Analysis of the role of OPS token in the synthetic assets niche

Cryptocurrency industry is one that has been seeing constant improvements and innovation from the day it came to be, to this very day. Not a day goes by when someone doesn't come up with a new idea, a better way to do something, or a solution to some issue. The last several years have been especially huge for innovation and developments, as the crypto sector started coming up with entire trends, which indicated that the attention of the community is beginning to focus on a single thing at the time when it is the most relevant.

In 2019, we had the IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) trend, which brought a much, much safer way to launch new coins than ICOs. In 2020, the DeFi sector exploded, with its TVL skyrocketing from $1 billion on June 1st, 2020, to $16.5 billion on December 31st, 2020. The growth continued at an even greater speed in 2021, allowing DeFi to hit an ATH of $86.18 billion on May 12th, even though it was nearly cut in half in the following bearish wave.

However, 2021 already has a new trend for itself, even though DeFI continued to thrive. The focus partially shifted towards tokenization, allowing NFTs to prosper. However, NFTs are not the only area of the crypto industry to benefit from tokenizing real-world assets, as there are also things like decentralized derivatives, or synthetic assets, as they are also known as. It is possible that the trend started back in February 2021, during the GameStop short squeeze, when a group of redditors stood up against institutional investors who were destroying companies in order to make money for themselves, by massively shorting their stocks.

When Redditors started massively buying said stocks, many centralized companies offering stocks to retail investors through their apps suddenly removed them. However, crypto exchanges were there to jump in by tokenizing these firms’ stocks, suddenly making them more available. In the meantime, the crypto industry developed a taste for synthetic assets, and it decided that it wanted more, which led to the creation of projects like Octopus Protocol.

Octopus Protocol and OPS

Octopus Protocol is a new decentralized project that allows users to create tokenized derivatives, or synthetic assets, that grant a new level of access and exposure to real-world underlying assets, such as stocks, commodities, bonds, and pretty much anything else that one would be willing to invest in. It has its own, rapidly evolving ecosystem and platform, as well as its own, native token, OPS.

The is a BEP20 token, although it has yet to be launched. OPS itself is a utility token, that will accrue value from platform fees paid for engaging and accessing the available products in the Octopus ecosystem. That includes creating synthetic assets, exchanging derivatives on trading platforms, and similar activities.

The token has a total of three major purposes, which include

• Governance.

• Staking.

• Engagement.

Governance is rather clear on its own — OPS holders will be allowed to vote on upcoming decisions, upgrades, and alike, and help navigate the project alongside other members of the community. Staking is also quite self-explanatory, and it means that users will be able to stake the token and receive rewards for doing so. 

As for Engagement, OPS tokens will be used to incentivize actions across its ecosystem in various ways, which makes it a means of internally accessing the Octopus system for engaging with its products and services.

The project has a goal to disrupt the decentralized derivatives market by offering a simple and user-friendly way to access them. Since there is currently a great demand for synthetic assets, and the number of projects focusing on them is rapidly increasing, it might be that the new tokenization trend is narrowing down and that synthetic assets will become its main branch in days, weeks, and months to come.

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