Beta Finance (BETA)

• Beta Finance’s mission is to offset volatility and facilitate healthy, mainstream adoption of DeFi by individuals and institutions. The protocol has built an integrated 1-Click Short Tool that allows DeFi users to initiate, manage, and close short positions with accessibility to all tokens. The protocol enables anyone to create a money market for any token automatically and permissionlessly.

• BETA is Beta Finance’s native utility token and has the following current and planned functions:

  • Staking incentives: BETA token holders will be able to stake their tokens on the protocol and act as a backstop for covering shortfall events. BETA holders who stake their tokens will receive a portion of the revenue generated by the protocol.

  • Liquidity mining: Liquidity providers can stake their assets into the lending pools to enable borrowing and short selling. To incentivize these providers given opportunity costs, liquidity providers will be eligible to receive BETA tokens through a liquidity mining program, adjusted based on a user’s relative contribution and additional parameters.

  • Governance: BETA token holders will be able to participate and vote in the governance process of the platform. Through governance, users can influence and modify product features and key parameters of Beta Finance. This will enable BETA token holders to influence the direction of the protocol's development.

• Beta Finance consists of the following major components working in conjunction:

  • "1 Click” Short Tool: Beta Finance provides an integrated tool for allowing DeFi users to short sell in an atomic transaction. Users are able to view relevant metrics (price impact, slippage, etc.) directly on the interface, and easily manage and update their positions on their dashboard.

  • Permissionless money markets: Beta Finance will allow users to create a money market for any ERC-20 token automatically. Anything from fractionalized NFTs to mature tokens can be listed on Beta Finance.

  • Isolated collateral model: To support volatile assets, Beta Finance introduces an isolated collateral model where users are only liable for the collateral explicitly associated with a position.

• The project has raised 2.75MM USD from two rounds of private token sales, where 15.00% of the BETA total token supply has been sold at 0.0150 USD / BETA and 0.0250 USD / BETA.

• As at September 30th 2021, the total supply of BETA is 1,000,000,000 and the circulating supply upon listing will be 160,000,000 BETA (16.00% of the total token supply).

Key metrics (as at September 30th 2021)

1. What is Beta Finance (BETA)?

Beta Finance is a cross-chain permissionless money market protocol for lending, borrowing, and shorting crypto. Beta Finance has created an integrated “1-Click” Short Tool that enables DeFi natives to take the opposite side of a trade and counter volatility, as well as allow anyone, anywhere, anytime to create money markets for a token automatically, unlocking new asset utilization.

Beta Finance’s mission is to offset volatility and facilitate greater stability for the long-term, mainstream adoption of DeFi by individuals and institutions through building critical DeFi tooling and infrastructure.

With a focus on the user experience, Beta Finance allows DeFi users to initiate, manage, and close short positions with single clicks, while providing relevant metrics and information before position execution. Lenders are able to lend out any token, creating the market permissionlessly if it is yet to exist, and start earning yield on their holdings. Traders are able to pay a premium to execute short trades and hedging strategies with accessibility to all tokens.

• "1 Click” Short Tool: Beta Finance provides a simple, integrated tool for allowing DeFi users to short sell in an atomic transaction. Users are able to view relevant metrics (price impact, slippage, etc.) directly on the interface, and easily manage and update their positions on their dashboard.

• Permissionless money markets: Beta Finance allows users to create a money market for any ERC-20 token automatically, supporting the long tail of assets. Anything from fractionalized NFTs to mature tokens can be listed on Beta Finance.

• Isolated collateral model: To support volatile assets, Beta Finance introduces an isolated collateral model where users are only liable for the collateral explicitly associated with a position.

2. Token sales and economics

2.1 Token sales data

2.2 Token allocation

2.3 Token governance and use of funds

As at September 29th 2021, Beta Finance has used funds raised according to the allocations below:

• 6.76% Marketing

• 10.13% Team

• 63.53% Development

• 19.57% Operations

The Beta Finance team holds its funds in crypto, stablecoins and fiat. Funds are stored with cold storage multi-signature wallets and USD bank accounts. Any movement of funds requires the approval of at least 3 out of the 5 executives and advisors of Beta Finance.

BETA token allocation

BETA token release schedule

3. Project team

4. Roadmap, updates, and business development

4.1 Original roadmap and achievements

4.2 Updated roadmap

Q4 2021:

• Launch Beta Finance Phase 2.

• Activate permissionless money market listing for tokens.

• Incorporate more markets and supported collateral.

• Launch BETA token.

• Launch liquidity mining program to bootstrap usage of Beta Finance.

• Launch BETA staking.

• Launch Beta Finance on EVM-compatible chains (e.g. BSC, Arbitrum, and/or AVAX).

• Improve existing social media infrastructure with bots, moderators, and more.

• Complete and release Trail of Bits audit report.

Q1 2022:

• Integrate Beta Finance with existing DeFi projects, e.g. Alpha Finance.

• Upgrade the Beta Finance dApp to include more features, e.g. position alerts, liquidation monitoring, tracking aggregate PnL gains, etc.

