Sovryn will allow you to trade Bitcoin against USD stablecoins.

No. Sovryn uses an automated market maker (AMM) that automatically adjusts fees in accordance with supply and demand

Margin trading has two main aspects: trading with leverage and shorting. In trading with leverage, a trader borrows assets to increase the amount of assets they are trading. By doing so, they magnify the gains or losses of their trade. The borrowed assets are known as a margin loan. To obtain the margin loan, the trader puts up assets that serve as collateral. The terms of the margin loan specify a collateral-to-loan ratio. If the trade falls below the specified ratio, the trade is liquidated and the lender is made whole using the trader’s collateral.

Margin trading also includes shorting. In shorting, a trader essentially sells assets they do not own. The short investor borrows an asset and sells it on the expectation that the assets will lose value.

Sovryn allows for up to 5X leveraged trades, which will be increased in the future.

On Sovryn, you receive a margin call when you approach the margin maintenance threshold of 15%. If your margin slips below 15% your position will be partially liquidated.

Since Sovryn is built on RSK (a Bitcoin side chain), it benefits from lower block times which average 30 seconds compared to the Bitcoin average block time of 10 minutes.

No, Sovryn uses an AMM (Automated Market Maker) to allow trading, similar to Uniswap. This design does not allow for an orderbook hence there are no limit orders. But in the future conditional orders will be added which will serve a similar purpose.

Sovryn uses an oracles (currently Money-on-Chain and soon also Chainlink) along with an aggregate of multiple exchanges to tether the price to the market price of Bitcoin.

Fees collected by LPs
Liquidity Providers can provide liquidity to the Sovryn Swap AMM. Unlike most other AMM’s, such as Uniswap, LP’s are not required to deposit both assets into a pool, they can add only one or both. Sovryn Swap uses oracles to rebase the ratio between tokens, eliminating most of the possibility for “impermanent loss”. Sovryn Swap collects a fee on each side of the swap, which is distributed to the LPs. Currently this fee is set at: 0.1%

Fees collected by the Sovryn Protocol
The Sovryn protocol collects a fee on each trade that is performed. This fee is currently set to: 0.15%

Fees on Borrowing
The interest rate paid by borrowers to lenders is set dynamically based on supply and demand - the ratio of supply to loans. The Sovryn protocol collects an origination fee on every loan, currently set to 0.09%

Interest paid to Lenders
Interest payments made by borrowers are distributed to lenders. The Sovryn Protocol collects 10% of interest for the insurance fund, which exists to protect lenders in the possible case of a loan defaulting.

We require at least one confirmation for all transactions. For most transaction sizes, even this is overkill. For very large transactions, we will require more confirmations on a risk-adjusted basis. Only the very largest transactions would require more than 3 confirmations.

It is indeed centralized right now. This will change soon as we add a federation and then further steps to decentralize it. In particular we will be linking it with lightning network, so that transfers can happen instantaneously.

RSK, which is a Bitcoin layer 2 smart contract protocol. Learn more about RSK here.

RSK is a Bitcoin layer 2 sidechain that provides for smart contract functionality using Bitcoin as it’s native asset. RSK is the most permissionless and censorship-resistant Bitcoin sidechain:

1. RSK is permissionless and its consensus mechanism is merge-mined PoW with about 40% of Bitcoin’s hashpower currently mining RSK. This means that RSK is mined by more hashpower than any other chain, except Bitcoin itself.
2. RSK’s two-way peg mechanism (called PoWpeg) is probably the most secure peg and multisig system in the cryptoworld. It uses a combination of HSMs and SPV proofs with multiple different functionaries. It layers PoW (through SPV proofs) over HSM security, providing additive security and decentralization. 3. Unlike Liquid, it is permissionless and highly censorship resistant.
3. RSK sidechain is constantly improving the two-way peg. In the next iteration, Bitcoin miners will directly participate, making the peg even less federated and even more tightly coupled with Bitcoin PoW.

RSK has a number of efficiencies over Ethereum, primarily with regards to storage handling and data structure (more info here). We however do not believe that these represent an order of magnitude difference. The main benefit in terms of scaling for RSK, is its ability to adopt those scaling solutions that prove viable in the future on Ethereum (rollups for instance). We have said that “Ethereum is our testnet” - and this is one reflection of that.

Bitcoin on RSK has decisive advantages over tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum (such as wBTC, renBTC):

• RSK is not a competing chain, it is Bitcoin Layer 2.
• RSK is Bitcoin native. You don’t need any other token other than bitcoin to use it and all fees are paid in bitcoin. This is the first DeFi dApp where Bitcoin is the only “gas” you need to power it. This reduces the user friction of buying an altcoin so you can trade another.
• RSK is non-custodial. It is not an IOU (like WBTC) and maintains censorship- resistance. tBTC is also non custodial, but is very expensive to make the conversion - and is likely to get more expensive in their new model (higher collateralization ratios). More generally, fees are much lower on RSK than on Ethereum.
• RSK is secured by Bitcoin PoW, no need to understand or trust a different model. No need to be concerned that Bitcoin value on Ethereum could exceed ETH value.
• BTC has the advantage of being the base asset on RSK. The loan to collateral ratios Sovryn will offer will be far superior to what is being offered for tokenized Bitcoin on Ethereum.
• With the FastBTC relay, it is faster, cheaper and easier to move Bitcoin onto RSK than any of the Ethereum BTC-tokens. This alone is a 10X improvement. This will also be integrated with the lightning network, which is important to many Bitcoiners.