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Startups Of The Year 2023: Asia Winners

Oracle extractable value (OEV) refers to oracles making use of their position to capture value that would otherwise have gone to third parties. As a simple example, say we have an ETH/USD price data feed with the value of 1000 and the deviation threshold of 1% (meaning that the value after the next update will be 990 or 1010.) A user has a position that can be liquidated when the data feed value is at least 1005, and ETH/USD price is increasing. In the traditional case, the oracles will wait until the underlying APIs return 1010 to update the data feed value to 1010. Then, it’s a race between third parties to liquidate the user and net the reward. With OEV, the data feed gets updated as soon as the underlying APIs return 1005 and the user gets liquidated in the same transaction to claim the reward. Oracles can either extract the OEV themselves, or auction off the right to extract the OEV, which results in an equivalent financial outcome for them. OEV is a concept that is as old as oracles themselves, but important developments have taken place since it was being entertained as a theoretical inevitability. The traditional way of getting a piece of the pie used to be getting into gas wars with other third parties. Over the last year, Flashbots proved that taking this process off-chain is possible in practice, . It’s even that this may be one of the reasons why Ethereum gas fees don’t spike as hard during market volatility. This demonstrates that as long as there is a trustlessly-available mechanism to fall back on, adding more efficient value extraction mechanisms is feasible, and can benefit all stakeholders. MEV extracting more than $650M to date argued Before moving on, let us note that intentionally degrading the advertised oracle service specs (by or ) is an oracle attack and not a method of value , which implicitly needs to be sustainable. At API3, we don’t only advertise specs, but also provide trustless security guarantees through the retrospective, insurance-like service coverage arbitrated by a decentralized third party, which means users of our data feeds are protected from all kinds of oracle attacks. Furthermore, the added OEV functionality does not make our data feeds any less secure or insurable, as we retain the traditional, decentralized first-party data feed — a trust-minimized architecture — to automatically fall back on. delaying updates flat-out misreporting extraction Why is there an OEV in the first place? When people think of oracles, they usually think of data feeds, i.e., live data points on a chain, always ready to be used. Unfortunately, the only thing certain about a live data feed is that it is outdated (compared to the underlying APIs), if only by milliseconds. This issue allows arbitrage, frontrunning and various other kinds of value extraction, all paid for by the dApps that use them. The only immediate solution here is to update the data feeds as frequently as possible, yet the cost of doing so still has to be passed on to someone, and this also makes it difficult to justify providing a large number of data feeds due to the associated gas costs, which impedes innovation. Now imagine an oracle service that does not store the data that will be used by third parties to change the state, but instead changes the state directly. If we go back to our liquidation example, the oracles would not need to periodically update any data feeds, and simply liquidate positions as needed. The dApp wouldn’t need to reward the oracles for this, as this is what one pays for when they’re buying an oracle service. (As a note, this doesn’t eliminate second-order OEV, e.g., due to cascading liquidations.) Although our Airnode request–response and publish–subscribe protocols are designed to allow these kinds of novel oracle services to be built, we’re aware that data feeds are not going anywhere soon, and our primarily cater to DeFi projects that require traditional data feeds for this exact reason. This section is just to clarify that OEV is an unwanted side-effect of legacy-DeFi and fundamental limitations of blockchains in general. dAPIs What to do with OEV? OEV is DeFi projects bleeding money due to being architected around a suboptimal oracle solution (which, to be fair, is the only one that is readily available.) Therefore, capturing OEV does not generate more value than picking up the wallet that someone has dropped. Then, it is obvious what needs to be done with the OEV proceeds. API3 will extract the OEV, and return it to the dApps. OEV is more than oracles having primary rights to MEV. Let us consider the liquidation example again. The traditional approach also ends up liquidating the position, but only if ETH/USD price ends up reaching 1010. But what if the ETH/USD price goes up to 1009, and then goes back down without reaching 1010? Then, the traditional data feed would not have updated, and the position would not have been liquidated even though it should have. This is a common occurrence with deviation threshold-based data feeds, and causes significant losses to the dApps that use them. OEV-based updates benefit the dApp