It feels like years since the Carmine Governance (DAO) was established, and the Carmine Options AMM was deployed. Many things have happened, and many have already transpired in Carmine.
Smart contracts
In April 2023, we released the Carmine Options AMM to the mainnet, followed by the deployment of Carmine Governance. This made us one of the first DAOs on StarkNet, capable of upgrading smart contracts exclusively through the DAO. Our governance contracts were among the initial Cairo 1 smart contracts on StarkNet's mainnet.
The Carmine developers spent the summer and autumn rewriting the Carmine Options AMM smart contracts to Cairo 1 and then to Cairo 2. By the end of 2023, the smart contracts underwent an audit by Nethermind, and the final report will be published soon.
App and landing page
Alongside the new smart contracts, the Carmine Finance team revamped the frontend, creating a new landing page and new UX/UI for the trading app. By the way, we still have a lot of things to add, and you will be surprised by what we are preparing.
Ambassador Program
The ambassador program launched in the summer of 2023, with the first ambassadors onboarded by the end of the season. We now have numerous ambassadors and moderators caring for the community in various ways. We are also accepting new ambassadors into the program to help promote what we do. If you are interested, reach out to us on our Discord!
Arbitraging
The design of the Carmine Options AMM is supportive for arbitrageurs, especially in the early stages of the protocol, where they are crucial to ensuring the efficiency of option prices. We have found an arbitrageur willing to collaborate with Carmine Options AMM to enhance option prices. They prefer to remain anonymous, but we will publish some information soon.
Governance
All the smart contracts in Carmine have been governed by the DAO since the early stages. The super early users received tokens to govern the project, and this group will grow soon. The governance smart contracts published in late April/early May are among the first Cairo 1 smart contracts deployed on StarkNet's mainnet. Initially, it included only token distribution and simple voting, and we are gradually adding to the functionality. Soon, we will have vesting, then staking, a forum for discussions where the user's influence on the protocol will be visible, and more.
Community build smart contracts
We have been receiving grants from OnlyDust, but only a few developers are willing to help. We believe this is a gap that we have and encourage anyone to talk to us, and we can assign tasks.
DeRisk
In early summer, Carmine Finance started working on DeRisk, a tool to measure risks in DeFi. In December, we released a fully open-sourced monitoring of the risk of under the water loans on StarkNet. We have more we are working on, but now it has to remain secret
Insurance against price drops
Quite simply: are you afraid of losing the value of your investments? We have a tool to insure against it.
Hedging against Impermanent Loss
The product is pretty simple. Imagine you are staking on an AMM, and this means you are subject to impermanent loss. This loss can be significantly high or might not appear. The problem is that you never know. So we decided to take care of it. We have spent a lot of time working on this, but hit a rock. Hopefully, we will finish soon.
Devonomics grant
We have also received a Devonomics grant of 12 ETH. We have proposed to the governance what we would like to do with and we are waiting for the vote to come through.
Trading halt
Part of the proposal to deploy the new smart contracts includes the possibility for a few addresses to halt trading. This is present in the smart contracts to increase their security and add the possibility for the governance to fix problems that may arise in the future. Although we assume the smart contracts will not need this, having the option is crucial. Soon, we will ask the community to apply for roles that will have the power to halt trading; until then, a few people have been assigned this role. We will look for people that have been part of the community and are reputable within the StarkNet ecosystem. We assume they never use their power, and they will have it just in case. The only thing that they can do is halt trading, and the governance can then, with a proposal, remove this halt.
Stats of 2023
2023 was amazing. We put a cap on TVL to limit the risks that the users take on and with that the numbers are awesome.
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Now, 2,374 wallets are eligible to vote on proposals! 🗳️ Check eligibility here: https://app.carmine.finance/position 🚀🚀🚀
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233,893 transactions on Carmine's smart contracts, with 94,772 trades. Users love keeping their options open (83,060) and hedging until expiry (11,712) 🔄💹
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66,958 unique traders and 75,248 stakers. totaling 138,568 unique users on Carmine.🤝🌐
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Despite capped TVL, the pools rocked! ⚡⚡⚡ Over 3,000 ETH notional volume for calls and 1,500 for puts. Exceeded expectations, turning over 100 times for calls and 50 for puts in ~8 months.💹🔄
Notional volume in USD? $7.9mil! 🚀 Higher capital efficiency than expected. 💼💰
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Premium transferred? Call pool got 35.1 ETH, paid 12.7 ETH. Put pool got $22.7k, paid $9.9k. Massive amounts, hinting at future 🚀🌔
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And now, the info all liquidity providers have been waiting for 😎 Our ETH/USDC CALL pool made 12.6% in ~8 months, and our ETH/USDC PUT pool made 18.9% in the same period 💰🤑
Hint of the future ;) ;) ;)
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We plan to add referral links!
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Galxe campaigns supporting providing liquidity!
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Collaborations with different players around StarkNet ecosystem!
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Improvements to the app!
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Token distribution ;)
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Token trading ;)
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Leverage
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More insurance products!
Carmine Options