Strategic Roadmap

Traditional Markets

Quiver aims to offer synthetic markets in all major asset classes that will allow investors to maintain a truly diversified portfolio on-chain. This will allow citizens to generate efficient risk-adjusted returns on their wealth, protected from inflation, confiscation, and mass financial surveillance.

We are going to use perpetual futures to offer deep liquidity in all of the world's major markets. This will be a base layer of liquidity, open and permissionless. Composability is going to be key.

We want a whole financial ecosystem to be built on top, including automated decentralized strategies, community-created ETFs, and actively-managed funds.

Advantages of Perpetuals

We believe decentralized futures hold the key for anyone in the world to be able to trade in all of the world's major assets with privacy and security.

Our goal is to provide unfettered access to all of the world's markets in a single place. For the first time, global investment opportunities will become censorship-resistant and accessible to all. The way we are going to do that is by offering trades in derivatives, particularly perpetual futures.

Perpetual futures are a new class of derivatives that allow very efficient trading on synthetic markets.

• Compared to spot markets, they allow leverage and short-selling, with no need for complicated borrowing operations.

• Compared to traditional futures with an expiry date, they not only avoid the need to roll positions, but also are much more resistant to price manipulation in the underlying market.

Other proposed solutions don't quite work:

• Centralized entities tokenizing assets have to deal with a weight of outdated regulation and bureaucracy, while adding censorship, custody and solvency risks.

• Decentralized synthetic tokens are a solution, but they currently introduce either large capital costs or unacceptable systemic risks. This seriously hurts their competitiveness as investment tools.

Smaller Spreads and Deeper Liquidity

We at Quiver have a very ambitious goal: we want our synthetic perpetual markets to be where price-discovery happens, even for traditional markets!

For example, we are going to launch perpetual markets for major stocks, such as Apple, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla. And we eventually expect our markets to have more liquidity than the spot markets at NASDAQ.

In part this is because of the intrinsic advantages of leverage. Leverage is one of the reasons index derivatives such as the S&P are often much more liquid than the constituent stocks, and perpetual markets can use that to their advantage.

However, single-stock futures have been tried in the past and failed to gain traction. What is it that we are going to do differently? Here is where our special matching engine comes into play.

Our conjecture is that one of the primary reasons single-stock futures failed to gain traction is that it is very easy to arbitrage between them and the spot markets:

• With the right kind of structure, this easy arbitrage allows bots to duplicate the liquidity from the spot market into the futures market (as we have seen with the Maker-Taker Arbitrage).

• But with traditional, first-in-first-out architectures, what is actually favored is the alternative, Sniper Arbitrage. This arbitrage happens both ways, but mostly from the bigger, high-volume market into the smaller or newer one. This creates a winner-takes-all game that favors the incumbents.

We therefore speculate that sniper arbitrage between spot stock markets and the new, smaller single-stock futures markets ended up making them illiquid and contributing to their unpopularity.

Quiver will have a chance to put single-stock futures to work at a much more favorable condition. Market makers will be protected from arbitrage losses and will be able to provide equal or smaller spreads than those in regulated incumbents. Maker-Taker arbitrage bots, as well as Sweeper bots, will duplicate much of the liquidity from traditional markets (including liquidity in correlated markets).

All the same arguments apply to obtaining liquidity on Forex, commodities, and bond markets, as well as in novel indexes whose components are existing markets.

This will allow Quiver to be an attractive trading platform not only for crypto-native retail users, but also for professional and institutional traders. Indeed, we would like to position ourselves to capture a large market share of trading activity from new types of permissionless, crypto-first hedge funds – that will nevertheless trade on all types of asset classes.

Other Future Developments

• Stop-loss and take-profit orders

• Standardizing our API so that we can be listed at CoinMarketCap + integrating with trading tools such as CCXT and PyCryptoBot.

• Developing structure to quickly create new types of markets (including temporary ones)

• Synthetic markets for pairs (e.g. ETH/BTC perpetuals).

• Synthetic markets for leveraged positions, or other automated strategies (such as mean-reversal).

• Liquidity for options

• Protected leverage positions (preventing liquidations for some time periods or price ranges).

• Counterparty insurance for protocol or exchange insolvency (credit-default swaps)

• Transparent lending engine

• Decentralized decision-making through futarchy governance and the QUIV token