LEVERJ, a scalable decentralized derivatives exchange, this week announced the launch of the BNC Blue-Chip DeFi Index-based futures powered by Brave New Coin, a digital asset data infrastructure company. Trading for BNC Blue-Chip DeFi Index contracts is now live on LEVERJ, allowing for up to 50x leverage.
The BNC Blue-Chip DeFi Index tracks the real-time market performance of the eight largest DeFi assets. This institutional-grade index product tracks DeFi assets across multiple pricing sources at sub-second frequency. The index tracks an eight-asset basket weighted by free-float market capitalization, capped at 25 per cent. Asset weighting is set at the beginning of each quarter and remains constant throughout the quarter. Assets currently in the basket this quarter are: Uniswap (UNI), Aave (AAVE), Synthetic Network Token (SNX), SushiSwap (SUSHI), Maker (MKR), Yearn Finance (YFI), Compound (COMP) and Universal Market Access (UMA).
“Exposure to the BNC Blue-Chip DeFi Index offers diversification across an industry group. This reduces portfolio risk and means investors don’t have to put all their eggs in one basket,” said Fran Strajnar, founder of Brave New Coin. “Risk is spread, and buyers don’t have to scrutinize the attributes of individual tokens. This removes most of the guesswork from the DeFi investment process.”
The majority of tokens in the BNC Blue-Chip DeFi index are designed to act as governance tokens that empower holders to vote on proposals to update the DeFi protocols they are native to. Many of these assets have seen aggressive price growth recently. In the past year, the prices of LINK, SNX and MKR have risen 844 per cent, 1,791 per cent and 298 per cent respectively. The market has unanimously decided that governance of these DeFi protocols, and a share of voting rights to determine the future direction of some of the most innovative, visible, and active projects in the digital asset space, is a valuable commodity.
“Trading an index that represents the blue chip of DeFi on a fast and scalable DeFi derivatives platform, Leverj, is like having your cake and eating it too. With Leverj’s generous Liquidity Rewards Program just announced, every Leverj.io trader will get rewarded with $L2 governance tokens for executing a maker side trade. They can then stake those $L2 tokens for further weekly APY,” said Shashank Tiwari, one of the core members of the gluon.network Layer 2 technology, which powers Leverj.io’s ultra fast futures trading platform.
“The BNC Blue-Chip DeFi index is the beginning of an exciting product roadmap. As an exchange we want to differentiate ourselves and offer traders not just the great benefits of non-custodial trading, but also innovative tradable products. We are excited to launch the DeFi index then focus on a steady rollout of new instruments with BNC in the coming weeks and months,” said Bharath Rao, CEO of Leverj Exchange.
LEVERJ is a decentralized crypto exchange founded by a small team of Wall Street veterans from J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse. Having seen the systemic risk inherent in the legacy financial system while developing trading technology during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (and how little was fixed afterwards), the founders discovered Bitcoin and began developing distributed trading alternatives.
LEVERJ is built on top of Gluon, a game-changing layer 2 solution purpose-built for high-frequency trading that offers a solution to Ethereum’s congestion and gas scaling issues. Gluon is an account-based layer 2 that has been through multiple external audits and testing rounds. Trading with Gluon offers a sub-second settlement, minimal gas fees, and withdrawals/deposits can be finalized within 30 minutes. Average Ethereum transaction prices have retreated a little from their record high of more than $16 USD on January 11 but still remain high, at around $5 USD.
