Research
Enterprise
DeFi

Overlay: An Exchange for Unexplored Markets

Oct 4, 2022 ⋅  10 min read

Most exchanges perform a market-making function matching two active counterparties for each market: buyers and sellers. Overlay flips that traditional idea on its head by letting traders trade against data from an oracle. Through the use of token burn/mint functions, Overlay devised a mechanism to mint new tokens when a trader profits and burns deposited tokens when a trader loses. What's beautiful about the idea is it only requires a simple data stream to make a market. That's why Overlay has in its future plans to offer markets for regional weather patterns, athlete stats, and more. With new sources of data coming continuously online in the 21st century, the new DeFi primitive is well-positioned grow its future user base.

Upgrade to Messari Enterprise to read this report

Intel monitoring with real-time alerting for 60+ onchain and offchain events on 500+ top protocols and networks

Enterprise-grade Asset Diligence for onboarding, listing, or delisting assets at your organization

First access to long-form Enterprise Research with deep dives, valuation models, technical explainers, and more

CSV Downloads for all datasets

Access to the Messari API for select datasets. Custom data packages are available on request

Learn More

No charge until upgrade is complete. Cancel anytime.

Already a member? Sign In

Jerry joined Messari as a Research Analyst after working in management consulting. He graduated with a B.S. in finance and a minor in computer science from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

About the author

Jerry joined Messari as a Research Analyst after working in management consulting. He graduated with a B.S. in finance and a minor in computer science from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.