[REVIEW] [GF: Phase 1, Voting Cycle 7] Overtime Markets

Supporting Public goods and advancement of the Layer2 Ecosystem has been the core values of Optimism and Thales Protocol is on that path hence the need to support them at this Critical time.

Thales Protocol/Overtime Market will help to promote, scale and support upcoming Public goods on the Optimism network and Layer2 Ecosystem in general.

Every support giving to Thales Protocol will be a win win for the Optimism Network.

So their asking for 300k OP token to help them scale is a good move not just for Optimism Network alone but Layer2 Ecosystem in general.

Finally I will humbly appeal that Optimism Governance fund grant this all important request.

Vision24.

6 Likes

I’m a pretty outspoken fan of what Overtime are doing and am glad they’ve put the work into a proposal here. The timing is perfect for what they’re intending to roll out.

On a per-user basis, hoping to know – what are these fee rebates going to look like? If I place a bet, how much of a rebate do I expect to get, and how would it be distributed?

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Hi @jackanorak great to hear you vouch for OT,

The current fee rebate model is currently implemented as per TIP-90 (Thales: Permissionless Parimutuel markets.)

"The maximum amount of bi-weekly rewards established are 8,000 OP tokens and 8,000 THALES tokens.

The leaderboard will calculate rewards as 90% rebate of the SafeBox fee, which is 2% of total amount paid in sUSD.

The $ value of OP and THALES will be calculated using a 7 days twap at the start of the period.

If at the end of the two weeks period the total rebates end up being more than the initial twap value of OP and THALES tokens, the rebate will be adjusted proportionally for every trader."

Users are able to see the leaderboard here: Sport Positional Markets built on Thales

Hope this helps!

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This op token would help a lot the project and it’s user to further developpe their technologie, interaction and give some fame to a project that deserve it !!

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I’m not so sure that OP distribution via Thales is long term good. I can only see a farmers that use actual campaign for OP and when that stop no one come back to use again. IMHO long term not good conceived campaign

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I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #65 by mastermojo ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote

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This proposal is driven by the Thales team my questions are:

-Is Overtime Markets a Thales product?

  • Thales won a phase 0 grant and we have not seen results yet, are there any performance metrics from Thales?

This was their previous proposal:

  • If I remember correctly, the Thales team after winning phase 0 resubmitted for phase 1, which was rejected because they had not yet demonstrated results from the previous phase.

  • The proposer and the team is the same as the Thales team, is this correct?

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Can Thales provide details on the above grants, in your proposal of 10% of 900k tokens, was intended for builders can you update us, as well as your LM program?

According to your phase 0 proposal part of the funds would be used to incentivize part of the users of your products, overtime markets is not included in this?

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Overtime Markets is a product built on top of the Thales core infrastructure. The foundation market contracts used for Thales marketplace and the ThalesAMM contract were found to be a perfect fit to develop an instance of the contracts to revolve around Sports markets. With amazing relationship with Chainlink and their willingness to leverage Overtime to showcase their sports data capabilities, this is how Overtime was born. It is a separate product built using the Thales core infrastructure.

Overtime was not included into Thales OP token allocation distribution from Phase 0 because the product did not exist at that time. Phase 0 allocation was mostly designated towards THALES/WETH liquidity and thalesmarket.io product usage. We are considering the OP token incentives to be highly successful in what they were designated towards. Down below you can see some relevant metrics of Thales Marketplace growth since the start of OP incentives.

  • Monthly Trading Volume increased from ~$350k per month to ~$2.5M trading volume per month
  • Daily Unique Traders increased from ~10 to ~50
  • Daily Trades Executed increased from ~30 to ~200
  • Discord Members increased from ~2,000 to ~5,500
  • THALES token on-chain liquidity increased 5x and remained stable at around $2m of effective liquidity on the incentivized pool at around a stable ~100% APY.

There are already clear positive results around the effects of the OP token towards growth, marketing and exposure, even though most of Thales Phase 0 allocation still has ~3 months of distribution period that will remain true to the original Phase 0 proposal.

@OPUser shared his findings around Thales Phase 0 distribution results here: Goverance Fund Accountability - An overview

Regarding the question around Builders on Thales. The 90,000 OP tokens allocated towards community builders on top of Thales remain unallocated in the Thales treasury since there was not much initiatives yet. These will remain reserved as future incentives for community builders willing to work on structured products for Thales and/or alternate front-ends and similar initiatives.

