Abstract

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is an open and global financial system built for the internet age. It is an alternative to a system that is opaque, tightly controlled, and held together by decades-old infrastructure and processes. With DeFi, the markets are always open and there are no centralized authorities who can restrict payments or deny you access to products. Services that used to be slow and at risk of human error became automated and more reliable now that they are operated by code inspectable by anyone.

With record-high inflation eating into real wages of the world population, and banks offering non-competitive savings APRs, people are increasingly forced to resort to investing in various assets in order to preserve their wealth. This is frequently easier said than done. Investments require skills, and most people lose money. To make things worse, there is a massive ticking time bomb at hand — the pension time bomb. An aging population and increased lifespan will mean more people needing to draw a pension in the coming decades with the danger that both private and state social security programs will buckle under the strain.

To combat these issues, we propose a blockchain protocol that issues an ERC-20 Standard token with limited composability ($OPLL), which will be subject to continuous price appreciation, similar to an interest bearing token (ibToken). The token price will grow through three main mechanisms; (1) supply control through minting and burning of tokens; (2) strict enforcement of trade execution price as opposed to traditional price discovery; and (3) an automated credit score-based system of monthly allowances meant to balance the protocol. Opulence is a financial game experiment that aims to prove the possibility to create and sustain an asset backed by the positive expectations of the community and credibility of its monetary properties, as well as a programmatic price discovery and continuous enforcement of it. We expect the OPLL token to become a viable addition to the current safe-haven assets, which proved to be prone to inflationary dynamics and volatility. The vision of Opulence is to create a form of savings suitable for everyone and become an alternative to government-backed social security programs and passive investment vehicles.