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A new platform has launched for decentralized margin trading – and it’s not on Ethereum. Sovryn has debuted its options trading platform on Bitcoin smart contract network RSK, bringing decentralized swaps straight to the Bitcoin community. The move signals a shift in the pendulum that has seen much of the onchain BTC trading gravitate to Ethereum, where assets like WBTC are swapped and staked onchain.
Trading and lending are the primary use cases for Sovryn, which is poised to open its virtual doors to the public after completing a $2.1 million raise led by Greenfield One, Collider Ventures and Monday Capital. Collider Labs and BlockVenture have also contributed initial capital and close support. The platform is scheduled to go live today, allowing BTC traders to experience DEX swaps and DeFi tools in a scalable, low-fee environment.
Margin Trading and Liquid Swaps
The product of intensive development followed by three months of rigorous auditing, Sovryn is now ready for public consumption. BTC, USDT, and DOC, the Money on Chain stablecoin, can be traded with up to 5x leverage, all conducted onchain. The platform will also enable holders of these assets to earn interest by lending them. Sovryn promises to provide a liquid environment for token swaps, implemented through its custom AMM.
While the platform’s core products are non-custodial, there is also support for custodial trading. The advantages of building the platform on RSK are that it anchors Sovryn closer to Bitcoin, the hub around which the crypto world revolves. It also mitigates the issues with high fees and slow transactions that are endemic to Ethereum.
Handing Control to the Community
One of the next tasks on Sovryn’s roadmap will be rolling out a governance framework, based on the model pioneered by Compound. This system is widely used by DeFi projects and has been extensively battle-tested. Token holders will be able to submit proposals according to the number of SOV they own. Proposals that are passed by the community, once the minimum number of votes have been met, will be scheduled using a timelock contract.
The Sovryn platform packs in many of the features that DeFi users will be accustomed to from a year spent chasing yield, liquidity mining, and DEX trading. Decentralized oracles are used for tamper-proof pricing, an insurance fund protects against undercollateralized loans, and the open-source software has been subjected to meticulous security audits.
A New Era for Bitcoin Defi
Commenting on the launch of Sovryn, Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar of RSK parent company IOVlabs said: “Bitcoin provides the biggest addressable market for DeFi. RSK built on top of Bitcoin is the most secure smart contract platform in the world and enables greater scalability and low transaction costs. We are very excited about Sovryn trading and lending platform launch which provides a very strong offering to keep building momentum on the DeFi for Bitcoin space.”
When Bitcoin first launched, there were no block explorers or wallets and coins could only be sent by command-line interaction. The first tools for sending, receiving, and storing coins soon followed, though, including the BitcoinQt wallet created by Satoshi himself. By summer 2010, the first bitcoin exchange had launched, followed by Mt. Gox a year later.
A decade on and Bitcoin has transcended the blockchain and community that launched it. From big banks to solo DeFi traders, BTC is now everywhere, it seems, wrapped, tokenized, collateralized, and staked. The launch of Sovryn on RSK’s Bitcoin sidechain brings BTC full circle while bolstering the ways in which bitcoin can be used to enrich its holders.
