Bluefin Building on Moonbeam for Derivatives Trading

We are excited to announce a technical integration with Moonbeam. Our engineering teams will collaborate to deploy Bluefin on Moonbeam's smart contract and runtime pallets. By leveraging the technical innovations on Moonbeam, Bluefin will offer traders a fast and easy user experience and an increased scope of products.

Bluefin is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for perpetual swaps and options powered by Substrate. Supported by Polkadot’s shared security, high-throughput and low-latency transactions, micro-gas fees, and interoperability across networks, Bluefin will provide traders with a derivatives DEX that is both performant and secure. The DEX caters to the Polkadot community, providing unique products for the 30,000+ parachain crowd loan participants, and will support staking derivatives of bonded or staked DOTs as collateral. Bluefin also provides one of the most performant user experiences in DeFi, with under-450-milliseconds settlement when network latency and network congestion are abstracted.

Since Polkadot is a layer-0 protocol providing shared PoS security and cross-chain communication between Substrate-native blockchains, all smart contract logic must live on the parachains. The Moonbeam Parachain has robust smart contract development and testing tools, with a rich set of wallet, technical, and asset integrations. Bluefin will go live on mainnet once Moonbeam wins a Polkadot parachain slot auction, which is expected to happen later this year. This integration positions Bluefin to become the first derivatives exchange in the Polkadot network.

But what does building on Moonbeam mean for traders? Traders will be able to use familiar tooling, collateralize multiple Moonbeam-native assets for opening trades on Bluefin, and trade with high performance with the shared security of Polkadot. Initially, USDT will be the only supported collateral, and additional assets will be added by the protocol’s decentralized governance.

Metamask Support

To encourage new traders and users onto Bluefin and the Polkadot ecosystem, we believe in facilitating the lowest barriers to entry. We're excited to partner with Moonbeam on this shared vision — Moonbeam's compatibility with Metamask will grant easy access to Bluefin for the large number of existing users of the extension. The on-boarding and trading process should be as simple as possible, and switching between the PolkadotJS and another extension to perform transactions adds friction. Thanks to deploying on Moonbeam’s parachain, signing up on Bluefin will be about as easy as using any protocol deployed on a Layer-2 chain of Ethereum.

Collateralise Positions with USDT or DOT Staking Derivatives

Bluefin will support both USDT and DOT staking derivatives as collateral for opening positions. The staking derivative modules will help the Polkadot community unlock the liquidity from staked DOT. These staking derivatives can then be used as collateral for trading on Bluefin. This opens the door for the DOT stakers to hedge or speculate on the prices of crypto assets while capturing the staking rewards on Polkadot or the crowd loan participation rewards. The composability with the DOT staking derivative modules also opens pathways for traders to execute positive carry strategies. We will dedicate a separate article to explaining these strategies in detail.

Sub-Second Trade Settlement

Bluefin will use rollups for near-instant settlement of trades on the exchange, enabling a performant UX with instant balance updates, efficient liquidations, lower liquidation penalties, and higher leverage.

Zero Gas Fees, Sponsored by Bluefin*

Bluefin Foundation will cover gas fees for users. If the Foundation does not sponsor fees in perpetuity, Bluefin will work with Moonbeam to allow for micro gas fees to be paid in USDT.

Bluefin Coming to Moonriver for a Trading Competition on Kusama

The Moonbeam team has also built a parachain called Moonriver to serve as Moonbeam’s sister network for the Kusama community. Moonriver won the second parachain slot auction on Kusama with over 200k KSM contributed by over 10,000 unique accounts worldwide. Moonriver will serve as the bold, risk-taking platform, providing a lab for building new financial products and parameters. Moonriver will continue to operate in parallel to Moonbeam. Bluefin will launch a trading competition first on Moonriver before deploying on Moonbeam, and more information on this launch will be released in the coming weeks.

Support for Any Parachain Asset

With the deployment on Moonbeam, Bluefin will not only have access to Polkadot relay chain and parachains’ assets via XCMP, but will also have access to Moonbeam’s native ecosystem assets. Any of these assets on Moonbeam can eventually be supported as collateral on Bluefin, and also allow for the creation of more complex derivatives and new financial experiments.

"The size of the traditional derivatives market shows us the huge opportunity for decentralized perpetual swaps and options. But there is no currently dominant DeFi derivatives platform due to UX, performance, collateralization, and other issues," says Derek Yoo, Founder of the Moonbeam project. "The Bluefin team has taken a thoughtful and sophisticated approach to building a defi derivatives protocol, combining a high performance rollup-based implementation with Polkadot based interoperability to address these underlying challenges. Bluefin is a powerful addition to the growing DeFi ecosystem on Moonbeam and we look forward to supporting them as they serve users and assets in Polkadot and other connected ecosystems."

"In developing their parachain, the Moonbeam team has shown not only technical prowess but also impressive business acumen in understanding what will be needed to deliver powerful DeFi tools to millions of people. The popularity and mind-share of decentralized derivatives platforms are growing, and we look forward to unlocking new financial products powered by the wide array of DeFi primitives such as staking derivatives and lending markets. Our teams share the vision of giving access to crypto-native fintech products to everyone in the world. This integration brings the joint pursuit closer to reality." said Nikodem Grzesiak, Co-Founder of Bluefin.

If you are interested in trading perpetuals, options, or learning more about Bluefin, then please join the growing community on Discord, follow the Telegram announcement channel, and sign up for updates at https://bluefin.io

Disclaimer: The products available on Bluefin are not available for use by US Persons or residents of any country or jurisdiction subject to US sanctions.

- Bluefin