Cours de Lyra Finance

Lyra is an automated market maker (AMM) for trading European options on Ethereum. Lyra prices options using a market based, strike-adjusted implied volatilities (IV) applied to a Black Scholes model. It also automatically accounts for Vega and Delta risk that LPs are exposing to. 

Lyra will accept a stablecoin as collateral, and will offer options in rounds. A round is defined as a 28 day period, with options tradable for 4 discrete expiries within that time (7, 14, 21, and 28 days from the commencement of the round). The liquidity will be split into two sub-pools, namely the Collateral Pool which collaterizes options and pays/receives premiums, and the Delta Pool which hedges the delta exposure of the AMM by trading the underlying asset.

The goal for an options market maker is to find an IV value at which demand roughly equals supply. In this situation the AMM can collect fees on trades without taking on risk itself, as it is buying and selling options in equal amounts. The AMM is designed to respond to supply/demand to reach this IV level efficiently. This market-derived IV value is then used to calculate the Black Scholes price of an option (W).

Liquidity providers can deposit sUSD to a Lyra market maker vault (MMV) in order to collect trading fees from users of the protocol. Users can deposit or withdraw their funds into the AMM at any point in time, subject to a short delay. After the 7-day cooldown timer elapses and pending the circuit breakers, the net asset value (NAV) of the pool (the sum of free liquidity, the delta hedging position, and the pool's option exposure) is calculated using a geometric time-weighted average value (GWAV). The value of each LP token is calculated by dividing the NAV by the number of LP tokens in circulation. The user then has LP tokens minted/burned, the number of which is given by the value of deposited/withdrawn capital divided by the value of a single LP token.