The Microtick project’s goal is to provide a globally agreed upon, real-time consensus price - without requiring direct financial coupling to any underlying asset. The project is built on decentralized blockchain technology and the game-theoretical foundation of Schelling points.
Speculate and hedge with short-term leverage
Microtick is more than a decentralized oracle. Its price discovery stems from a two-sided marketplace where traders can enter leveraged positions on a very short-term basis. Choose a trading timeframe that suits your needs: 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, or 12 hours. Or, take the role of “Market Maker” and provide your own assertions about an asset’s price and volatility.
Status-quo price discovery encourages centralization
This Cosmos-based platform aims to address the inherent centralization in the way price discovery is usually conducted. As popularized by the book "Flash Boys," centralization stems from the fact that price information is more accurate when a passive observer is closer geographically - or temporally - to where trade matching occurs. This type of centralization can also contribute to order execution problems such as front running where profit can be made by acting as a middleman in the order flow pipeline without incurring any risk or adding any liquidity to the market.
Beyond the order book
Because Microtick’s consensus price can be hedged in either direction, it has the ability to decouple price discovery from order book trade execution and bring the benefits of a global, real-time reference price to decentralized, private trades on the underlying asset - wherever in the world they may occur. We believe this approach has better long-term benefits than building a decentralized order book or importing data into smart contracts using trusted data sources.
The on-chain consensus prices generated on the Microtick network will always be freely available for use by any external Cosmos / Tendermint Dapp or other blockchain application with access to IBC.
ShapeShift is an R&D sponsor of the Microtick project.
Microtick's blockchain node and CLI have passed a security audit by Certik.
Your Incentive: As a market maker you can make money by providing accurate and real-time price assertions and keeping them updated.
Community Benefit: Help the global network achieve a more accurate consensus price by adding your token backing and unique information to the consensus estimates.
Action: Choose your asset, provide your best estimate for the current price and volatility and back it with token value. Maintain your quote with the latest information as price information changes.
Your Incentive: As a trader you can make money by identifying short-term trading or hedging opportunities and trading malicious, misplaced, or neglected data quotes off the market and collecting their token backing.
Community Benefit: Help the global network by removing stale market maker quotes and rapidly responding to inaccurate ones in order to lock in short-term profit.
Action: Monitor the network. Run a non-validator node. Build a trader bot and watch for stale or low priced quotes in order to profit from your market outlook as it plays out in real-time.
Your Incentive: As a Cosmos validator you make money by collecting the commissions market makers and traders pay for quotes and trades.
Community Benefit: Help the global network by contributing to Tendermint / Cosmos BFT consensus and providing Cosmos IBC data access to others in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Action: Run a secure validator on the Microtick zone. Profit from commissions as market makers and traders battle on price.
