Since exploding in 2020, decentralized finance has been gaining great attention and popularity, which can often be seen in mainstream media’s headlines. With the exponential growth, DeFi has recorded a total value locked of $41.29 billion, with lending and decentralized exchange products taking up almost 90%.
Lending and trading are the two areas in the current DeFi space with the most TVL. However, they are practically isolated from each other, leading to extremely low capital efficiency. Rare lending protocols support spot or even margin trading, and most DEXs don’t provide loans. Also, even though users get transferable and tradable deposit certificates after depositing in lending protocols, there are few platforms to actually facilitate the financial use of them.
Therefore, Lever is developed to bridge the gap between lending protocols and DEXs, increasing capital efficiency in DeFi.
Market problems
As mentioned above, according to our observations, the problems in DeFi mainly lie in the following aspects:
- At present, it is almost impossible for users to perform margin trading on a DEX, regardless of long or short positions on an asset. The only way to do so is to take out loans from a lending platform and then manually transfer the fund to the DEX to operate, making efficient position management unavailable.
- The lack of direct trading scenarios in lending products. The activities of borrowing and trading of assets often happen in two separate places: in lending platforms and on DEXs. Users will have to go through a strenuous process of taking out loans from lending platforms first to trade on their preferred exchanges.
- Inefficient utilization of deposited funds. Users get tokenized deposit certificates after making deposits in lending protocols, such as aTokens from Aave and cTokens from Compound. These tokens represent the value of their underlying assets but can rarely be reutilized for investment or trading.
- Rare DeFi products provide efficient and user-friendly margin trading services. Margin trading can effectively amplify traders’ gains. It’s popular in the traditional finance market and also has a huge demand in the DeFi space. Though there are a few protocols that offer this service, their liquidity is not enough.
Welcome to Lever
Lever is an open-source margin trading platform where you can lend, borrow and perform leveraged trading to either buy long/sell short an asset in just one place.
For lenders and/or borrowers, you can lend your idle crypto assets (including your deposit certificates from other lending protocols) to earn interest or use them as collateral to take out loans.
And for traders, after making a margin deposit in the margin pool, you will be able to open either long or short positions in a supported asset in Lever with up to 3x leverage. The platform makes use of external AMMs like Uniswap to provide surplus liquidity for margin traders to open positions of any size.
Using Lever, you can comfortably leverage your available capital for larger gains.
Lever’s solution and features
- Quick and convenient trading. Lever manages to bridge the gap on lending platforms and DEXs. Borrowing and trading are now seamlessly integrated on Lever. Traders can easily borrow and trade assets in just one place. Lever also offers a visualized operation interface for position management.
- Margin trading and enormous liquidity. Thanks to Lever’s powerful margin pool, traders can easily open leveraged positions to either long or short an asset. In addition to Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) and Ether (ETH), many DeFi and ERC-20 assets like Synthetix (SNX), Uniswap (UNI) and Aave now can be shorted on Lever. Furthermore, by relying on AMMs like Uniswap, Lever can provide enough liquidity and reduce slippage for positions of any size.
- High-capital efficiency. Other than native tokens, lenders can deposit Aave’s aTokens and Compound’s cTokens to earn extra interest on Lever. This makes double interest possible, as lenders can first deposit their assets in Aave/Compound, then use the aTokens/cTokens they receive to redeposit on Lever. Moreover, these tokens can also be used as collateral to take out loans.
The project is managed by experienced experts in the field of blockchain development. As the first AMM-based decentralized lending and margin trading platform, Lever serves as a pioneer to other decentralized exchanges. Also, with the innovative features and benefits that come with using Lever, it is sure to lead DeFi to the next level and enrich the ecosystem.
Lever’s testnet has already gone live and will be ready for its mainnet launch and initial DEX offering soon. Join the Lever community for more updates:
Site: https://lever.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeverNetwork
Telegram: https://t.me/LeverNetwork
Medium: https://medium.com/@LeverNetwork