Are you ready to take your options trading to the next level? Look no further than Carmine Finance, the revolutionary decentralized finance platform built for options trading.

With Carmine Finance, anyone can buy and sell options at a fair price, unlocking a world of possibilities for traders, liquidity providers, hedge funds, and investors. Whether you're a seasoned trader or new to decentralized finance, Carmine Finance provides a comprehensive and user-friendly platform that caters to all experience levels.

The Journey

• Work started with initial idea in the early 2022. The team made their first commit on Thursday, April 28, 2022, marking the beginning of their development efforts.
• As progress continued, the testnet for Carmine Finance was opened in the autumn of 2022, allowing users to explore and test the platform's functionalities.
• Finally, on April 7, 2023, the highly anticipated mainnet was officially launched, enabling users to actively engage with Carmine Finance and leverage its decentralized options trading capabilities.
• In a recent development, the governance system of Carmine Finance, written in Cairo 1, underwent an upgrade, showcasing the project's commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. Although this upgrade does not directly impact the user experience, it demonstrates the team's dedication to enhancing the platform's underlying infrastructure.
• Looking ahead, Carmine Finance has an exciting release on the horizon. An interesting feature that the team is rolling out is insurance against price drops of cryptocurrencies. It is already available for whitelisted users to test it out. This massively useful feature will soon be rolled to all users pretty soon. 
• This upcoming feature will provide users with added protection and risk management tools, further solidifying Carmine Finance's position as a comprehensive and user-friendly decentralized finance platform.
  
  

Challenges Faced

• Carmine Finance faced various challenges throughout its journey, including designing an entirely new protocol while ensuring it remained secure and free from exploitable vulnerabilities.
• The team iterated multiple times, collaborating with individuals and conducting thorough audits to refine and enhance the protocol. Their efforts led to a simplified protocol that is difficult to find flaws in, demonstrating their commitment to robustness and security.
• Another significant challenge for Carmine Finance was raising capital during a bear market. In an environment where market sentiment is low, and investor confidence is reduced, securing funding can be particularly challenging.

• However, despite the obstacles, the team persevered and successfully obtained the necessary capital to support the development and growth of Carmine Finance.
• Building the protocol in a new programming language needing essential tooling posed difficulties. The team had to navigate the limitations and workarounds associated with a language that may have needed to have readily available all the required resources.
• They either had to exercise patience and wait for the necessary tools to be developed or find alternative solutions to ensure progress and overcome this hurdle.

Despite these challenges, Carmine Finance has demonstrated resilience, adaptability, and a commitment to pushing boundaries in the decentralized finance space, creating a robust and innovative protocol.

Unique Features

• One of its standout offerings is its innovative price updating model for options automated market maker (AMM). This model, designed by the team, revolutionizes how options are handled within the AMM space.
• While a competitor may have implemented a similar design, Carmine Finance believes its approach is superior, although it acknowledges that it is not the first exceptional design in its class.
• Another distinctive feature of Carmine Finance is its utilization of options for contracting insurance and hedging products. This represents a novel and forward-thinking design, showcasing the team's commitment to pushing traditional financial instruments' boundaries and offering users unique solutions.
• Furthermore, Carmine Finance has implemented a governance system on StarkNet, a technology that enables direct management of smart contracts. This governance framework ensures that no shortcuts can be taken when upgrading smart contracts, as all changes must go through the established governance process.
• Additionally, StarkNet allows for the efficient management of multiple smart contracts, further enhancing the platform's flexibility and scalability.

These exceptional features collectively contribute to Carmine Finance's position as an innovative and forward-looking protocol, providing users with novel options for AMM functionality, groundbreaking insurance, and hedging products, and a robust governance system on StarkNet.

Future Plans

In the near future, Carmine Finance has ambitious plans set in motion. 

• Within a matter of days to a maximum of two weeks, the company intends to launch insurance products specifically designed to protect against price drops in the volatile crypto market. 
• Additionally, they are preparing to introduce hedging solutions to counteract impermanent loss, a crucial step in safeguarding investments. 
• Furthermore, Carmine Finance is diligently working on implementing a comprehensive risk monitoring system for under-the-water loans on the StarkNet lending protocols. 
• Looking ahead to the distant future, Carmine Finance envisions broader horizons. The company aspires to traverse the entire ETH ecosystem, exploring and expanding its reach and influence. 
• And beyond that, in a grander timescale, Carmine's vision extends to offering standardized insurance solutions that will cater to both the web3 realm and the real world, all securely built on the foundation of blockchain technology.