boardwalk. | Devpost

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We want to replicate the BoardWalk Defi protocol

Inspiration

Our inspiration started out as project from the EthGlobal Hackathon from February, the original idea has now been rebranded as Boardwalk. We are using this Hackathon as a chance to challenge ourselves to re-design the project and work together under critical time constraints, while simultaneously gaining the project exposure. When we first started the project we saw a gap in the market between risk seeking investors wanting higher leverage with less collateral and DAOs/Funds wanting more options for low risk investments. The solution that we thought of was utilizing our unique derivative: The Total Return Swap.

What it does

Boardwalk set out to provide our easy to use derivative: The Total Return Swap, to risk seeking investors by allowing the user to provide 10% collateral for access to 10x leverage swaps

Let’s pretend you run a hotel, renting from a landlord since buying the whole hotel is out of your budget. The landlord makes money by receiving the rent you pay him in exchange for letting you rent out the rooms in the building

As the manager, your goal is to make more profit while having to deal with guests and the potential damage they cause to the property. This is essentially a T.R.S! The landlord swapped risk of managing the building over to you, in exchange for the profits in return for reliable income

BoardwalkHotelAnalogy

In the DeFi realm the hotel is essentially the DeFi investment. For example a portion of ETH, or liquidity tokens.

Web3 investors would be the manager in this example. Earning the profits of this investment while only needing to pay rent. Boardwalk is creating a way to create DeFi lending that doesn’t require large amounts of collateral (~150%!)

On the other side of the swap large investors such as DAO's or funds would be the Landlord and collect the interest payments while someone else deals with risk and the token volatility. Lately stable-coins have been becoming less trusted and no longer considered enough to make up a diverse portfolio. Using Boardwalks total return swaps we will be able to solves this in a simple and effective way.

How We Built It

Our process for building boardwalk at EthCC Hack was a reverse approach to our usual hacking mindset of hit the keyboard until it works. We started with the user experience in mind and then designed our smart contracts around that after defining the UX.

We realized we wanted users to be able to simply see "deposit" and "buy" and be able to see the details pertaining to each upon selecting them. This led to the smart contracts earning the following interface functions deposit() withdrawal() depositCollateral() withdrawalCollateral() buySwap() _endSwap()

The sellers (comparable to hotel landlords) call deposit() to fund swaps and can then leave the system with withdrawal()

the buyers (comparable to hotel managers) call the collateral functions to add collateral (imagine a security deposit for the hotel) and then can buy or end swaps. The swaps settle profits or collateral liquidation upon their end.

Note there's also NFTs issued to help handle swap logic so buyers/sellers can trade their swap position as the NFT without ending the swap.