Oxygen is a DeFi prime brokerage service built on Solana and powered by Serum's on-chain infrastructure. Oxygen is built around Pools—baskets of assets that take collective actions. Starting with a borrow-lending facility, users will be able to earn yield and get leverage against their portfolios, setting the foundation for a vibrant and decentralised financial ecosystem.
The project launched in late 2020 with the release of its mainnet alpha. Oxygen is headquartered in Switzerland and the core team is made up of people who are passionate about building the financial infrastructure of the future. They collectively have decades of fintech experience, with 15 developers located around the world.
Oxygen’s ambition is to transform our current model of finance into one that is more accessible, fair and powerful than once imaginable. The first phase of Oxygen is a borrow-lending via a pools-based infrastructure. We next plan to create volatility trading agreements and structured product functions, so that developers can create their own structured products. Our ultimate vision is to recreate marketplace-esque business units which exist within investment banks and make them accessible to everyone.
## What does Oxygen Protocol offer?
Oxygen’s first phase will be a borrow-lending protocol. Some key features distinguish Oxygen from its peers:
Market-based pricing: Oxygen is built around a pools-based infrastructure, wherein users can create a pool by depositing their assets and marking which ones to lend. Users set their lending parameters, including desired maturity and yield, whether as a market order or limit order. Oxygen will match borrowers and lenders with the Serum DEX on-chain order book (instead of through a pre-set, manually adjusted market model). Users thereby get a fair price for borrowing/lending.
Capital efficiency: Oxygen also allows for multiple use of the same collateral. Users can generate yield on their portfolio while borrowing other assets at the same time. Furthermore, users can utilize all of their portfolio across multiple asset types as collateral when borrowing (cross-collateralization). This should mean lower liquidation risk for user portfolios.
Streamlined in-pool trading: Since Oxygen allows users to interact with the Serum ecosystem and DEX directly from their pools (rather than having users continually deposit/withdraw from accounts), a streamlined trading process is made possible.
Sophisticated products: Because Oxygen uses a general on-chain risk management engine evaluating each user’s pool rather than a fixed borrow/lending model, Oxygen can support arbitrary products: tokens, synthetic products, nonlinear assets, and more; all cross-margined in the same account.
Liquidity: Oxygen will also be seeded with the 140M registered users from Maps.me’s user base who will generate yield from their embedded wallets. This will jump start Oxygen as one of the largest fintech applications. We have other liquidity provisions in place too, including support from Alameda and leading HFT firms.
Scalability: Oxygen is also built on Solana blockchain, which can support over 50,000 TPS, with block times of 400ms and transaction costs of approx. $0.00001, meaning Oxygen has scalability as a completely on-chain P2P borrow-lending and prime brokerage protocol.
## Platform and Technology
Oxygen protocol is built on the Solana network. OXY will however be available as both an SPL (native) token and ERC-20, supporting full interoperability between Ethereum and Solana.
Oxygen will run on Serum DEX and Solana, which feature a fully automated on-chain order book and 50K+ transactions per second at a cost of $0.01 / 100 per transaction
## Team/Backers/Investors
Oxygen was co-founded by Alex Grebnev and Viktor Mangazeev. Alex Grebnev has over 16 years of investment banking experience (Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch). Viktor is a serial technology entrepreneur and has worked as CIO for a number of large companies. Oxygen’s strategic investors include and DeFi ecosystem partners include Alameda Research, Serum, Genesis Capital, CMS, MultiCoin, and other leading HFT firms.
## Target market (Geographical focus)
We are targeting a number of segments. Our main segment is the general DeFi market and users who are interested in order-book matched, fair borrowing and lending rates (in our first phase) and more sophisticated financial services sets (in our later phases). We are targeting DeFi users all around the world and are running a number of marketing and promotional campaigns across multiple regions to spread awareness of what we’re bringing.