How to Calculate Price Volatility for DeFi Variance Swaps

Max Feldman's prize-winning submission for the Chainlink hackathon involved creating a decentralized finance (DeFi) product that calculates on-chain price volatility using Chainlink Price Feeds to support a variance swap. A variance swap, traditionally traded over-the-counter among financial institutions, measures the volatility of an asset pair over time. Feldman's innovation allows these swaps to be traded directly from Ethereum wallets, encapsulated in an ERC20 token wrapper, thus democratizing access to decentralized infrastructure for hedging volatility risk. The system ensures sufficient collateral for payouts and balances long and short positions, with a fee structure up to 2.55% set by the Feldmex team. Feldman's design also leverages Chainlink's capability to fetch historical price data, enabling accurate calculation of variance and demonstrating the potential for traditional financial instruments to be adapted into decentralized protocols. His work highlights the potential for expanding decentralized finance to include a broader array of financial derivatives, with plans to move to the mainnet and enhance the user interface.