Beaker is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) built on Radix, with the goal of radically changing the experience of decentralized exchanges. It is currently live on the Babylon betanet.
Vision
The purpose of Beaker is to solve issues by making a complete overhaul of the DEX experience. Beaker identifies the current experience of providing liquidity as closer to gambling than investing. On most DEXes, after providing liquidity to a pool, users are left clueless about the performance of their investment. Beaker aims to change this by using distributed ledgers to their full capacity to automate this process.
The design of Beaker revolves around three ideas:
- Radically better technology: Beaker is working on making a proper abstraction of the AMM problem to find better market-making functions. Once a proper model for the problem is found, they will work on the right solution. This work should also allow them to find a better fee model that would take into account market conditions.
- More serious and responsible DeFi: Beaker believes in #RealYield, meaning that liquidity providers will only receive the commissions due to them. Beaker will provide tools as turnkey solutions to simulate and track investments and risks.
- Simplicity and elegance: Beaker aims to attract traditional investors but also wants to keep it simple for those who don’t want to scratch their heads too much. Beaker will propose simple and advanced tools depending on the user’s will.
Features
At the moment, Beaker is running a minimal version on the Radix Betanet 2. These features include swapping and providing liquidity. Beaker currently uses a Uniswap v2 AMM model where fees are not automatically compounded. After providing liquidity, users get a Position, a Non-Fungible Resource (NFR) that gives an overview of the liquidity provided.
Liquidity Pools
Beaker uses the constant-product market-making model for its liquidity pools. Providing liquidity comes with a risk called impermanent loss. Beaker does not plan on minting tokens to give additional rewards to liquidity providers (also known as liquidity mining).
Relative Portfolio Evolution
Beaker introduces the concept of relative portfolio evolution to have a better understanding of liquidity providing by taking fees into account. This concept is used to make a bet on the relative pool's rate evolution at the moment of removing liquidity.
For more detailed information, please visit the official Beaker documentation.
Tokens/Tokenomics
At the moment, Beaker does not plan to emit a token. They are very sceptical about the real utility of "DAO tokens" and believe that they are mainly speculative assets that some projects use to make a profit. Therefore, issuing such tokens would be against their philosophy.
Team
The team behind Beaker consists of three master's degree students from Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon.
- Theodore Conrad-Frenkiel, frontend development.
- Arthur Vinciguerra, Scrypto code.
- Guillaume Méroué, backend development.
Business Model
Beaker acts as a platform that matches liquidity providers and traders. This kind of platform usually takes a 15% commission fee. Beaker will therefore take up to a 15% commission on all accrued fees. They plan on making their tools free for all users. However, tools that track investments and risks will only work for their pools. If it is not sustainable, they reserve the right to charge for these tools or make them available only for liquidity providers.