Hello everyone,
Here's a conceptual preview of the futures contract:
http://www.metaliquid.io/post/110737608153/the-seinfeldian-contractWe're going to have a special kind of smart property that gets issued/revoked dynamically as people transact, allows a negative balance (i.e. a short position) and locks up a corresponding amount of OMNI. Then it has an index of transactions that is reference at expiration to settle everyone against a data feed. We're trying to nail down a prototype for the hackathon next weekend, initial data-feed will be a random walk number. The initial contract will be very short duration and very basic in terms of paramters. Later iterations will support more sophisticated indexing so people can get settled either immediately or sometime before expiration when taking profits, and can get settled immediately when taking losses.
Then later, rolling contracts, and then double-locking 100% collateral to issue what was originally called "user currencies" in JR's original spec. I refer t this as decentralized banking. There's a potential to earn interest from the yield gained as one rolls a contract at a slight premium paid by speculators who want leveraged exposure to the underlying reserve asset (OMNI in this case) - that yield balances out tail-risk that a 50% move in the underlying i 6 hours or whatnot might lead to a breaking of the buck. Very experimental but this would enable billions of people to dynamically get liquidity to peg payments to minor fiat currencies or commodities, and also to save with pretty high yields, and it can become an engine to rocket the valuation of OMNI and even BTC into the giga-bucks range.
So as a board member, I want to see that vision realized - so all OMNI holders get fabulous returns. We've got negative interest rates in the EU, a crazy stock market bubble in the US, gold temporarily suppressed, BTC as a monetary commodity facing headwinds (which this protocol can help alleviate by boosting transaction volumes 1000x), maybe OMNI can create a new paradigm for money and be the digital platinum to bitcoin's digital gold.