Even though Overtime product was not included in Phase 0, we subsequently took around 15,000 OP tokens from the Protocol Usage bucket of Thales and distributed them as various incentives towards Overtime product users for the past 2 months. These small experimental incentives showed to be very effective towards bringing new attention to the product.

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Can you indicate where I get the funds from?

image

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The 15,000 OP (matched with 15,000 THALES tokens) funds used to short-term trial incentive program for Overtime were used from the highlighted 360,000 OP allocation towards Thales Products Users (thalesmarket.io Trading Incentives) that were still not committed from Thales treasury by the governance structure by the time Overtime launched. These funds were originally intended towards thalesmarket.io future Trading Competitions, new Referral Program promotions, Exotic Markets product growth next to the already committed AMM Trading Incentives and Gamified Staking trading incentives that take over the majority of those 360,000 OP tokens. Our Governance Structure agreed to take out 15,000 OP tokens towards Overtime from the original allocation for this trial as Overtime is held at the highest potential for global market fit. Also, maybe it is important to note that we are in constant communication with Optimism and they are as excited as we are about the growth potential of Optimism native Overtime. They are continuously assisting us with third-party tooling, introductions, growth advice and technical support.

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Really like the value proposition. I do believe gaming could bring value of web3 in general.

Could you please help with few points.

70% as incentives in form of Fee Rebates to create an inviting environment to help with the Overtime growth and user increase.

how would you describe “inviting environment” ? As a user what would i need to do to be part of this incentives ? How will the distribution plan look like ? You mention fee rebates, in current state how does this look like. could you please paint a picture for us.

30% as targeted events…

Similarly here, you have a space of 30K which is pretty big. How would you do this and where ?

KPIs are really well defined.

Project with match co-incentives with THALES tokens to a certain degree that will be determined by the governance structure.

when can we expect more info on this ?

how would you describe “inviting environment” ? As a user what would i need to do to be part of this incentives ? How will the distribution plan look like ? You mention fee rebates, in current state how does this look like. could you please paint a picture for us.

By offering Fee Rebates to users, the user/trader would feel more comfortable trading on Overtime knowing that he will get OP+THALES rewards proportional to the amount of fees they generated. This is especially beneficial for growth of the project and for UX for end traders as it will create a lucrative environment for Sports Positioning compared to centralized competitors, especially as Overtime already offers the best rates in the industry. We are highly optimistic that this specific initiative will prove to be the most impactful one, especially as organically the Fee Rebate emissions should be on the low side compared to other incentive structures such as LP mining.

30% as targeted events…
Similarly here, you have a space of 30K which is pretty big. How would you do this and where ?

Targeted Events allocation is basically focused incentives (trading competitions, per-game incentives, incentives specific for certain tournament brackets) for exclusive sporting events and new offerings that are the most popular globally. These focused campaigns tend to be a major tool in bringing new attention to the product as this industry is mostly event driven.

Project with match co-incentives with THALES tokens to a certain degree that will be determined by the governance structure.
when can we expect more info on this ?

Co-incentives are solidified during the detailed planning of emissions during the internal governance sessions as to find a best possible matching balance for that specific period in time. So far, the Thales governance structure matched all incentives almost equally.

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We belive Overtime (sports betting) can be one of the early killer apps for Optimism as this areas is not strongly held back by current blockchain limitations and can attract many users with specific events. Consequently, the Fifa Worldcup could be a great occassion to bring in additional users to OT & OP.

It seems you never had unincentivized usage.

  • Do you think the fee rebates are essential? How did you come up with the expectation of 20 to 40% increase in user numbers based on fee rebates?
  • If pricing & fees are already better than on centralized platforms and aren’t holding back adoption, 100% focus on user experience and marketing towards user acquisition would be better usage of funds, right? (currently happy users might not need a fee rebate aka unnecesary cost for the Optimism ecosystem and it could be spent on growth instead)

For new products, we’d prefer to see unincentivized, organic usage for some time. Otherwise, it’s really hard to tell whether pricing is (un)attractive to users or if there are other issues to adoption.