financially even without the dApp receiving the proceeds. Traditionally, the quality of a data feed is measured by its deviation threshold, where smaller values are better because they result in fewer events such as the example above. OEV-based updates make this metric obsolete by updating precisely when needed, achieving zero deviation threshold in practice. Note that OEV-based and deviation threshold-based updates work well together to deliver the best of both worlds because in the context of data feeds, all updates are good updates. How does it work? API3 runs an API that announces data feed updates that can be bid on (imagine 100+ data feeds each on 10+ chains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Fantom, Gnosis Chain, Moonbeam, Moonriver, Milkomeda, Metis, RSK and more). Searchers (bots that are programmed to automatically extract MEV) periodically check on these to see if there is an update that can be used to extract any value. When there is such an update, searchers bid an amount in the native currency of the chain. The winner of the auction is presented with a meta-transaction that is cryptographically-signed by each API provider that powers the specific dAPI, . Then, the winner of the auction can push the meta-transaction to the chain to update the dAPI, and trigger any additional events in the same transaction, which will guarantee them all the rewards. (Since the update will be signed to be executed by a specific searcher, it will be compatible with any block production and validation scheme — for example, it doesn’t require a private mempool.) The auction proceeds accumulate in a dApp-specific contract, withdrawable by the respective account. which can only be used by the winner of the auction, if they send the bid amount that won the auction along with the meta-transaction More competitive auctions will result in more efficient value extraction, which will be achieved by making them publicly accessible to all searchers. A staking-based security mechanism will be used for newly onboarded participants to disincentivize denial attacks, which will dynamically shift to a reputation-based system to ensure capital efficiency. This auction layer is particularly suitable for monetization by first-party oracles (i.e., API providers), as it’s essentially a Web service provided to searchers. The system will also be publicly accessible to all dApps — in that any dApp that uses any data feed on any chain will be able to open their usage to OEV extraction in a practically permissionless way by following the instructions, and withdraw the proceeds by interacting with a trustless contract. Conclusion Traditional oracle solutions update data feeds blindly, which is wasteful and provides poor granularity. OEV extraction updates data feeds exactly when needed, which results in cheap and maximally accurate data feeds. Furthermore, the OEV update transactions can be offloaded to third-parties, making it financially feasible to operate a large variety of data feeds. dApps typically offer some MEV to facilitate the automatic triggering of events — for example, liquidating positions should be rewarded for third parties to liquidate positions. This amount is difficult to minimize without jeopardizing the service, which causes dApps to overpay. In addition, there are cases where dApps leak MEV without any benefit to themselves. Extracting OEV maximally through a publicly competitive auction and returning the proceeds to dApps resolves these issues, and provides dApps with a novel and very significant source of revenue. Check out the API3 OEV if you want to learn more. litepaper

What is Oracle Extractable Value (OEV)?

Ever since rebase tokens came to the forefront with OlympusDAO, there have been many forks and projects that are using this clever Defi mechanism. This space has grown so much, to the extent that Coingecko has a separate category for . rebase tokens We decided it would be worth looking into this interesting part of the Defi ecosystem. OHM Forks Rebase and Bonding Mechanisms Overview – Top 10 Token Projects In understanding the prospective tokens that may end up defining the further exploration of the Defi 2.0 ecosystem, this list comprehensively approaches the examination and review of these projects from the angle of rebase and bonding mechanisms. 1. OlympusDAO Rebase Mechanism- User-controlled Network Talk about a Defi that grows and impacts based on every participant’s input; the token project is participation based. Users stake their OHM and benefit from a network that grows in line with OHM emissions. Olympus When the “index” increases at every rebase, the sOHM and gOHM supply and distribution vary. The Olympus token project rebase mechanism (as illustrated below) entails users staking their OHM for a reward to earn them eligibility in navigating the network. The Olympus token project is better explored by understanding the staking and the reward rate. We look at the relationship between staking and reward rate to understand better how the Olympus project is faring and what users stand to gain as they stake, considering the rebase and bonding mechanisms. Relationship Between Staking and Reward Rate In