TI First Sight: Black Ocean

Black Ocean is a liquidity providing platform incubated by VRM, a high-frequency quantitative trading company. Black Ocean aims to cover custody, lending and legal currency channels for institutional and corporate users, and provides a series of services such as dark pools and liquidity pools. The dark pool provides a trading venue for the execution of large orders of more than 300,000 US dollars or 5 bitcoins, so that the execution of large transactions is not affected by the external market environment; the liquidity pool provides for the execution of market makers and retail orders venue, there is no minimum order limit. Retail investors will benefit from the services of Black Ocean through their brokers (OTC merchant, Exchanges, Trading apps and etc), which is indirect.

Black Ocean's dark pool and liquidity pool business, source: VRM, TokenInsight

The establishment of Black Ocean is based on the ever-growing market for digital asset trading and the increasing demand for large transactions from institutional and corporate users. According to the VRM team, its average daily transaction volume from 2018 to 2020 has increased from 9 million to 2.751 billion, and its daily transaction volume will reach 10.86 billion at its peak in 2020. In 2021, the daily peak value of VRM transactions has reached a new high, US$26 billion. At the same time, in the field of digital assets, ordinary investors alone cannot build a trading market with sufficient liquidity. The liquidity provider itself that provides liquidity for the platform/transaction pair is particularly important.

A platform similar to Black Ocean that also supports dark pool trading is Wootrade. Black Ocean is currently in the testnet stage, and the private round of its token $Fly has been closed, with investments from a great number of institutions. The follow-up plans of the project include the official launch of dark pools and liquidity pools, the development of decentralized dark pools, and the launch of $Fly on exchanges. Among them, the decentralized dark pool is designed for giant whales and institutions in the DeFi field. In mechanism, the order is matched through the backend and passed to the smart contract, and users can interact with it through the Metamask wallet commonly used in DeFi.

• Black Ocean official website: https://bo.market/

• Token Introduction: https://tokenfly.co

Tokenomics:

The token Fly provides holders with Black Ocean transaction fee discounts and rebates, and it can be used for all services under the VRM ecosystem. The following table shows all the services that VRM will include and the purpose of $Fly:

The total supply of tokens is 1.7 billion, and 1,701,170,600 are initially deployed, of which 1,170,600 have been burnt. The team said that the destruction of the token is to increase the value of the token, and the design of the lock-up is to prevent malicious selling. The plan for token distribution and lock-up is as follows:

• Institutional investors: 18.2%, 309.4 million, locked up for up to 24 months

• Public sale/ Customer users: 17%, 289,000,000

• Liquidity management: 30%, 510,000,000

• Incentive plan: 18.8%, 319,600,000 locked up for 50 months

• Advisors: 2%, 340,000,000, locked up for up to 18 months

• Team: 14%, 238,000,000 units, locked up for up to 48 months

Core Team:

The main members of the VRM team have more than 4 years of experience in the digital asset industry. The main members are as follows:

• Andrei Grachev: Co-founder, with trading and successful entrepreneurial experience. Obtained an MBA degree from Orenburg National University in 2015, worked as a commodity (oil futures) trader on a traditional exchange from 2014 to 2016, and then independently engaged in digital asset trading for about 2 years, established VRM in 2018, and traded as JiamiX in 2019 The CEO.

• Vladimir Demin: Co-founder, has more than 20 years of project management experience. In 2016, he developed and implemented a series of government-oriented blockchain projects as the chairman of the VEB Innovation Fund. In 2019, he became the CEO of Huobi Russia, and he became the chairman of VRM in 2020. He also served as the chief consultant of Huobi Russia.

• Shawn Chong: Business Director of the Asia Pacific Region, graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer and electronic engineering, and joined the blockchain and digital asset industry after completing his postgraduate studies in 2017. At the age of 23, he became the Business director of Bincentive, an asset management platform in Taipei, and then moved to Beijing to join Huobi, responsible for the Huobi cloud market business. He currently also serves as a Huobi consultant.

• Yoichi Akase: Co-founder and head of business.

• Raymond Campbell: Co-founder and IT director.

• GytisKandrotas: Co-founder and UI/UX director.

• Zac Zhou: Marketing Director of the Asia Pacific Region, ex-OKex.

At the same time, the project advisory team members include Heng Yu Lee of IT security service company Group8&co, Michael Rendchen of Digital Wave Finance - a trading company, Eugene Ng of Gemini Exchange, and Mr. Сang of trading company AKG Ventures.

Ecosystem Development:

Black Ocean received investments from the following institutions: AC Capital, AKG Ventures, Bitmart, Blofin, Collinstar Capital, Consensus Lab, Deep Tech Ventures, DeFi Singapore, DeFi Times Capital, Encryption, Eureka, FBG, Fundamental Labs, Gate Labs, HBTC, Jackdaw Capital, LD Capital, MCVC, MXC Exchange, One Piece Capital, Parastate, Quest Capital, RedBlock Capital, Redline Capital, Sanctum Ventures, Stillwater Research, Superchain Capital, YBB Foundation. (Alphabatically)

At the same time, VRM itself has a relatively mature ecology. VRM provides market-making services for exchanges, and its market share on trading platforms such as BitMEX, Bitflyer, OKEx, Huobi, and Binance ranges from 4.2% to 69%. According to the team’s plan, in a negative, neutral, and positive market environment, it will take 5 months, 8 months and 6 months for the project to be profitable; and it will take 16 months, 12 months and 7 months to return on investment. Currently, the project is building a Business-oriented community, and the development of decentralized dark pool smart contracts will also be launched in the second half of the year.

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