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As the blockchain economy continues to grow, new projects are emerging and working to make their mark in the space. With the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies recently surpassing $1.5 trillion, there is a lot of room within the industry to grow. One example is the decentralized finance (DeFi) movement, which emerged into the mainstream eye in 2020 and grew to over $50 billion in market cap. This recent run has proven that the market will reward innovative and functional blockchain technology projects, which promise disruption.
Below we will identify 10 of the most groundbreaking blockchain projects and applications currently launching and scaling, with some positioning themselves to be the cornerstone of a new generation of digital asset heavyweights.
DAFI Protocol
DAFI Protocol empowers web3 and DeFi protocols with the ability to reward their early adopters and devoted users in the way that they are meant to be. Upon integration with DAFI, protocols will have the power to distribute synthetic versions of their token as rewards to their early adopters in a truly elastic manner, based entirely on network demand correlation.
DAFI’s game-changing feature is in its ability to translate network demand-volatility with token reward supply-volatility. This means that the number of token rewards in user wallets automatically increases or decreases based on real network demand. These supply adjustments, otherwise known as “rebases”, seek to motivate supply-side network participants to help foster growth of real demand-side users instead of being focused on speculators and price, as well as help minimise the risk of supply shocks in the event of market downturns.
Radix
Radix is a breakthrough layer 1 platform that is targeting the booming DeFi market. As the founder of the GoodFi Initiative, Radix was joined by industry giants such as Aave, Chainlink and mStable to take a stand against bad practices in the traditional financial world and to onboard 100 million mainstream users to DeFi.
Using its proprietary breakthrough technology, Radix (EXRD) has demonstrated a record-breaking 1.4 million transactions per second in 2018, while their current tech iteration ‘Cerberus’ is theoretically infinitely scalable. The highly anticipated launch of the Radix mainnet in Q2 of this year is gathering a lot of attention as Radix continues to prove itself over competing blockchains like Ethereum, Polkadot (slow finality times and lack of atomic composability), Solana (not really decentralized with very high requirements for node runners) and Avalanche (security flaw led to first breakdown of the network).
Expect significant spotlights coming to Radix very soon.
Fractal
With current ‘free’ Internet applications like social media platforms, news outlets, and certain trading exchanges, there is a misalignment of incentives that ends up punishing end-users. In order to remain free, these products make the user their product, selling their information to advertisers in many forms throughout the web browsing process. This leaves everyday users vulnerable, with many unaware that their personal data is being resold and exploited. Fractal is proposing a solution to fix this by offering a new, open-sourced internet platform that allows for the fair exchange of user information.
Utilizing Polkadot’s fast, transparent, and interoperable blockchain infrastructure, Fractal will enable users to regain control of their information and have value exchanged should they elect to assign their data to third parties. With the first iteration launching shortly, Fractal will feature a replacement for annoying cookies that track your movement and information across the web.
Bridge Mutual
The cryptocurrency industry has unfortunately seen hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from hacks and vulnerabilities in exchanges, smart contracts, and other blockchain applications. Bridge Mutual harnesses the power of DeFi to bring users decentralized, discretionary, peer-to-peer risk coverage. Using the Bridge Mutual platform, users can take out or give insurance, paying or collecting an interest fee as part of the transaction.
Instead of going through the traditional insurance system, which doesn’t even offer coverage on these types of events, users can take out risk coverage against malicious behavior that affects their crypto assets. Applicable to decentralized and centralized exchanges, smart contracts, stablecoins, oracle data misinformation, and more to come, Bridge Mutual offers risk coverage for an array of crypto environments.
TrueFi
Collateralized lending has taken off in the DeFi space, allowing users to borrow cryptocurrency by depositing 150 per cent of one asset to borrow 100 per cent of another, all via trustless smart contracts. TrustToken, known for launching the popular TUSD stablecoin, launched TrueFi to cater to the much larger base of companies interested in uncollateralized crypto loans.
