# Foundational Architecture of Thales The Thales Protocol was born in 2021 as a permissionless, order book based `peer2peer` Digital Options platform deployed on Ethereum Mainnet and powered by Chainlink price feeds. The original goal of Thales was the ability to support tokenized "all-or-nothing" Digital Options that are determined by the following variables: * Asset - Choice of asset (price/data feed) around which the Digital Options market is revolving around ( e.g. price of `Bitcoin` ) * Strike Price - Goal price of chosen asset around which market participants choose if the price will be above or below ( e.g. "Will the price of `Bitcoin` be above `$50,000`" ) * Maturity Date - Time and date at which the Strike Price is compared to Current Price and the market is resolved either as UP or DOWN ( e.g. "Will the price of `Bitcoin` be above `$50,000` on `2025/01/01`) All individual These Markets were (and still are) all dedicated unique smart contracts. All of them individually support the minting of UP and DOWN ERC20 tokens that represent tokenized exclusive outcomes, in exchange for USD of collateral ( 1 USD deposited into the market by the MM mints 1 `UP` and 1 `DOWN` ERC20 token back to the MM wallet) Only one of these two types of tokens are able to be redeemed for the entire amount of USD collateral from the market contract after maturity date, depending on if the Chainlink reported price of this market's Asset is UP or DOWN from the Strike Price on the Maturity Date. **This collateral mechanism is the core foundation of the Thales Protocol.** Even though this market design format is ideal for simple derivative markets around the price movement of crypto assets, but this is nowhere near the extent of Thales’ power. Thanks to a network of data authenticators known as Oracles, that publish information to the blockchain, any off-chain event can theoretically form the basis of a Thales Market. This architecture was later expanded to support Sports Games oracle data (pre-game odds and post-game results) to allow Thales to build a permissionless onchain Sports Markets architecture. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.thales.io/foundational-architecture-of-thales.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.