High level overview of Opium

The market for financial derivatives is the largest in the world. Some estimate it to be more than 1.2 quadrillion USD (1’200’000’000’000’000 USD), which is 10 times more than the world’s GDP. For centuries, financial markets are controlled by large investment banks and other trusted agents who provide clearing, settlement and trading for derivatives.

With the maturing of blockchain technology it becomes possible to transfer traditional functions of banks and intermediaries to a trustless, distributed and immutable system. This lowers costs, enhances security and at the same allows approximately 1.7 billion unbanked people to take part in the world's financial system.

Like in a classical derivatives market, users of Opium can be:

• investors

• hedgers

• speculators

• margin traders

• or arbitrageurs

And unlike classical markets, there are also:

• relayers

• product designers

• contract executors

• and front end developers

The designed ecosystem transfers the clearing, settlement and trading functions from centralised agents to the blockchain, with support of relayers. Core and sensitive functions are stored on-chain and all computational intense processes are run on the overlay of relayers, but verified on-chain. Relayers are motivated by commission fees and can also carry out arbitrage functions between different orders, markets and ecosystems.

The developers of the Opium Protocol are professional derivatives traders and fund managers, mathematicians and developers, who bring together the best from the old and innovative markets. We also took lessons from the existing distributed finance solutions and adopted it in the philosophy of the Opium protocol. For example we don't have a utility token and we share fees with the active community, not only parties who have professional equipment for running relays.