We’ve been fascinated by decentralized finance and are thrilled to be a part of this new wave of financial innovation. We want to focus our efforts on building products that can empower people through an inclusive, fair, and open financial system. While building the margin trading platform, we’ve come across problems in DeFi that we’re more excited to solve and that we think have more of a unique long term benefit to DeFi than the current iteration of the margin trading product. In order to fully focus our efforts on these new areas, we will no longer be maintaining the margin trading platform. While you will still be able to interact with the platform for now, we will be taking down the interface one month from now on October 15th.

We deeply value our users and being able to provide top notch support to ensure a seamless experience for products we build. Unfortunately, at the moment we can’t provide a high quality of support and maintenance or improve the margin trading product while we also continue to explore other directions, and so we’ve had to make the hard decision of discontinuing the current product in the next month.

We are so grateful to everyone who has used the product, provided feedback, and helped us develop the margin trading platform. We’re excited about what’s coming next and are looking forward to sharing more :)

What exactly is happening to the margin trading product

We will no longer be actively maintaining the margin trading platform and will discontinue the interface one month from now on October 15th. You will still be able to interact with your Long ETH positions via the dYdX interface + contracts and with any other pairs from Opyn’s contracts. We recommend that users close out positions they have open on the platform while the UI is still available.

Takeaways

We wanted to share some of our takeaways from building the margin trading product:

Small niche in a well-served market : When we started developing the margin trading platform it was to quickly build a simple way for individuals to go long or short on ERC20s — the first version of the product didn’t even support ETH. We quickly realized that the main use case for margin trading in DeFi right now is to go long ETH, and focused on supporting this use case. However, there are many platforms in DeFi that provide stellar support for going long ETH. Moreover, the primary user group for decentralized margin trading is composed of individuals who have a strong understanding of financial concepts and who are often looking for a more “pro trading” experience. While there is a secondary group of users looking for simplicity that our product provides, this user group is still relatively small.

: When we started developing the margin trading platform it was to quickly build a simple way for individuals to go long or short on ERC20s — the first version of the product didn’t even support ETH. We quickly realized that the main use case for margin trading in DeFi right now is to go long ETH, and focused on supporting this use case. However, there are many platforms in DeFi that provide stellar support for going long ETH. Moreover, the primary user group for decentralized margin trading is composed of individuals who have a strong understanding of financial concepts and who are often looking for a more “pro trading” experience. While there is a secondary group of users looking for simplicity that our product provides, this user group is still relatively small. Lack of defensibility: The ability to compose financial primitives into new applications is remarkable. A small team was able to build a margin trading platform from scratch in a matter of weeks — this is impossible in the traditional financial system. The composability of DeFi primitives allowed us to build long and short positions without having to bootstrap our own two sided marketplace (through integration with Compound and Uniswap), engage with multiple exchanges at once to get users the best price on their trades (Kyber integration), and to bring 6x leverage to DeFi (dYdX integration). We’ve been so excited to see users interacting with the platform. We’ve even seen volumes steadily increasing. However, the main network effects are accrued in these base platforms, rendering our margin trading platform as it exists today difficult to defend and difficult to develop a sustainable business model for. We are looking forward to continued iteration and innovation on business models in DeFi.

We really want to thank the folks at Compound, Uniswap, Maker, and dYdX for their support as we built this!

Feedback or Questions

If you have any questions or feedback we would love to chat. You can reach us on our Discord or at hello@opyn.co. To get updates on what’s next, you can sign up for our mailing list here.