Introductory Story: How did you get to today, and what do you want to do next?
3 cycles deep. Initial success through simple scripts placing buy and sell orders instantaneously from McAfee coin of day tweets (RIP). Ignited a fervor in me that led me down API trading and running arb strategies cross-exchanges. Was easy money early on, got way more intricate as big boys got involved. Leveled up strats, DEXs now provide most value as larger firms aren’t as savvy yet. As Jupiter grows and DEXs take over CEXs, we all know that there’s potential to become the Citadel of DeFi, what’s stopping a decentralized protocol like Sage from becoming that firm?
Describe your project in 5 sentences.
Sage Markets is about democratizing access to sophisticated market making strategies and its rewards. Sage can become the premiere decentralized market maker that effectuates LPing, MMing, DAO-to-DAO MM deals and DAO-to-Project MM deals across both loan option and retainer models, with smart treasury management by allocating to voted on ecosystems and/or strategy vaults. Protocol owned liquidity grows through quarterly placements and revenues are distributed to SAGE holders and team.
Tell us about your team
Me, Hyroglyph, crypto full time degen circa 2017.
@0xHyroglyph on Twitter, coming out of my shell. what better way than championing a project like this in Jupiter, Solana, and beyond?
Prev Exp: Honestly just trading shitcoins since 2017. Traded perps like a madman since BitMEX API errors gave Arthur more Ferraris. Used ccxt and eventually moved to Hummingbot. Used rekt notification emails as fuel to make me do better and it turned out okay. Gonna keep it real with you guys.
Jupiter Ecosystem and you
Sage Markets is setting the stage for seamless, cross-ecosystem market making, liquidity provisioning, and treasury management starting with Jupiter and Solana and extending. A commitment that Sage intends on fulfilling is a marquee integration with Hummingbot through a Solana + Jupiter connector. This unlocks potential for both Sage and the broader HBOT community to engage in sophisticated trading strategies, enhancing volume and connectivity for arbitrage across Jupiter, Solana, and beyond.
Partners/Tools: Jupiter, Realms for DAO Governance Tooling of SAGE token on Solana (or other recommended DAO Toolkit), and potentially enabling successful bootstrapping of other native LFG tokens via Market Making with SAGE Protocol Treasury. Hummingbot. If this works correctly imagine immediately having a large LP to Jupiter token launches, as the DAO we can allocate a % toward supporting other LFG Launchpad projects.
Sage Markets is committed to a transparent and inclusive governance structure, which includes the formation of a DAO council. This council, initially being the founding team and members elected by the community, will be responsible for the strategic deployment of capital until more programmatic means are available. As such, Sage Markets is extending an invitation to Jupiter founders to join the DAO council as potential initial council members.
Approximate date for TGE could be as early as April 2024, depending on which features are considered necessary before TGE. For example, with an elected DAO Council, manually placing liquidity according to DAO vote via Realms can enact Sage Markets immediately until more programmatic means are available.
Committing to half of the IDO raise amount being used for SAGE protocol owned treasury.
Vision Category:
If your project were to succeed, how would it fundamentally change the web3 space? Sage Markets would rid of the currently needed centralized gatekeepers for market making, liquidity provisioning, and treasury management cross-ecosystem and cross-exchanges. Sage Markets would become the premier DAO-based market maker that can coordinate DAO-to-DAO agreements. This is a massive step in the right direction toward growing and sharing the pie together.
What would you say are your biggest challenges or obstacles as a project? The automation and transparency of provisioning and market making, particularly for CEX API trading as opposed to on-chain transparent strategy deployment. This could be addressed in a variety of ways, simplest being that a DAO Council is voted in to manage API connectivity and safeguarding. Also ensuring that any rewards are shared only through active engagement via Realms or another toolkit, that way it’s a reward for active effort.
What advice would you give to another team launching a token in web3? Prioritize authenticity, community engagement, and transparency in governance. Avoid over-hype and be collaborative to benefit the ecosystem you are a part of and create value-add through cross-chain alignment and win-win scenarios for partners. Honestly just build in public, share ideas, and if it gets support then you know you are on the right track. Just put it out there and iterate with feedback you get. Nothing is ever perfect on its first go.
What is something most tokens get wrong, and what steps are you taking to ensure that you won’t experience these pitfalls? A lot of tokens get caught up in short-term trends and speculation rather than long-term games and sustainable strategies. Steps to ensure Sage Markets does not fall into this trap are open governance, ecosystem alignment by providing value to others, and business strategy that fuels itself on the wisdom of crowds to provide rewards and continued DAO-engagement across all market types.
Hey! Awesome proposal and I would kill to see this launch on Jup and supporting big & small SOL projects.
Few questions:
if it’s a DAO, how would loan options and retainer models be signed? I’m guessing either we make DAO proposals to those projects a la wintermute et al @ OHM or we vote on a committee that runs an entity which can take ‘legal’ responsibility?
Hummingbot integration sounds sick. Has it made any progress on SOL so far? Or would Sage build it?
Big fan of bootstrapping lfg-launched projects. Maybe something for the JUP dao to vote on as Sage goes to market?
“placing liquidity according to DAO vote via Realms” - what are realms?
LFG! Gotta make it happen. Truly think its the most concrete biz model. Revenue generating, measuring PnL via total rewards via vaults, LP, and MM strats, use those for buy-and-burn and distribution to $SAGE holders. Win all around.
