The Crypto Volatility Index ($GOVI) — Announcing V2

4 min readApr 28, 2021

V1 — inception

We have released the CVI V1 beta version back in October 2020, and have been optimizing and improving it since, welcoming new users to the platform and gradually growing the total value locked, number of trades and all growth parameters. The CVI trading platform has been live on mainnet since January and has been generating cash flow for $GOVI holders.

Volatility trading — a growing trend

CVI is the first decentralized platform to trade market volatility, the same way traders do on traditional markets with the VIX. Our belief is that Crypto Volatility trading will be just as big on crypto as volatility trading is huge on traditional finance. In fact, since we have launched the first platform, we noticed that this idea is taking shape, as the biggest crypto funds and investments arms, such as Alameda and Coinbase ventures, are seeking investments in volatility products coming later this year.

CVI is the first mover in the market and we plan to maintain our leading position by continuing to innovate and develop the platform.

Introducing Version 2 (CVI V2)

The CVI 2.0 Version will have a lot of improvement. Here are the top 3 innovations that will be introduced:

LAYER2 solution

Ethereum gas costs are a major friction in the adoption of Defi platforms. Our commitment to our user base is to have a substantial and immediate reduction of gas costs. While the ecosystem waits for Ethereum 2.0 and Rollups to improve scalability and reduce costs, we’re taking a very active approach to reducing gas costs and have been testing various solutions, including Optimism, Arbitrum, xDAI and Polygon. We are in touch with all layer2 teams and follow their progress and schedule. We’re happy to say that CVI V2 will launch with an integrated Layer2 solution on Mainnet, following which our users will save most of their gas costs.

Margin Trading

Margin trading allows a trader to take a leveraged position in order to increase his return and capital efficiency, as well as in order to better hedge himself against volatility and impermanent loss. In traditional finance, leveraged trading vehicles for the VIX are very popular and useful. We believe that Crypto Volatility Trading should have the same set of tools and CVI V2 will include margin trading for all tradable tokens.

Volatility Tokens

The greatest innovation in V2 will be, in fact, volatility tokens. In V1, traders and liquidity providers who want to use the platform will need to access it, make a deposit and build a position. V2 introduces a brand new concept: instead of opening a position, users can simply use a DEX to buy a token that represents the position they wish to have. For example, if a trader wants to buy a 20% increase in Volatility, he can just join that pool on Uniswap. The concept extends to leverage as well, so a user can buy the same 20% volatility with 5X leverage. We believe that this will be a game changer for CVI as it greatly simplifies the user experience and attracts the huge audiences that DEXs like Uniswap and Sushiswap have, while fees generated will continue to be streamed to the platform backing the token and to GOVI stakers, as they’ve been until now

Some more features

We wish to continue and expand CVI to other chains and platforms, to make it the platform of choice for all chains and users. Expect to see CVI grow to more chains.

We will continue to offer liquidity mining and deposits to more tokens and communities, in order to attract a wider audience to the platform. Of course, COTI as a deposit method remains an important goal.

As our top priority is, and always will be, our users’ safety — we have hired Peckshield to do a 3rd platform audit in May for the additional features that are being developed. We’ll share the results with our community, of course.

When V2

Our ambitious goal for V2 is to launch it before the end of this quarter! There are a lot of moving parts and unprecedented technologies in play, but we are laser focused on deployment.