ON–132: Derivatives (part 2)
Coverage on Katana and Opyn.
Aug 5, 2022
👥 jp12
- Katana is an asset management protocol building investment products across the risk spectrum. It was the grand champion out of 568 project at the first annual Solana conference. Today, Katana mainly sells structured products such as “Covered Calls” and “Put Selling” vaults. So far, $650m worth of options have been traded on the platform. However, the bear market has not been kind to the protocol TVL as it has decreased to $10m which is about 75% from the high around $40m in Jan 2022.
- In the bear markets, users gravitate towards the strongest assets. And in crypto, there’s nothing stronger than Bitcoin. In this bear market, the BTC covered call vault is seeing fewer BTC deposits than it did in January but the number of weekly users remain consistent since the end of January.
- The BTC Put Selling vault has been quite popular in the bear market and is still attracting large deposits in June. The number of weekly users has also increased compared to January. When the market turns, the behavior between these two vaults will likely flip.
- Opyn is a base layer options infrastructure protocol, allowing users to buy, sell, and create options on ERC-20s. TVL in the ecosystem still remains positive YTD, with around 20k more ETH even during the market's recent downturn.
- Opyn is also the creator of Squeeth, the first power perpetual meant to track ETH². Squeeth volume remains relatively constant with total cumulative volume surpassing $280m.
- Opyn launched its new version of its highly requested Crab strategy. Crab strategy utilizes Opyn’s Squeeth to create a short volatility vault for DeFi traders. Due to the demand, capacity was raised from 800 - 1492 ETH, putting the combined v1 and v2 vault’s TVL at $2.88m (reference ETH $1,659).