Generally, our experience with prediction markets and providing capital in such pools has been that liquidity is a major barrier and it’s tough to find (opposite) parties for certain markets (especially with little trading fees in early stage). Is this an area that holds you back or is it a non-issue for Overtime/Thales? (Hence, there is no focus on this matter in the proposal)

We see that Overtime and Thales are different products & proposals target different areas. Nonetheless, in our opinion it would be best for the Op ecosystem to issue grants for specific goals within the next 6 months (incl. builder initiatives) and have ecosystem teams “spend these tokens” on sustainable growth initiatives (or give them back?) instead of “sitting on tokens” for future usage.

Obviously, this also depends on the demand side and we don’t want to encourage a rapid spending of tokens for uncertain initiatives… but potentially Overtime could use more of these Thales OP tokens to grow adoption… and Thales + Overtime can request more tokens in the future.

Looking forward to your replies!

  • Do you think the fee rebates are essential? How did you come up with the expectation of 20 to 40% increase in user numbers based on fee rebates?

We determined that the fee rebates seem to be the most effective low-cost growth tool. They are low emissions compared to straight volume incentives and are more inviting towards organic usage, instead of drawing in farmers only. As sports positioning industry is a constant competition around who will provide the best odds, giving a fee rebate rewards to users gives Overtime an edge using tokenization against limited centralized solutions. This brings more eyes to Overtime and provides a solid stream of new organic growth since farmers cannot take advantage of a fee rebate system without taking on positioning risk.

  • If pricing & fees are already better than on centralized platforms and aren’t holding back adoption, 100% focus on user experience and marketing towards user acquisition would be better usage of funds, right? (currently happy users might not need a fee rebate aka unnecesary cost for the Optimism ecosystem and it could be spent on growth instead)

Overtime does provide highly competitive sports positioning terms compared to centralized solutions and is constantly working on iteratively improving UX and constant new exposure campaigns. Having 70% of this OP grant proposal planned towards long-term fee rebate program fits into UX and marketing tool at the same time. It solidifies Overtimes edge in the industry regarding user experience, and it gives further incentives for non-crypto people to make an effort towards learning about onboarding the Optimism network, using EVM compatible wallet and educating themselves around Web3 for a clear benefit. These are not trivial efforts for non-crypto people but are necessary for increase in adoption of Optimism and Overtime with it. We would not call fee rebates unnecessary cost as it represents one of the most effective and non-toxic growth incentives.

Generally, our experience with prediction markets and providing capital in such pools has been that liquidity is a major barrier and it’s tough to find (opposite) parties for certain markets (especially with little trading fees in early stage). Is this an area that holds you back or is it a non-issue for Overtime/Thales? (Hence, there is no focus on this matter in the proposal)

We are using an elegant novel AMM contract that seeds liquidity to sports markets based on Chainlink provided pre-game odds. Every created game market is a separate contract that is seeded with on-demand liquidity by a global SportsAMM contract and we think this liquidity model is a worlds first working model for these type of markets. Liquidity of games is not an issue requiring incentives as it is currently 100% seeded from the treasury that takes on the risk until we develop a external LP system with revenue share. Keep in mind the novel AMM is super capital efficient and it does not require massive collateral for high demand. To learn more about it, visit this link: https://docs.overtimemarkets.xyz/decentralized-sports-markets/sports-amm

We see that Overtime and Thales are different products & proposals target different areas. Nonetheless, in our opinion it would be best for the Op ecosystem to issue grants for specific goals within the next 6 months (incl. builder initiatives) and have ecosystem teams “spend these tokens” on sustainable growth initiatives (or give them back?) instead of “sitting on tokens” for future usage.

Fee Rebates incentives would be committed until they are depleted and are not possible to have a fixed timed emissions. Fee Rebate emissions are proportional the usage of Overtime. Bucket of 30% towards targeted campaigns are also impossible to time right now since it requires to be highly adaptable to upcoming major events in the world of Sports.

2 Likes

Recommendation from DeFi committee C

Value-Add
Overtime Market is a unique product implemented on the Optimism chain. Launched 2 months ago and achieved some traction already - partially due to incentives from Thales incl. OP. The proposal can help Overtime & Optimism gain users.

Traction
Until now, Overtime Market has been performing well in attracting early power users & almost 1K total users.