Fresh off of a successful V2 protocol upgrade, TrueFi is becoming the star in the unsecured on-chain lending space, placing in the top 30 protocols by Total Value Locked (TVL) and top 10 for lending protocol. The protocol has cleared over $60 million in loans since its November 2020 launch with no defaults. The company’s V2 includes a more robust and lucrative staking model for the native platform currency, TRU, and the launch of full on-chain governance, formally decentralizing the project into the hands of its community. Keep an eye on TrueFi as a possible ‘winner’ of the uncollateralized crypto lending space – worth trillions in traditional finance.
Gather Network
Gather is a platform that allows publishers to monetize without ads, provides businesses and developers to access cheap and reliable processing power. Web and application developers can generate reliable revenue streams without having to rely on the existence of ads. Gather’s unique selling point is that it is a consent based tool compared to existing digital advertising solutions, which is very easy to implement to websites and applications to generate alternate revenue for them while utilizing their users’ compute resources, creating a fairer and more rewarding business model for the ecosystem.
So far, over 350 online businesses registered for their Early Adopters Program for Gather Online and the company is partnered with a $4 billion corporation to test Gather Cloud. Gather is currently putting the final touches on its MVP leading up to their mainnet at the end of Q1 2021. Recently, they have added new features such as merged mining for child chains and Gather Cloud for enterprises.
Cartesi
Cartesi is focused on making DApps easy, scalable, and cost-efficient by leveraging tools developers have been using for decades. In most current forms, developers need to know blockchain-specific coding languages like Solidity to create a smart contract or decentralized application. Now, using Cartesi, every classically trained developer will have the ability to produce their own blockchain applications.
With a product suite that includes a decentralized oracle for Ethereum (Descartes), scalable smart contracts built with mainstream software stacks (Descartes Rollups), and a high-performance side-chain for data availability (Noether), Cartesi is well poised to be a leading contributor to the mass adoption of blockchain technology.
PolkaFoundry
A one-stop-shop for Polkadot builders, PolkaFoundry plans to be the hub of all Polkadot decentralized application development. PolkaFoundry offers an easy to use developer hub that facilitates the creation of many different financial products, such as open lending, decentralized insurance, cross-chain decentralized exchanges, DeFi derivatives, digital auction houses and marketplaces, and prediction markets.
PolkaFoundry is also fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), creating an easy application bridge for developers who build with its suite of products. Built by a seasoned team of Kyber Network, Harmony, Oraichain, and TomoChain entrepreneurs, PolkaFoundry will soon be launching with the support of leading VCs and partners.
APYSwap
APYSwap is a highly-anticipated blockchain protocol for the decentralized exchange of shares of Tokenized Vaults, helping simplify yield farming and other DeFi use cases. Using APYSwap, users can save costs, enjoy greater liquidity, and even enjoy passive income without the demands of active portfolio management. For DeFi portfolio managers, APYSwap provides the ability to trade trustfully on behalf of users.
All of this is achieved by the creation of a layer 2 blockchain where users can swap accounts and assets from layer 1 protocols such as Ethereuem, Polkadot, and Binance Smart Chain. APYSwap solves many of DeFi’s current issues, making it a contender to be one of the most important projects in 2021 and beyond.
DAOventures
On a mission to make DeFi simpler, more accessible, and inclusive, DAOventures is launching DeFi robo-advisor and automated money manager platform. DAOventures offers users easy access to multitude DeFi products including, but not limited to, unbiased robo-advisory, yield-farming aggregation, funds management, structured products, decentralized insurance and more.
DAOventures plans to raise the bar for optimal solutions when it comes to DeFi products by creating a simpler, more accessible, and more open world that is permissionless, inclusive and guided by their DNA of continuous learning, integrity and transparency. DAOventures has recently announced partnerships with other trailblazing projects like Biconomy, MantraDAO and Ferrum Network, to offer users the best of all worlds.