understanding the level of OHM staking rewards, users play by the navigation of the reward rate. There is no manipulation; the reward rate is codified by eligible participants who make up the community. The level of OHM staking rewards is determined by actively participating individuals (via the OIP-18 vote). The reward yield is among significant elements of the users’ participation. In simpler terms, the Olympus project reward depends on how many other individuals stake their OHM. token’s mechanism as it revolves around It gets interesting. When a more significant number of participants stake their OHM, the reward yield declines, and the opposite occurs when more users stake, causing an increase in the yield. This expresses a unified network system, and the platform supports the growth process, presenting the current sOHM (staked OHM) as an illustrative annual percentage yield (APY). This is logical considering the steady daily rebase nature of sOHM (about every 8 hours). It further aligns with the interest-oriented nature of the Olympus DAO rebase mechanism. Let’s get practical. The diagram above further explains the APYs of the Olympus token project, supporting the project’s emphasis on rebase rate, number of stakers and existing supply as part of its growth mechanism. However, as is with every token, users should keep in mind that calculations are floating and current rebase rates are not a guarantee of stake returns. Since a rebase occurs three times daily, users’ reward raises to the power of 1095,  following the annual percentage yield. Participants of the network will find it exciting and anticipate yields of a process that requires a merger of results from the number of OHM distributed to the staking contract and OHM total supply, as illustrated in the equation below: 2. Ampleforth Rebase Mechanism- Elastic Protocol The comes as an OHM Fork whose rebase mechanism is sends a sparkle. The AMPL is based on contraction and expansion. Ampleforth project The protocol flows with price and targets the CPI adjusted 2019 US dollar, deciding the number of tokens in user wallets based on price fluctuations. AMPL, as its short form, we acknowledge its slight similarity to , with the only exception being that the number of tokens in user wallets increases as demand rises and decreases when there’s less demand. Bitcoin A look into the token project’s expansion and contraction protocol helps to understand this better. Let’s look into it: AMPL Expansion Users are mandated to keep an eye on the token’s target as it is its major deciding factor for market prices. It is simple; when the price exchange rate of the token rises over 2019 USD, it signifies higher demand than supply in the market. In response and as is of a typical interactive DeFi system, the AMPL protocol automatically and proportionally calculates the amount of tokens in the user wallet, impacting the token’s worth. AMPL Contraction The AMPL’s contraction protocol has the price per AMPL returning to the CPI adjusted 2019 dollar when the market signals excess or limited supply, this presents the difference between the two as users’ experience of the AMPL’s deviation. This scenario is unlike the expansion, having holders of the token experiencing supply volatility. However, despite this unpredictable yet intriguing scenario, contracts denominated using AMPL will be stable long-term. Instead of eliminating demand volatility, the Ampleforth protocol transfers it. Consequently, it offers holders unique benefits of not requiring collateral, treasury, market-maker or buyer-of-last-resort to fall back to its long-run target. It is among OHM Forks with a rebase mechanism for . future DAOs 3. Redacted Cartel – Innovative Bonding Model The has one of the most interesting rebase mechanisms. It entails users being introduced to a new bonding mechanism based on taxes. Redacted Cartel OHM Fork There is no hint of the possibility of potential users doubting this innovation that provides a new model of PCV accumulation that solely utilizes taxes. The blockchain-oriented tax model brings to light the DAO’s shift from the traditional bonding mechanism. It revolves around governance, in similarity to the OlympusDAO project. Moving away to the new mechanism in the second half of this year, PCV accumulation will be based on Harberger taxes, improving the allocation efficiency of assets. It gets interesting. But it is what potential explorers will know and agree to; paying a higher tax (for an asset) than its current owner. In this case, the current owner is forced to sell to the highest bidder. By “assets”, we look at stable protocols utilising Convex Finance (CVX) for governance power. Long overdue for the DeFi ecosystem, this project has a productive model that allows a different growth mechanism for PCV. Replacing the bonding mechanism with exotic yield markets, a more competitive system comes alive and is oriented around “staking slots” for people to explore Curve ecosystem tokens. Conceptually, ownership over the Redacted treasury involves staking slots. A up PCV and the Redacted treasury from proceeds of purchased staking slots. system where those holding BTRFLY maintain a digital common’s governance