Metrics achieved in 65 days since launch on Optimism:

  • 943 unique traders
  • 8,609 total trades
  • above 200 txns per day
  • 15 supported sports leagues and rising
  • $1,041,389 Settled Volume
  • $2.1M Notional Volume
  • above 60 Unique Daily Users on average incl. daily new users

Amount
The requested amount is 300K $OP tokens, which is a reasonable figure. But given that the Overtime team is partly the same Thales team that already received a grant of 900k $OP tokens in phase 0, the requested amount is high.

Thales Phase 0: https://gov.optimism.io/t/gf-phase-0-proposal-thales/1078"

OP Distribution
Distribution of up to 50K for World Cup incentives, rest of targeted events & fee rebates depends on market demand (might last longer than aspired 6 months)

  • 70% as incentives in form of Fee Rebates to create an inviting environment to help with the Overtime growth and user increase.
  • 30% as targeted events to help user growth of new league and sport integrations.

Co-incentives
The co-incentives will be determined by governance, which is the same as Thales’ governance ( https://docs.overtimemarkets.xyz/decentralized-sports-markets/governance). And if implemented, it will be with the Thales token.

Alignment
As an Optimism native platform. there is no doubt that the Thales team is aligned with the Optimism ecosystem,

Recommendation
NO

Overtime Market is a good product that is getting decent early traction - with OP/Thales incentives. Looking at the analytics & current fee rebates, the fee rebates would largely accrue to current top users and would likely last a lot longer than 6 months. At the same time, the Thales team still has almost 100% of funds for ecosystem projects, and we believe this would justify reducing the fee rebate program & total grant amount at least 1/3. This recommendation should not hinder on-boarding during the world cup as max 50K of OP were suggested and we’d recommend re-submission for the next cycle

Our past recommendation is available on committee recommendation thread.

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Hey Red from Thales/Overtime here.

I just want to point out how fee rebates are of catalytic importance for our users.

At the moment, Overtime odds competes with major centralized bookies, although it doesn’t always have the edge. Fee rebates, allows us to not only compete, but take the lead on offering the best odds in the industry. This is a major point to attract users from web2 to web3. Without a solid offering there’s not many reasons for them to make the move. This is why offering the best odds is of importance.

The table below compares the odds of 2 major centralized bookies and Overtime with rebates and different sizes.

As incentives rolls out we are working on new solutions to bring the price impact of buyers down.

The first solution which will be implemented in the next few days starts with offering a price impact discount to position where the AMM is heavily involved. You can further ready about the TIP here : Thales: Permissionless Parimutuel markets.

The second solution is to increase the AMM liquidity. Overtime is currently a new product and opening the AMM to the public would be reckless. As we move out of “Beta” and further work on the kinks of the AMM to be as efficient as possible we will make the move. At the moment we are working on this for the CryptoAMM. Opening the AMM for deposits will allow to increase the liquidity per market hence decreasing the price impact of big volume buys.

As you can see we have plans to bring the best prices to our users, and we are grateful for the opportunity to obtain 300,000 $OP tokens to help us incentivizes this growth plan. Truth is that without these incentives we would lose our immediate edge and therefore wouldn’t be as attractive as one can be. This means less users for Overtime and Optimism.

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The defi shadow committee – which is not an official committee – supports this proposal .

We support the proposal and respect their path to growth on Optimism. The dual-pronged approach of fee rebates and direct marketing campaigns are likely highly catalytic for user growth on Optimism — and this would be a different user segment than typical market-dependent defi users and crypto speculators.

Overtime Markets has a unique value proposition for Optimism and stands apart from crypto-native DeFi protocols. With these fee rebates, we believe they ought be able to better compete with centralized offerings and continue the growth they’ve seen over the last 2 months since launch. We thank @Red for following up on our inquiries into this question and think Overtime have made a strong case.

We think there is an information gap that Overtime could meet by reporting more of their expected go-to-market strategy, but now is the time to give them an opportunity to jump ahead of the pack.

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Couldn’t agree more. This is a great proposal from Overtime and I’m excited to see it pass. I invite other committees to reconsider their recommendations with this new information.

Thanks @Red and @jackanorak

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Great update Red; The Synthetix Ambassadors also support this proposal.

Bringing Sports Markets on-chain and making it unique to Optimism is a huge win.

Voting yes can help them flourish on the Optimism ecosystem, and bring new users to the ecosystem.

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