Introducing Symmetry: A decentralized crypto index protocol
Intro
Traditionally, index products have been one of the biggest traded instruments in the world. However the creation and management of an index has always been limited due to its capital intensive nature as well as the complexity of moving large amounts of money to maintain risk and reward ratios. Public has also been limited by the rules and methodologies of the central parties managing the indices. We strongly believe that DeFi can completely revolutionize index products as well as portfolio management to the benefit of the entire world by its trustless, secure and open source nature.
As of writing this, there is more than $130 billion worth of assets locked up in DeFi according to CoinGecko. As the industry keeps growing exponentially at lightning speed, there is a clear need for easy and intuitive platforms that expose us to the entire up-to-date ecosystem without having to worry about missing out or frequently having to buy/rebalance many of the tokens we hold, one by one (which is a lot of unnecessary manual work in my opinion).
As we experienced this need ourselves, we decided to create Symmetry, a decentralized index protocol on Solana blockchain that would allow anyone to create and buy custom indices — baskets of tokens with different weights.
We are honored to be part of the amazing community that is building the next web3 applications and value all feedback that we receive. We want to make the best, community driven index creation and investment platform where anyone can participate and contribute. We start with our core ideas and adjust our direction based on our community’s suggestions.
Solana and the future of DeFi
Until recently, majority of the DeFi applications were being built on Ethereum, however, developers started to explore alternative chains that offer lower fees and faster transaction times while remaining decentralized. We chose to build on Solana because of its unprecedented transaction speeds and virtually non-existent fees. We are also seeing Solana’s ecosystem growing rapidly as more projects and teams are porting to take advantage of its impressive architecture. We think this is just the beginning and Solana will play a major role in the future of DeFi & crypto in general.
Say Hello to Symmetry.fi
Symmetry makes it easy to create and invest in custom crypto indices.
You might ask:
But why would I create an index in the first place?
Here are some of the reasons why holding an index is order of a magnitude better than just holding crypto.
- Easier way to diversify your portfolio instead of buying & selling assets separately. Saves time & fees.
- Improved risk-to-reward ratios for any budget user. Whether you prefer higher risk higher reward portfolio, or a less volatile one with a steadier growth, there can be an index for you.
- Rebalancing. This is one of the most important aspects of an index. Without rebalancing, more volatile assets start taking higher and higher portion of an index making it riskier over time. In such case, all it takes is for that one asset to go down that will bring a substantial part of your portfolio down with it. This is why every index needs to update its holdings regularly to maintain the target asset weights and therefore perform reliably. Our protocol rebalances automatically whenever needed.
With Symmetry, you can create your own index, or purchase one created by someone else. When creating an index, you can select all assets that you want to be included in the index, as well as their corresponding weights, and rebalancing method. Type of rebalancing you choose is important and will affect overall performance of the index, because of this, we created Index Simulator, which we’ll talk about next.
Index Simulator
While researching the benefits of indices, our team developed an Index Simulator, a tool that is now part of Symmetry Protocol, that allows users to simulate how their custom index would perform based on historical data, even before it is created. This allows users to test out different weighting and rebalancing methods before they deploy the index, to try and come up with the most effective methods.
We are very excited to launch the protocol soon and see the types of indices our community creates.
SMF Token & First community airdrop
SMF is a governance token used to govern the Symmetry Protocol. It is also used to incentivize protocol usage, bring in more liquidity & grow the ecosystem. The SMF token is heavily integrated in the protocol and is the backbone of our platform.
Soon we will announce the first community airdrop ;) keep an eye on our Twitter.
To participate in the airdrop and for more details, please join us on our social media channels: Twitter, and Telegram.
The Team. Why us?
We’re a growing team of 5+ people with Computer Science and Engineering backgrounds from leading universities, such as MIT. Our core team members have multiple medals at International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). We’re a strong technical team, all of us contributing to the source code of the protocol, while some are also experienced at Business Development & Design as well.
Big plans ahead. What’s next?
In the next article, we will take a deeper dive into Symmetry Protocol, how it works, and how you can use it to maximize returns.
We also will soon be releasing our Tokenomics and Whitepaper, as well as information about some of the amazing partners we’re excited to be working with. To be in the loop, keep an eye on our Twitter and join our Telegram channel.
