Our mission at Opium is to create permissionless infrastructure for financial products — but not just for Decentralized Finance!
Most derivatives listed on our Opium Exchange today are focussed on Decentralized Finance, however Opium Protocol can also be used by companies from the traditional financial sector.
Opium as a platform for testing your value proposition
Opium Protocol can be used by anyone or any organization that wants to create a new derivative contract and bring it to market. In fact, we are already working with four external companies to bring their derivative ideas to Opium!
Creating a derivative in the traditional financial sector will likely cost you a million. On Opium Protocol, configuring, launching and listing a new derivative contract can be done in under an hour!
Imagine you are a startup that seeks to create a financial product as a new value proposition. You will likely experience some significant(and costly!) roadblocks that will prevent you from launching your derivative in traditional finance. Using permissionless infrastructure for financial derivatives can mitigate these roadblocks!
The need for decentralized olive oil futures
Let’s consider one of our partners as an example. We are collaborating with Oliva futures to bring olive oil futures to the market. The people and organizations behind the Oliva futures initiaive are deeply involved in the Spanish olive oil market and see a real need for financial instruments to hedge risks caused by volatility of product prices.
In Spain, the native Oilive Oil Futures Market has completely disappeared because of very strict regulations and requirements imposed by local regulators. Combined with a very volatile market for olive oil products (due to the COVID-19 pandemic), this situation has caused a lot of financial damage to olive oil farmers who were unable to hedge their production risks using derivatives.
The project initiatior behind Oliva futures is dr. Ismael Santiago Moreno — a doctor in Finance at the University of Seville. The initial idea was focussed on launching their own cryptocurrency “Olivacoin”, but since then the team has pivoted to the idea of creating olive oil future contracts. Instead of building their own infrastructure from scratch, they have decided to launch their product on Opium Protocol, since it drastically reduces the cost and efforts required for their go-to-market. Opium Team is currently assisting the team in configuring the derivatives contracts, which will also be listed on Opium Exchange — offering the Oliva Futures team a global platform for offering their derivatives.
Oliva futures aims to become an innovative alternative to the Spanish olive oil futures market, which no longer exists. For more information about Oliva futures, please get in touch with dr. Ismael Santiago Moreno.
Instead of building their own infrastructure from scratch, they have decided to launch their product on Opium Protocol, since it drastically reduces the cost and efforts required for their go-to-market.