CoTrader: decentralized investment funds platform supporting DEXs, pools, and any DeFi dapp

6 min readApr 7, 2019

This article assumes you know some key concepts of DeFi (eg Ethereum smart contracts, AMM DEXs, pools, yield farming, etc).

CoTrader.com enables anyone to create or join a DeFi fund onchain.

Traders (fund manager users) can only manage funds, but can’t withdraw other users’ (investors’) assets from them.
CoTraders (investor users) deposit into accepted crypto-assets (ETH, COT, DAI, etc) into the funds, in return for fund shares, and can redeem — withdraw their share portion of tokens — anytime.

All fund activity (trades, pools, stakes, loans, etc) is done onchain. As such, Trader and fund performance is known from chain inspection and shown to CoTraders.

If you, as a Trader, earn your CoTraders ETH or DAI, you can earn fees for the combined AUM, eg 2% for management + eg 20% from earnings. Tools provided to you include DeFi dapps such as all swap major DEXs, aggregators, and numerous pools that currently include Bancor and Uniswap. Balancer, Moooniswap and Curve integration are coming by September 2020.

The DeFi activities available to Traders include:

DEX token trading
Borrowing via eg Compound
DEX pool staking for APR yield farming.

$COT is CoTrader’s token, and can be traded on 1inch.exchange, uniswap, bancor, hotbit, hoo, and other places mentioned in our telegram pinned post at t.me/cotrader.

CoTrader Platform Fundamentals:

Platform Revenue:

Traders can choose their own success and management fees — eg 20% from earnings, 0% management fees.
The platform now takes 10% of the success fee (eg, 2% in this example), as of version 6. In v7, it will take from the lead trader the same % they charge the CoTrader. Eg 20% of 20% success fee, or 4%, of the $100M ($4M), and 20% of the 0% management fee, ie 0%, or $0).
Traders can choose to whitelist only allowed investor wallets into their funds.

Example: A fund manages $100M, and appreciates by 20%:

$4M would be the CoTrader’s profit, and $800k would be the platform cut taken from the Trader, and 50% of that, or $400k, will be used to buy-back COT. The fate of platform-bought COT is explained next:

Tokenomics:

50% of platform revenue buys-back COT via 1inch, and this amount is burned (sent to the null address, 0x0). The token is thus deflationary, as it started with 20B max supply.
25% goes to a bond reserve that pays COT for more COT, depending on locking period during which users deposit and stake their COT
25% goes to the managing team’s wallet. This can be used for developer bounties and other initiatives to advance the platform.

Reasons to Hold the COT Token

Buy and hold COT to benefit from the platform’s onchain automatic revenue-driven buy-backs and burns. This applies upward pressure to the token’s price. Keep in mind that speculation on the token itself can offset such benefits.
Governance:
— 50.1% vote can replace the management team of the project (currently the founding team)
— What will be subject to voting is itself subject to voting and additional voting is TBD.
Farming fair launch tokens offering new features such as funds insurance and new blockchain support

Additional Uses

Bonds: Lock and stake for COT bonds to earn more COT, depending on the lock duration, from COT reserves replenished by platform revenue buy-backs (discussed later).
Earn trading fees from COT pools. For example, the COTBNT pool on Bancor shows high yield — 162% APR this week. More on this below.
Coming soon: Borrow USDCOT using COT as collateral. This stable will form the reserves for a COT / USDCOT pool without selling the COT, while providing access to other APR yield generating stable-to-stable pools such as USDCOT/DAI, USDCOT/USDT, etc.

162% APR: this week in COT trading pools:

The COT to BNT token trading pair pool generated 162% in APR. The pool can be entered here: https://swap.bancor.network/eth/pool . Click Join and find COTBNT.

This 162% is from a weekly 3.12% earnings relative to the pool size, times 52 weeks. 3.12 * 52 weeks = 162% (growth annually)

The below chart is from the week of this article’s writing. Type COT in the search field here: https://zumzoom.github.io/analytics/bancor/roi/

The 3 month APR was also high, above 112% (28.22% * 3), but perhaps far lower than it could have been, because exchange fees (which are paid to the user liquidity providers — eg, can be you) were not optimized (too low by up to factor of 6x) before being changed from 0.5% to 3% while it was still the best place to acquire tokens in a volatile pairing at the middle-of-the-market starting price. While 3% seems high, people still trade there because the relatively high liquidity pairing is still one of the best places to acquire lots of tokens in a volatile pairing, especially in larger volumes, especially when split with other DEXs via the 1inch aggregator. (We also see the same and even far higher fees on some other popular Balancer pools)

To have these pool stakes managed for you, simply deposit ETH or USD stables *via the deposit button into the contract*.

You can find it on cotrader.com by address (0x0863C…) and deposit here:

To make sure you’re using the right fund, you can find and deposit directly in the fund details page here, as in the image below: https://cotrader.com/#/fund/0x0863C38d4303A6f33F408F745F32219ef78E758f

This above is a USD based fund, where the ROI for managers is based on earnings above USD.

Below is also an ETH based fund for the same, but where ROI for managers is based on earning above ETH. Deposit directly in the fund more info page: https://cotrader.com/#/fund/0x734C04Ff28fd6dA6d274e52F2403BFccF18143bb