November marks Ballast’s first month of existence, and what a month ! It’s been an extremely busy, fulfilling and exciting couple of weeks.

TL;DR

• Ballast’s leadership team is formed
• Ballast product roadmap is clear
• Ballast’s v1 is ready to launch on devnet
• The BLT token is designed
• Ballast socials are booming!

Forming the dream-team

When the idea of building a DeFi product came to Mark and Silvia’s minds, they knew they had to bring on a handful of the best brains in the industry to make dreams become possible.

Ballast now boasts a top-tier leadership team, with talent from notorious protocols like Uniswap and Balancer as well as OG centralised exchanges such as OKX. In addition to cutting-edge experience, the leadership team also brings names like Pingkan, Accenture and HSBC to the table.

If working in a fast-pace environment alongside an ambitious team sounds like you, please check our open positions here. The list is growing.

Where to start ?

Sui Network’s timeline to main-net gives us the luxury to take a step back and reflect on what financial product is needed on day-1 of launch.

In this first month of operations, the team has laid out 4 versions of Ballast which will become the directory for our product roadmap.

AMM & Swap Interface (v1)

Our AMM is composed of a suite of persistent, non-upgradable smart contracts that together create an automated market maker, a protocol that facilitates peer-to-peer market making and swapping of tokens on the Sui blockchain.

Ballast’s v1 AMM is ready for devnet ! The v1 includes features such as : Swapping Sui tokens and adding & removing liquidity to token pairs.

Read more about Ballast’s v1 AMM here.

Central Limit Order Book model (v2)

Ballast v2 will use a single asset pool, the liquidity of which is sent for market making to the order book. Thus, traders will always have enough liquidity for comfortable trading, and investors can profit from the sophisticated market-making mechanism developed by the Ballast team.

Spot trading (v2.1)

The secondversion of the Ballast spot DEX on Sui is the first order book implementation that supports on-chain order matching and Sui wallet connection. Ballast also provides users with an opportunity to make instant token swaps at the market price in a single click. Ballast boasts lower fees compared to AMMs. On Ballast, for example, on the SUI/USDC market takers pay 0.1% where 0.05% goes to makers and another 0.05% – to the treasury fund. As for USDT/USDC, the taker fee is 0.04% and the maker’s rebate is -0.02%.

Perpetuals (v3)

Ballast v3 will offer a decentralized way to trade perpetual futures contracts meaning that traders have no need to rely on centralized exchanges and trust their funds to a single entity. Instead, funds are stored on users’ wallets e.g. Suiwallet. Ballast’s perpetuals will support leveraged trading, cash settlements, and multi-collateral features.

Options (v4)

The goal of Ballast v4 in terms of options trading is to provide a decentralized platform for their operation and to ensure a convenient and easy-to-use foundational block for well-versed, expert traders and as well as novel traders. Ballast will support partial collaterization for options.

Crafting BLT’s design

Designing the token that powers an ecosystem is not a light task, it defines who participates in the ecosystem and how they participate too. We will be publishing an in-depth piece that covers BLT economics, supply and utility in the coming days. As of now you can refer to our documentation.

Getting the word out about Ballast !

Community is key and initial traction can be a deal-breaker for initiatives, internal moral and overall success.

We are genuinely grateful for our early supporters on Twitter, Telegram and hopefully on other social media channels to come! Within 20 days of launching our Twitter page, we have grown exponentially to over 5,000 community members!

Are you an early #BallastSailor ? Don’t worry, it’s worth it ! Read up on how supporting Ballast at this early stage can be rewarding.