VariabL Roadmap — Our Journey Towards Decentralized Finance
The team behind VariabL and the StabL tokens gathered around the same objective: bringing financial stability to decentralized applications to enable them to compete with and outperform centralized applications.
Last February, our team released its first paper explaining the need for stable tokens, our approach to creating them through derivative markets, and our vision and values. At that time, VariabL, the trading platform for derivatives built on Ethereum, was introduced as a step needed to bring stable tokens to the ecosystem.
A few weeks later, we launched the first private alpha of the VariabL trading platform and rewarded the best of our 150 amazing alpha traders. They provided us with great feedback, dramatically increasing our understanding of the challenges we will face in the future.
After various iterations, we launched the second phase of our trading challenge, which ended last June. Since then, we paused the alpha to leverage feedback and create a (way) better version of VariabL. We also wanted to experiment with a new kind of token that would incentivize contributors to participate in the success of VariabL. We called them VariabL Contribution Tokens (VCT) and they will be distributed to contributors testing our alpha and contributing to the project.
Based on user feedback and our own research, we have now decided to focus our efforts towards VariabL (which will be the platform issuing StabL Tokens, among many other derivatives-based products).
VariabL is therefore both the name of our trading platform for derivatives on Ethereum and of the company behind it.
Our complete roadmap is now:
2014: Public release of Ethereum’s White Paper; first reflections on decentralized financial instruments including: insurance, loans, CFD, and derivatives based on a public ledger.
2015: Hadrien joins Consensys and starts to experiment with the EVM while exploring ideas around identity and stable cryptocurrencies, two tools needed to bring decentralized services mainstream.
Feb 2016-Sept 2016 / Research & Prototypes
- Research on stable token mechanism: Seigniorage shares model, collateral-based model and mixed approaches.
- Research on derivatives: liquidity pools, automated market makers, oracles.
- Research on exchanges and order books: scalability, offchain transactions, price feed.
- Prototypes: stable token exchange and stable token API.
- Private alpha: trading challenge for a limited number of users on simple Contract For Difference.
Sept 2016 — Feb 2017 / Formalization & Development
- Team expanding with Blockchain engineers and Legal Experts:
+ Vincent Eli: Research, PhD Game Theory;
+ Antoine Estienne: Product, Software and Physics Engineer;
+ Marc Zeller (Finance and Operations who left us for new adventures);
+ Claire Pion: Lawyer with Regulations. - Private White Paper: White paper for internal use with a global roadmap, milestones, technical scope.
March 2017- May 2017 / VariabL Alpha round 1
- Users: More than 100 traders used the first online version of our platform on the Kovan Testnet.
- Simple Contract For Differences-like called “VariabL Derivative Contract”: around 2000 VDC created and liquidated.
- Testers: Great improvements have been made on the Backend, Contracts and the global User-Experience.
- Rewards: 120 ETH distributed as rewards to our best traders and for valuable troubleshooting and feedback.
- Blockchain: Onchain orderbook, offchain matching.
May 2017 - June 2017 / VariabL Alpha round 2
- Users: again, more than 100 traders used our trading platform on the Kovan Testnet, after improvements have been made thanks to the VariabL Alpha 1.
- Product: Major alterations and improvements have been done on UX/UI.
- Research on VCT (VariabL Contribution Tokens) and offchain transactions/state channels.
June - August 2017 / Research & Product Development
- Leveraging feedback: UX/UI.
- Redesign: Brand new platform development for our open alpha.
- Website: development of VariabL.io’s landing page.
- Research on a more mature derivative model.
- Team expanding:
+ Hrishikesh Huilgolkar: State channels;
+ Simon Polrot: Operations, Legal, Finance, Communication;
+ Nathan Sexer: Business, Marketing, External Communication;
+ Charlotte Eli: Financial Engineering, Price Feed.
September 2017 / VariabL Open Alpha
- Launch of the website: Variab.io new landing page and trading platform.
- VariabL Open Alpha: Integration with VariabL Contribution Tokens. New design/UX. More robust pricefeed.
- Product: Finalizing research for StabL tokens and future VariabL version; sandboxing and risk analysis.
- Rewards distributed through Contribution Tokens for contributors.
Q4 2017 / VariabL Consolidation & StabL Research
- State channels: implementation on the Open Alpha
- StabL tokens: Experimentations on the Open Alpha
- Audits (technical, security and legal)
- More rewards distributed through Contribution Tokens
Q1 2018 / VariabL Implementation
- MainNet: VariabL to be on Mainnet; with actual ETH
- Distribution of the first mainnet StabL tokens on the VariabL platform
Q2–3 2018 / VariabL 2 Implementation
- New derivatives products for Hedging Management
- APIs for Stable tokens and hedging derivatives
- APIs for traders
- New pairs
And many more new features to come — keep tuned to learn more about our future products.
For more information and updates, join us on slack, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on our social medias (Twitter,Facebook). We are looking forward to meeting you!
