For the past 9 months, our team has been heads-down building Hook Odyssey, the perpetuals DEX for fast moving onchain assets. We’re thrilled with the feedback we’ve received from its earliest users.
One of the most common questions they’ve raised is, where is Hook headed, and what happened with the legacy options product?
First, a bit of background. Regy and I started Hook with the vision of using crypto’s trustless, permissionless transactions to enable complex financial products for assets 1/100th the size of those served by traditional finance. We focused on derivatives specifically because they are the glue that connects liquidity between products like lending, AMM LPs, and option vaults. While these markets used to cost millions of dollars to setup and require full-time attention to support, crypto lays the foundation for them to be spun up with 1 click, at a fraction of the cost, and operate autonomously.
We haven’t veered from the original mission in writing Hook’s next chapter with Odyssey. NFTs were the right starting point because we recognized that most of the assets in the world by value look more like NFTs than fungible tokens– and these assets are generally underserved by financial infrastructure. Since then, the liquidity has shifted and we’ve realized that, beyond NFTs, Hook serves a user group that participates in markets for new, fast-moving onchain assets. We built Odyssey to support a much broader set of asset types for these users. Today, Odyssey is the only perps DEX listing both NFTs and fungible tokens. And it’s just the beginning.
Since we launched, the market structure for these fast-moving assets has also matured. It was impossible to create a reliable oracle for NFTs when Hook launched in 2022. Spot markets for these assets have improved significantly since then, thanks to innovations like incentivized bidding and tighter spreads enabled by cheap L2s. As a result of this evolution, it's now feasible to use oracles for our derivatives. To start, Odyssey is launching with perps instead of options because users prefer trading them, and their liquidity concentrates within a single instrument.
Odyssey is a huge leap forward in terms of capabilities and speed, so much so that it seems like a completely different product. But, the real story is that we’re taking advantage of all of our learnings from 18 months in the trenches of covered calls, to bring the market a fresh way to trade. The result is Odyssey, the dex for fast moving onchain assets. We hope you love it, and can’t wait to share what we have in the works.
