For the first time in human history, there would be a level playing field for everyone to access yields, leverage & liquidity for their crypto. Historically, only hodlers and whales could access these financial tools as the high fees would eat up all profits from small transactions.
This changes with the introduction of Market. We are here to help all crypto users — whether hodlers or traders, whether regular people or whales — to access this emerging ecosystem of financial tools with near-zero fees, thanks to Polygon’s low-fee infrastructure.
Introducing Market
Bringing Isolated Pools to Polygon
We are introducing the Polygon community to isolated pools, allowing anyone to create a pool for borrowing & lending assets. Isolated pools mean that the risks of one market doesn’t overflow into other markets. The pool creators can set up the pool to suit their communty’s risk profile without creating additional risk for other pools, meaning they choose their Oracles (pricing “APIs”), interest rate curves, liquidation terms, fees, etc. Token holders can choose between competing pools with different terms to maximize their yield according to their risk profile.
With the pool going live, users (including the pool creator) can then deposit capital, spread the word of the pool, meet borrowers/lenders on their terms, and as such, Market enables anyone to create their own money market.
We started with building on top of and partnering with Rari Capital — the creators of Fuse Protocol, and the pioneers behind introducing isolated pools on the Ethereum Mainnet, to help us bring isolated pools to Polygon. This partnership allows us to implement a well-tested and robust framework to create value for our pool participants from Day 1.
From a philosophical standpoint, Market will make DeFi even more decentralized. Historical DeFi meant open-state in terms of open-source & open-deployment (traditional blockchain open-access). However, participants were still limited to the liquidity pools, and risk profiles set out by the respective yield protocol’s DAO (think Compound & Cream governance). Market changes this as now there’s also open-creation and open-risk-management. This openness, combined with the powerful financial possibilities, form our belief that Market will be the category-defining product of DeFi, starting from the Polygon ecosystem.
Further, the Market protocol combines the idea of superfluid collateral with market-of-markets which is a complete rethinking of the first principles of the finance industry. Historically the highest-impact innovations have come from transforming closed-state networks to open-state networks. Through isolated pools on Market, virtual-asset-lending is on the verge of becoming open-state.
Preliminary Roadmap of Market
Our short-term mission with Market is to enable the Polygon community to make the most out of isolated lending markets. Medium-term, we want to help regular people be part of the governance for isolated markets. The long-term mission is to democratize access to financial tools and collateralize every global asset.
Market and Rari Capital are on a mission to take this world from the corrupt hedge funds and centralized institutions that have hurt the masses for centuries and give it back to the people. This begins with a yield.
On the journey of democratizing finance
Our mission is to make crypto borrowing & lending accessible for everyone. Unfortunately, for the average person, the fees required to enter & exit a yield pool generally means that they could only put their biggest holdings into staking — while traders know that the fees are too high to even consider getting short-term interest.
With Market coming to Polygon, we introduce a sophisticated and decentralized lending infrastructure where users can create and participate in money-markets that suit their risk profiles, with staggering low fees.
Market enables crypto communities that are early in the journey or have a token with a small market cap to turn their holdings into recognized collateral classes and leverage against it. This will enable participants to borrow and lend certain assets on Market that they can’t access on other platforms like Compound or Aave.
Making Lending Markets a DeFi-pillar-stone
The roadmap ahead, in short, medium, and long-term, is packed with exciting milestones.
You may expect a novel pool interface rethinking the first principles since Compound’s instantiation with separate interfaces for farmers and degens within the near future.
Farmers can easily customize how they want to earn yields. For example, they can easily leverage long-tail assets in a way where they decide which other collateral is used in the pools, as visualized in an easy leverage product.
Market will soon launch on other networks like Fantom, Avalanche, Optimism and Arbitrum.
Collateralize NFTs and other exotic assets
So far, collateralization of exotic assets like NFTs was only possible if you had special contacts and high-value items. However, this changes as Market is soon to meet an NFT Oracle.
The success of Polygon in the NFT space has opened a wide opportunity for NFT based value exchange. As it is today, the NFT market has a lot of long-term holders that would want to earn interest on their assets, with many lenders willing to take NFTs as collateral. However, there’s no good platform to access such liquidity easily. Market aims to change that by allowing easy transacting against non-traditional-assets.
We want to make it easy for all NFT-holders globally to get liquidity by allowing any user to create a liquidity pool with any oracle of choice.
Our long-term thesis is that the rise in any token’s intrinsic value by its collateralization, speeds crypto’s vision of tokenizing all assets.
More active & sophisticated DAO Governance
Technology contributors, token contributors, and Rari DAO will aid in instantiating the Market DAO. Deployment by Rari DAO ensures decentralization and audit of all off-chain consensus on the launch of the Market DAO.
The governance of liquidity pools which allows anyone to create their own pool in a permissionless manner requires improved voting mechanisms. Unfortunately, the blue-chip Defi protocols cannot adopt or experiment with these sophisticated mechanisms due to the high cost of voting on Ethereum.
Polygon’s low fees make it more feasible to both implement sophisticated smart contracts and have high participation. In addition, things that have been proven and tested in DAO’s such as quadratic voting, proof of knowledge airdrops, digital courts, etc., can prove helpful.
Exotic governance solutions like certainty-voting, claim-reputation, relational-argument-proposals, etc., can be experimented with to build sophisticated governance that seeks to implement idea meritocracy by being more inclusive of everyone’s opinion so that the future of finance really can benefit everyone.
It’s not just the future of finance; it’s the future of our world.
Keep updated
Check out all live pools and metrics on our website market.xyz. Follow the official Market Twitter handle, and join the discussion in Discord. Stay tuned!
