your Ethereum wallet, sometimes referred to as a Web3 wallet. Unlike Bitcoin wallets that are primarily used to store BTC, a Web3 wallet does a lot of things for you –

  • Store ETH safely in a non-custodial manner so you never have to trust an exchange or third-party to hold your assets.
  • Store ETH-based tokens, including ERC20 tokens (fungible tokens), ERC721 tokens (non-fungible tokens), ERC1155 tokens, etc.
  • Interact with DApps (Decentralized Applications) on your behalf so that you can use an entire ecosystem of applications in a completely trustless manner, especially the DeFi apps.

For these reasons, MetaMask is by far the most popular Web3 wallet in use today. It is a simple chrome extension which prompts as a popup whenever you try to use a DApp like Compound or Uniswap. You can verify and sign the transaction to interact with the Web3 ecosystem.

MetaMask also supports hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor. If you have substantial amounts of money, we strongly suggest using a hardware wallet in conjunction with MetaMask.

The steps here are as follows:

  • Download and install MetaMask for Chrome or Brave.
  • Create a new wallet. Make sure you keep the 12 words secret and secure, and backed up. The 12 words can be used to derive all your private keys used by MetaMask. If you’re using a hardware wallet, this step can be omitted. Instead, connect MetaMask to your hardware wallet.
  • Set a strong password.

Enter the Ethereum Ecosystem

If you already have Bitcoin, then there are several ways to enter the Ethereum ecosystem.

Centralized Exchanges

You can start from BTC and trade it for ETH on centralized exchanges. For most people, Coinbase or Binance should be the preferred options for this trade since they are the largest and most trusted exchanges.

If you want higher safety, go with Coinbase. If you want more options, including trading a bunch of DeFi and other tokens, and be able to margin trade, go with Binance. These days, Binance has become the preferred exchange for most serious people and traders in crypto due to all the extra features it offers. More on buying fractions of Ether.

Pros: Cheap

Cons: Lack of privacy, need trusted intermediaries

Decentralized Exchanges

There is current a way to go from BTC to ETH in a fully privacy preserving way so your BTC and ETH addresses do not get associated with each other. This is via the Ren Protocol.

Note that this will cost around 0.1% in initial conversion from BTC to renBTC and another 0.3% or so from renBTC to ETH.

Step-1: Go to Ren bridge and create a BTC deposit.

Step-2: Wait for the transaction to complete.

Step-3: Create the transaction to redeem your renBTC on Ethereum. We suggest allowing an arbitrary time to pass to increase privacy.

Step-4: Go to 1inch and convert renBTC to ETH. Make sure to connect your wallet (via the MetaMask popup) and confirm the transaction that pops up in MetaMask. Note that you may need to do 2 transactions – one approval and one actual exchange.

1inch will automatically split and route your order via all the decentralized exchanges to give you the best price.

As you can see, 1inch is able to create complex routes through the entire DEX ecosystem to bring you the best price.

1inch renBTC to ETH

Step-5 (optional): Use Tornado Cash to enhance privacy. If you want to improve privacy, make sure to deposit the ETH you obtained into Tornado and withdraw it in another address. This is a completely trustless smart contract based mixer (unlike several BTC mixers that have been mostly scams).

However, be aware that the gas price is fairly high to use, so we suggest using this for 10 ETH and above.

At this step, you should have converted your BTC into ETH successfully!

Note: There may be other bridges coming online that convert BTC to ETH in a decentralized or semi-centralized manner. Do your research on how safe these are. When your intention is to immediately convert renBTC to ETH, the bridge is reasonably safe. We don’t recommend holding renBTC since there are additional centralization risks still with Ren.

Pros: Decentralized, privacy preserving.

Cons: Gas costs and other costs add up – expect close to 0.5%-1% depending on how much BTC you start with for the whole process.

Protocols and Tokens

Once you have the ETH in your MetaMask, it is time to go to town playing with DeFi!

The first two primitives we suggest are exchange and borrowing.

For exchange, if you want to buy any tokens, simply go to 1inch to get the best pricing. 1inch will source liquidity from over 20 protocols for you and find the best pricing and order routing. You can also go directly to exchange protocols like Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Balancer.

For a more in-depth guide on exchange, check our guide on buying DeFi tokens without KYC.

You can check out CoinGecko for some of the projects. CoinGecko is usually on top of adding new DeFi and other Ethereum projects.

Then, check out lending. You put in excess collateral and borrow against it. The best place for this is Aave. Another option is Compound.

Some of the DeFi blue chips are AAVE, SNX, LINK, UNI, YFI. You can also simply buy DPI, which is a DeFi index tracking several tokens.

If you’re feeling adventurous, check out some of the yield farms. Yield farming is a way to distribute a project’s tokens widely to users and other value providers. Make sure you thoroughly understand the risks you’re taking including smart contract risks and impermanent loss when you’re being a market maker.

As a first pass on smart contract validation, vfat has a good list of yield farms and a consistent and easy to use interface.

Other Ecosystems

There are other DeFi ecosystems that you can also explore. This is outside the scope of this guide, but you can check out Polkadot, Cosmos, Ava, BSC, etc. There are also primitives on arguably lower quality blockchains like Tron, and EOS as well but we do not recommend them as such.

Along with Ethereum, BSC (Binance Smart Chain) has entered into a thriving ecosystem of DeFi primitives and apps being built. One advantage of BSC is the transactions are far cheaper compared to Ethereum. The biggest disadvantage is its centralization risk. Read more about DeFi and yield farming on BSC if you’re interested.