Answers to your questions:
Exactly, DAO proposals to projects (outbound) and project proposals to Sage Markets DAO (inbound). In Sage Markets V1, the elected DAO council will then place the liquidity according to the agreed terms. In the roadmap, the goal is to automate the provisioning of liquidity and/or Market Making programmatically. This will be relatively easy for DEX pairs compared to CEX pairs which would require API keys and a legal entity to interface with the CEX. This touches on my answer to the “biggest challenges or obstacles” in my original post and ties in deeply with your question on Hummingbot. We can delve in deep, but to break this down into executable steps immediately = Elect DAO Council → Governance on Protocol Treasury Allocations → Deploy Treasury across elected strategies (LP to DEX, Strategy Vault for Treasury Management, and/or Market Making).
Sage Markets use of funds raised will go toward the development and maintenance of a Solana integration on Hummingbot v2 with Gateway. Interestingly, Solana is one of the only major ecosystems without an integration.
Agree! Maybe even allocate a % of protocol treasury exclusively to bootstrapping other LFG Launched projects.
Realms is PERFECT for Sage Markets. If you haven’t already seen, it’s a DAO toolkit with everything needed to get going immediately. Realms | Solana
“Interestingly, Solana is one of the only major ecosystems without an integration” - shocking to say the least, you’d say it’s a no brainer with how much on-chain actviity SOL has.
Love this one! could you expand a bit on protocol earnings and how distribution would work to token holders? I think it’s a significant gap in the market that Sage can address. It would be interesting to consider projections and how protocol revenue ties in with token price and liquidity provisioned by participants. Sort of feels like there’s no downside pressure on the token under this model. Kinda surprised it hasn’t been done before, but then again, onchain trading only really started to kick off this last quarters once cexs integrated kyc
Yeah! So here’s how I currently envision the rewards distribution:
69% of rewards generated at the end of each quarterly allocation is distributed to $SAGE holders who actively participated in the most recent quarterly allocation vote. The distribution is proportional to each holder’s personal stake in relation to the total holdings represented in the vote as tracked by Realms.
15% of rewards generated at the end of each quarterly allocation are designated for the buy and burn of $SAGE tokens, specifically targeting the DEX pool with the largest amount of liquidity for SAGE.
The elected DAO Council will receive 15% fee of rewards after every quarterly allocation and 1% annually of treasury to motivate the Council to incentivize long-term alignment and sustainability. This also enables the DAO to be highly selective with who is on the DAO Council and provides better checks and balances.
Hmm. This is a difficult concept to consider, as there are elements of positivity (e.g. assisting in DAO funding initiatives) but there are also issues of whale centralization. The summary sentence of ‘Sage Markets would become the premier DAO-based market maker’ sort of sums this up as the word ‘premier’ really translates to ‘central’. This sort of goes against the principles of decentralization and would give far too much power and money (including the 15% rewards to the DAO Council) across the board, which makes me extremely uncomfortable. It far too much money, power and privilege in the hands of the few, which is contrary to the principles of decentralization. As I say, I can see the ‘positives’ of early-bird funding to fledgling projects and DAO’s, but the unfair rewards and power to a planned ‘central’ market maker DAO is much more of a ‘negative’ which I am not comfortable with at all.
I appreciate your engagement. The interpretation of “premier” as “central” does not capture Sage Market’s intent. “Premier” in this context is meant to signify leadership within a decentralized framework, not centralization of power.
The DAO structure utilizing Realms is designed to incentivize contributions and active participation across the board, preventing whale centralization by design with the vast majority of rewards distributed to the community and for the $SAGE buy and burn.
The 15% to the Council appears to be the real concern of yours, which can totally be adjusted. The purpose is to align the council for long-term proper stewardship - particularly for two purpose:
Multi-sig of the Treasury
Proper management of API keys, including a read on balance for any strategies requiring CEX API for complete transparency. This comes with KYCing an entity and operational costs associated with it (for CEX-specific strategies).
The ultimate goal is to make all actions programmatic and rid of the DAO Council over time.
As always of course the main issue in routes to inclusion in the DAO, and how much impact a marginal holding can truly influence capital deployment. Across the space we have this broadchurch advertising campaign but the actual result resembles something more of a distributed cartel.
If you can avoid this, which tbf it looks like youre savvy to that potential, then decentralized market making is a huge win. Facilitating properly interoperable DAO funding models that can help alleviate liquidity stresses on tokens and help achieve price clarity quick would be invaluable, particularly due to the shared intercommunity alignment between associated actors that it creates. There are definitely still in 2024 shady operators even at the top of the MM space, and decentralization would be a powerful antidote. Doing that programmatically obviously the tech challenge here, but I assume that’s what you’re building towards. If we can make market making less EXPENSIVE through use of on-chain activity, that’s when it gets really exciting - even if the GTM might be slower. Community-constructed and parameter fuelled strategy implementations could be fun - if more than 10 top token holders get a vote of course. As would liquidity allocation levers - collective masters of the market is fun on paper.
And Sol/Jup clearly the place for everything these days lol. But it makes sense, Market making is not a slow sport….
Centralized market makers have strangled too many projects in the crib. Decentralization should extend to everything, include GTM liquidity for projects, so I’m all for this. It’ll weed out market makers trading against their own projects and distribute the incentives for doing so more widely. More please. Id learn to learn more about allo opportunities through jup launchpad, feel that hasn’t been fully fleshed out by the team yet