• Explore integrating a DEX aggregator and/or Uniswap AutoRouter to improve swap efficiency when initiating shorts.

• Develop and initiate grants program to enable community to take an active role in the development and growth of the Beta Finance ecosystem.

Q2 2022:

• Expand Beta Finance’s DeFi interoperability to more chains.

• Implement Governance contracts for on-chain governance, and integrate with Commonwealth for client facing forum.

• Create frontend surface on dApp for on-chain governance.

• Initiate development of additional derivatives product layered over Beta Finance, e.g. delta neutral farming product, DEX-CEX arbitrage, etc.

• Re-vamp frontend UI to handle the increased number of money markets available on Beta Finance, e.g. tabbing, pagination, etc.

Q3 2022:

• Initiate expansion into institutional offerings with Beta Finance.

• Transition to full community governance of Beta Finance.

• Aggregate and analyze feedback and usage of Beta Finance over the past 3 quarters and begin preparing for Beta Finance v2 launch.

4.3 Commercial partnerships and business development progress

1. Alpha Finance Labs: Integration with Alpha, which has products including leverage yield farming, and will have integrations for leveraged positions on Beta, hedging strategies, and other DeFi strategies.

2. Frax Finance: Integration with Frax to support FRAX as the first algostable token to be used as collateral on Beta Finance.

3. Uniswap: Integration with Uniswap, to support creation of permissionless money markets using TWAP oracle and as an integrated DEX for swapping.

4. SushiSwap: Integration with Sushi, as an integrated DEX for swapping.

5. Band Protocol: Integration with Band Protocol as an oracle solution for robust price feeds for Beta money markets.

6. Chainlink: Integration with Chainlink, as an oracle solution for price feeds for Beta money markets.

7. DeBank: Integration with DeBank, to allow users to easily view all their positions on Beta Finance and more on one dashboard.

8. Immunefi: Bug Bounty program to protect the security of the protocol.

5. Existing Products

Beta Finance is creating a permissionless money market protocol that will enable anyone to create a money market on any token to lend, borrow, and short any token. Beta Finance has been built from the ground up with a short selling framework in mind, resulting in significant technical design and product design innovations that are unique in the DeFi ecosystem.

Figure 1: Money Markets Interface

Source: Beta Finance

First, Beta Finance structures each market in tiers based on the maturity and volatility of the underlying token. These tiers determine the borrow allowance and safety loan-to-value (LTV) thresholds for the underlying token, and are meant to protect users from initiating dangerous positions. Furthermore, Beta Finance will only accept stablecoins and highly correlated mature assets (e.g. BNB, ETH) as collateral initially.

Second, Beta Finance uses an isolated collateral model, and does not allow cross-collateralization. Each position maintains its own collateral and liquidation factor, even if a user is borrowing the same asset. Thus, if there is a sudden swing in volatility of a token, the only position at risk is the isolated collateral staked for that borrowed position, rather than all collateral being used on the platform -- limiting the users liability.

Third, Beta Finance allows borrow and short position repayment using a token other than the underlying (e.g. the collateral token) or the underlying token. This means that users do not need to swap back to the underlying token they initiated a position on, and deal with that hassle of managing so many different tokens. They are able to repay with the collateral associated with their position immediately, and Beta Protocol will handle the transactions needed to swap to the underlying token for repayment.

Figure 2: Short-sell Interface

Source: Beta Finance

6. Beta Finance's activity and community overview

Current community growth strategies of Beta Finance include:

• Hosting AMAs and Twitter Spaces to engage with users and the community.

• Working with DeFi trading shops to meet their needs of being able to short for hedging strategies and other DeFi strategies.

• Publishing weekly updates about the progress of the protocol, and additional clear and consistent communication via social channels.

• Engage on Telegram and Discord to answer any product and support questions from the community.

• Publishing educational resources on the protocol (e.g. for shorting) to make the community understand the fundamentals of the protocol and develop their own use cases.

Future community growth strategies of Beta Finance include:

• Creating a Community Ambassador Program where community members will be able to step up and take a more active role in proposals, moderation, and growth of the ecosystem.

• Hosting talks at DeFi conferences, in-person and virtual workshops, and sponsoring meetups to engage with the community in person.

• Hosting hackathons with ecosystem partners to enable developers to build derivative products on top of the Beta Finance protocol and providing developer grants to grow the developer community.

• Expand on strategic partnerships and integrations with DeFi protocols to join multiple communities together.

• Launch events and competitions that utilize the protocol, e.g. short trading events.

7. Community and social channels (data as of September 30th 2021)

Twitter | 7,294 Followers
Telegram(English) | 1,761 Followers
Discord | 2,135 Members
Medium | 268 Followers

8. Appendix

• Walkthrough Livestream of using Beta Finance with DeFi Dad.

• Delphi Digital Podcast with Tom Shaughnessy.

• 51% by Mable Jiang presented by Multicoin Capital Podcast.

• Website

• Documentation

• Etherscan

8.1 Advisors

• Tascha Punyaneramitdee

• Nipun Pitimanaaree