Horizon Finance Beta Launch

Horizon Finance
4 min readMar 23, 2021

Hello future Horizon Finance users,

Horizon Finance’s mission is simple, we seek to enhance the trading toolkit available to DeFi participants who are engaged in key yield streams across the ecosystem and reward our users in the process. We aim to achieve this goal via interspersed auction markets (Horizon Finance Markets) across various tenors where participants can compete for preferential payment in return for capping their yield, on a fair and transparent playing field.

We are excited to announce that v1 Horizon Finance markets are now officially live in beta at https://beta.horizon.finance/ (don’t ape in until you have finished reading this article please, you will find out why below). As part of the beta launch, we have now also officially opened up the Discord and Telegram (links are as follows: https://t.me/HorizonFinance and https://discord.gg/TwkWDncc). Please note, Discord will be the main channel used for interactions not Telegram.

While the v1 of Horizon Finance has been audited by Quantstamp and Peckshield, it is still a Beta product. As such, we have imposed a cap per bidding slot of $100,000 yUSD and 5000 xSushi per wallet in the early stages as we ensure everything is running smoothly. The Team will announce when this cap is lifted. We have also partnered with Immunefi (https://immunefi.com/) to establish a lucrative bug bounty program. You can find the specifics of our bug bounty program here: https://immunefi.com/bounty/horizonfinance.

We are launching Horizon Finance v1 Beta without a token, any tokens you see on Uniswap or other decentralized trading platforms are fake. It won’t be too long till the token officially drops, and as always — users will be rewarded. When the launch of the token occurs, an announcement will be made by the Team.

The first live markets we are listing for users will run on top of two of our favorite tokenized cash flow streams in DeFi…

yUSD xSUSHI

Initially, there are two possible tenors users can mint markets for and trade in; 2-weeks and 1-month. That means that once the first user interacts with the smart contract to create a Horizon market (the Horizon Finance team will do this within the next 24hrs), the bidding period where others can join will then be open for approximately 2 weeks for the 2 week market and 1 month for the 1 month market before the auction seals. This means there is no need to ape in immediately, the Horizon Finance team will announce when we suggest entering and placing your fixed or floating bid, this will be approximately 2–3 days before the market seals. After the initial auction period, markets will roll from one to another seamlessly as bidding for the subsequent market opens up when the current market is sealed.

Once floating or fixed bids are confirmed and the auction is sealed, the round will run for at least 2-weeks or 1-month depending on the choice of the initial user, and will only ultimately end when somebody interacts with the blockchain to roll the market by initiating a new round of bidding. Note, in the early days of the protocol, the Team will keep a close eye on this process to ensure markets don’t linger unnecessarily and may use K3PR to streamline this process going forward.

Please note that gas is currently high and our v1 contracts are gas-intensive, so we urge users to exercise caution when interacting with our beta smart contracts. We have already begun research into L2 solutions which will help to reduce any gas-related economic frictions and the launch of our token should also assist in reducing the net cost of interacting with the Horizon Finance protocol, in our goal to deliver the best user experience. For those who insist on trying it out now on Ethereum’s base layer, here’s a quick rundown of how the product works.

  1. Click on APP to connect your Metamask wallet
  2. Markets can then be viewed by clicking SEE HORIZON MARKETS
  3. Within each currency there’s a FACTORY section and a HISTORY section
  4. Participants can create new markets, place bids for a chosen tenor, or join existing bids via the FACTORY page
  5. Markets operate on an at-least-X-period basis. That is to say, once a tenor has been launched, “X time period + 1 day gap period” later anyone can interact with the smart contract, which does these three things: a) crystallizes payoffs for that round, b) seals the auction for the new round which begins at that moment, c) sets the interaction timer forward by at least X in the future. Of course, you can always still bid for the following period before somebody else or yourself seals and rolls it.

6. Crystallized payoffs can be claimed from the HISTORY page

Good luck and we hope you enjoy the Horizon Markets Beta. We have plenty more in the pipeline.

--

--