However, if you’ve only been in BTC all these years, we strongly suggest getting familiar with the DeFi ecosystem on ETH since it is the most established and trusted.

Want us to cover something in greater depth or have any questions on the above? Drop us a comment or email us and we’ll be happy to help.

Feb 092021
 

This is a guide on how to buy TORN token from Tornado Cash. Tornado is a privacy and anonymity protocol on Ethereum. It helps users with this extra layer of privacy using a trustless mixer, with denominations of 0.1 ETH, 1 ETH, 10 ETH, and 100 ETH. It also works for ERC20 tokens like USDC, DAI, and USDT.

Tornado Cash has been in operation for a while now and has proven its effectiveness in real-world adversarial scenarios. To that end, the protocol has come up with its own token TORN. This is currently a governance-only token but it is not hard to see how it can become a value capture token via fees. The users of Tornado would not mind paying some fees for peace of mind and privacy.

TORN’s tokenomics is well thought out and the inflation schedule is very gradual with no bumpy lockups expiring. In addition, there are no pesky VCs in TORN’s allocation ready to dump on retail as soon as possible and bring down its value.

The allocation of TORN has been very fair, providing TORN to early users of the Tornado protocol and using TORN as an incentive mechanism to increase the number of users and total value locked (TVL) in the protocol. This is essential to the success of TORN and Tornado since the larger the anonymity set, the better it is for the users.

How to Buy TORN

If you want to buy TORN, the simplest way currently is through CowSwap. The reason for this is that CowSwap aggregates liquidity across multiple DeFi exchanges and most importantly, you won’t be affected by MEV sandwich attacks. Long and short of it – you will get the best execution price via CowSwap than directly sending your transaction via say Uniswap, Sushi, Curve, or Balancer. Use this especially if you have larger orders to buy or sell.

Another good way is to buy TORN on 1inch.

1inch has both its own liquidity pool for TORN/ETH but is also an aggregator. This means it will guarantee you a lower price to buy TORN than directly going to other DEXes like Uniswap. Here is the Uniswap pool for reference.

1inch is able to provide fairly sophisticated routes for your order, and even split it up into various protocols and DEXes to bring you the best price. Here’s an example going from YFI to TORN which combines 4 DEXes and protocols – Uniswap, Sushiswap, Balancer, and 1inch.

1inch also currently has a liquidity provider (LP) incentive which has increased the pool size. See the next section to learn more about this if you want to participate.

Buy TORN with YFI on 1inch

Note that DEX trades can take up decent gas, so if you are trading small amounts, it is better to trade on Binance instead. We don’t usually recommend CEXes but these gas prices are unusually unprofitable for anyone trading < 100 ETH batches.

How to Earn 1inch Tokens by Staking TORN/ETH (currently inactive)

1inch has a limited time liquidity providing incentive for TORN. This is a great way for you to earn some 1inch tokens while also earning liquidity provider fees on 1inch.

To access this, go to 1inch > DAO > Farming and select the ETH/TORN pair. The current APY is 200%. Remember that you take on impermanent loss risk by being an LP.

To become an LP, first buy TORN via 1inch, then add liquidity to the TORN/ETH LP pair on 1inch.

You can read the official 1inch announcement here.

How to Farm TORN

You can also farm TORN instead of buying TORN from an exchange. This is a long-term play since the amount of TORN that you earn depends on the time you are staked. However, this is good because TORN is gradually released into the market.

The mechanics are a bit complicated due to privacy considerations. You get AP tokens that you can convert on a special Balancer pool into TORN after you withdraw a note. Also, always check the gas prices since they can take up a significant amount of ETH for Tornado and thus reduce profitability.

You can read the TORN farming details here.

Jan 292021
 
how to buy opium token from opium finance

This is a guide on how to buy OPIUM token from Opium Finance project founded by Andrey Belyakov and team.

What is Opium Finance?

Opium finance or opium protocol is a general purpose derivatives protocol built on Ethereum. The protocol allows investors and traders to create new positions, settle existing positions, and trade them with other traders and investors.

Opium finance’s first financial product is an insurance product. This helps investors in the DeFi ecosystem hedge some of their risks. This is mostly protection against smart contract exploits, defaults, stablecoin insolvencies, and other risks inherent in the system.

Since the opium protocol is general purpose, the insurance product can be specified to contain custom logic. A good example of a general insurance use-case with Opium would be to protect against a USDT collapse if you are heavily exposed to Tether. Other protocols will have a harder time getting the data to settle this type of position.

To learn more, check out the opium protocol docs.

How to Buy Opium Token

If you want to buy the opium token, which is the native governance token of the opium finance protocol, follow these steps:

Step-1: Go to 1inch OPIUM/ETH pool. Note that 1inch pool currently has the highest liquidity, but that might change in the future. The good thing though is 1inch is also a liquidity aggregator, so it can route liquidity to get you the best execution for OPIUM.

Step-2: Connect your MetaMask or another Web3 wallet.

Step-3: Execute the trade. That’s it! You should have the OPIUM in your wallet after the transaction is confirmed.

If you are starting out with a non-ETH token, e.g. say YFI or LINK, then you don’t need to convert to ETH first. Instead, let 1inch figure out the route that gives the best price natively. Just change ETH to your token in the dropdown on 1inch.

If you don’t yet have any ETH or other ERC20 tokens, you can buy from Binance. Note that sometimes trading on Binance could be preferable over DeFi exchanges if the gas fees is very high and your trade size is not too large.

For the month of February 2021, there is a liquidity mining program for OPIUM along with 1inch. You will earn both OPIUM and 1inch tokens during this time. Check out this post from 1inch for more details.