Thales raises $2.5M for binary options platform in Synthetix ecosystem

Published at: July 14, 2021

A decentralized finance project providing binary options style trading has just completed a $2.5 million seed round.

Binary options are financial instruments that allow traders to speculate on the price movement of the underlying market or cryptocurrency. There are two possible outcomes which is why they are considered binary.

At launch, Thales will support markets for more than 60 different assets including cryptocurrencies, commodities, equities, and index products, before expanding into sports markets. At the time of writing, there was no mention of the specific launch date.

The strategic investment round for the Thales platform was led by Framework Ventures and Apollo Capital. There were several other venture capital contributors including LD Capital, Honey DAO, the LAO, Zee Prime Capital, IOSG Ventures, D64 Ventures, and Koji Capital.

The announcement added that there will be a two-year token vesting strategy by the protocol’s strategic partners starting at the token generation event.

The funding round was completed using 'DAO-first capital formation', a method proposed by Synthetix founder Kain Warwick earlier this month. This approach enables the project to establish token holder-based governance usi a Decentralized Autonomous Organization much sooner than going through legal structures and processes.

Thales is a Synthetix ecosystem project building support for trading binary options and on-chain derivatives on the Ethereum network. In late 2020, core contributors at Synthetix began to seek an external team to develop a binary options trading platform that would become Thales. It received seed funding from the SynthetixDAO to kick start the project.

Thales token distribution model will be weighted towards active Synthetix community members with 35% of the 100 million tokens claimable by SNX stakers with minted debt. Another 45% will go toward various incentive programs and yield farms and 20%, or 20 million Thales tokens, will be allocated to the current and future team.

The Thales airdrop will likely happen in August and September according to Synthetix core contributor, Jordan Momtazi.

Thales intends to venture into the realm of on-chain sports betting through a partnership with Chainlink which will be providing the oracles and data feeds.

In 2019, Cointelegraph reported that U.S. regulators were growing concerned about the emergence of binary options scams for this high-risk derivatives trading method emerging in the crypto sector.