Recently, the name SBF has frequently appeared in the ears of DEFI miners. Because of his place, the project currency is at risk of being smashed and unable to rise for a long time. Miners naturally pay special attention to its movements.
In fact, SBF is not just a miner holding a large amount of funds, but a financial genius with extensive experience on Wall Street. He once worked as a traditional ETF trader, founded a secondary market quantitative trading company and investment institution Alameda Research, and later founded the digital currency derivatives centralized exchange FTX.
Beginning in 2020, SBF's sight has begun to extend to the decentralized world of blockchain, and the focus is on the field of decentralized finance, which is DEFI. In the following year, SBF deployed multiple tracks in the field of decentralized finance, with the intention of creating an ecosystem that includes the construction of a complete DEFI infrastructure.
These layouts started with the launch of the Decentralized Exchange Serum Agreement by SBF in cooperation with Alameda Research founded by itself in early 2020, and gradually touched all aspects of DEFI.
The tracks and projects involved include decentralized exchange (DEX) Serum, front-end platform Bonfida, liquidity protocol Raydium, lending protocol + synthetic asset protocol Oxygen, and application scenarios Maps.me, etc.
Today we introduce two of them: Serum and Oxygen
Serum DEFI universe on the Solana chain
Serum is a fully decentralized trading platform DEX developed based on the Solana public chain. It is mainly aimed at the trading of encrypted asset derivatives, which is also a familiar track for SBF. Unlike most DEXs on Ethereum, Serum uses an order book rather than an AMM mechanism.
The choice of this pre-order mechanism is to meet the low-cost, fast trading and high-frequency trading features required by derivatives exchanges, and these features are guaranteed by the high performance of the Solana public chain, which is why Serum chose to develop on the Solana public chain.
Because Solana is known as the fastest blockchain in the world, it can help Serum achieve more than 50,000 transactions per second, with a fee as low as $0.0001.
Such performance is unimaginable on the Ethereum chain, and it has an extremely important role for DEX whose main business is trading, especially for DEX whose main trading object is derivatives. Such performance also makes Serum's efficiency comparable to that of payment giants in the traditional financial world.
In fact, in addition to being a decentralized exchange based on the order book mechanism, Serum also uses Solana's wormhole cross-chain function to develop a cross-chain transaction protocol to convert ERC20 assets on the Ethereum chain and assets on the Solarna chain. Serum has also developed Serum USD, a stable protocol coin based on a basket of stable coins.
The purpose of these functions is to realize the connection with the Ethereum public chain, reduce the difficulty for developers and users to obtain funds from the Ethereum ecosystem, and provide basic tools for the development of DEFI business for their own ecology, and improve the DEFI basic modules.
It can be seen that SBF is built using Serum as a DEFI infrastructure , and the entire DEFI layout is developed around this basic ecology. Therefore, some people call this ecology that accommodates the entire DEFI infrastructure construction as the Serum universe of SBF.
Serum's target is the decentralized version of the FTX exchange, which will be built as a spot and derivatives trading platform on the Solana public chain, and will provide liquidity and other infrastructure for the entire ecosystem.
We know that in the world of DEFI, the three most important tracks are trading, lending and derivatives.
Oxygen hit the three tracks with the greatest potential of DEFI in one go
Nature of the Oxygen Agreement
The product that carries the functions of lending, asset management and derivatives issuance in the Serum universe is the Oxygen platform. In fact, it also has the functions of DEX trading and exchange.
The core of the agreement: According to the official website, the Oxygen agreement is a decentralized finance (DEFI) chain prime broker business agreement.
However, the term prime broker is very professional, and it is difficult for people without financial background to understand it. In fact, it is a concept in traditional finance and a core business in traditional financial markets.
Let's first understand this concept.
The so-called Prime Brokerage (Prime Brokerage referred to as PB) refers to one-stop financial services provided to institutional investors, professional investors or high-net-worth individual investors.
For example, fund clearing, delivery and settlement, custody, valuation, risk control, operation, asset statement preparation, trading, leverage, investment research support, margin financing and securities lending, design and execution of derivatives, and capital introduction, etc.
It can be understood as putting investors in different financial service institutions to do things, or different financial services provided by different financial institutions on one platform or one project.
It can be seen that this business of prime brokers is mainly for centralized and professional investment and fund management services for institutional investors and professional investors, such as high-level financial services , fund coordination, and margin trading.
It is generally provided by investment banks, commercial banks and other large-scale centralized financial institutions that have the ability to connect different market participants. These various types of market participants may include hedge funds, pension funds, asset management companies, insurance companies, institutional investors, liquidity providers, and so on.
It can also be seen that the threshold of this service is very high, and it is impossible for ordinary users to enjoy such a service. Because of the nature of services such as risk management, capital coordination, and financing, it involves very high professional capabilities, resource capabilities and capital costs.
The fundamental goal of the agreement: Oxygen chose such a business model to cut into the field of decentralized finance. Obviously, it wants to bring the ultra-high barriers to specialization and in-depth financial services in the traditional world into the world of DEFI , So that ordinary people can enjoy such high-level services.
To have such a bold idea, the most basic resources should be the trust mechanism brought by blockchain technology and the DEFI model, the ability to reduce costs, the permission-free entry mechanism, and the composability of different financial services and other new era characteristics.
On this basis, Oxygen has also made some choices that are more conducive to the overall goal. For example, the Solana public chain was selected for efficiency, high performance and cost reduction. Serum was chosen because it has the infrastructure to start the entire DEFI, and the project’s The team, investors and SBF (SBF is Oxygen's consultant) have senior background and resources in the traditional financial industry.
Another more important option is to cooperate with another super application of Solana Eco, the map APP maps.me. Maps.me has just completed a financing of 50 million US dollars and has 140 million registered users.
Regardless of the user base that Oxygen can attract through other channels, just maps.me 100 million-strong user base makes Oxygen's vision a more likely possibility: making it easier for the general public to use. Previously, only professional investment.
The main trend of future finance must be to move these complex financial processes from a fragmented platform to a professional one-stop service, until a simple application can achieve one-click operation. This is an idea with a very big vision. If it is made, it will be an aircraft carrier-level financial service platform. Oxygen actually wants to do such a thing.