and build As is typical of a mechanism, details are subject to change. However, the dominating logic is to bring about a two-week voting period where the DAO will solely navigate and define the Pulse Height and other numbers, as illustrated in the image below. It’s practically interesting as users are expected to stay on the Pulse Height and watch the starting block reward of the pulse to know when it is met. Once met, users can then begin to own empty staking slots with burn rate, incentive rate and price/BTRFLY, as the image below illustrates. For the Pulse duration, staking slots will always be available for acquisition by other users. However, as is with this model, slots are acquired by anyone willing to pay a higher burn rate than the current slot owner. The image below gives an illustrative angle. For the entire Pulse duration, staking slot owners get their OHM emissions which facilitates quick PCV provision by quadratically dropping within the Pulse duration (2 weeks). Consequently, slot owners who still hold their stakes at the conclusion of the Pulse period will receive first slots in the coming round. The image below illustrates this governance mechanism further. Meanwhile, you will notice that there is no explicit mention of a defined rebase mechanism for this project. However, we see reasons to assume that it is similar to the Olympus DAO in their joint exploration of a people-centric governance model. 4. Wonderland – Risky, But Proactive Treasury Management System Coming as the first project to warrant cautious advice to potential users, the token project deploys capital at the very early stages of projects. Wonderland Users may want to be cautious, but will find its advanced treasury management strategies fascinating in the DeFi ecosystem. The project explores a cross-chain reserve currency protocol to introduce a new currency exchange system in the DeFi ecosystem. This presents it as more active, although riskier than its counterparts. We look to an advanced and innovative treasury management system that empowers crypto and web3.0 protocols while maximising capital growth and fostering wealth generation. It’s not all risky after all. Users’ actions are described by minting and not bonding. The Wonderland website allows users to mint their TIME tokens to profitably sell assets in return for discounts on TIME tokens. Mint page However, as some others in the DeFi ecosystem view it, the Wonderland minting process maintains significant similarity to a bond purchase on the unique and market-leading Olympus DAO. 5. TempleDAO Rebase Mechanism- Intrinsic Value Growth TempleDAO Rebase Mechanism The project has the Safe Harvest process at its core and targets value growth in its rebase mechanism. TempleDAO project Safe Harvest entails minting new Temple growth. tokens while maintaining intrinsic value We find this interesting, though. Because the strategy remains amusing; where the system causes a growth spike in the intrinsic value by minting less than it can mint. This evolves as new FRAX emerge in the treasury. The Temple then periodically calculates to to create a dilution and decide the number of mints and resultantly grow the intrinsic value. Let’s get practical; Say the treasury holds $1000, and Temple has a fully-diluted supply of 1000. In line with its rebase mechanism, this goes to say the intrinsic value of the token is $1000/1000, or $1. Switch the narrative; say the Temple is worth $5, and a buyer just brought in $100 of FRAX to the treasury. Since $100 equals $5, 20 Temple (100/5) is minted and awarded to the buyer. Having $80 left, if it decides, the treasury can mint additional 80 tokens. However, going beyond this threshold will have the intrinsic value decreasing. Since the less it mints, the higher the intrinsic value, the Temple gains more value by minting less than 80, in this case. Various pools receive distributions from the minted tokens when a buyer brings a new FRAX. However, the treasury mints 20% less than the maximum it can mint when this purchase occurs. This remains a strategy to fuel a mechanism that offers: 43.75% to the staking rewards pool for distribution to stakers over time. 12.5% to the bonus rewards pool, to be distributed to Templars participating in FAITH 18.75% to be added as liquidity to the LP pool 25% to the DAO for funding development ‘Temple Defend’ – Bonding Mechanism This project further explores the DeFi ecosystem and allows traders to buy with the option of selling their tokens to the protocol at a floor price (IV). This mechanism entails traders keeping a watch on the token to know when the cool-down period is. Then they stake their tokens with the protocol with the Temple defend in effect. However, after this activity, traders are allowed and not obligated to sell at the floor price (IV). The system gives a new life to the bonding system where traders could buy Temple even at lower than the floor price, sell the tokens to the AMM for a deal, yet still retain the grace to redeem the tokens from the Temple protocol after the cool-down period. They target the Temple’s increase in the short-term, and a win-win situation emerges for the trader and the protocol. 6. Klima DAO – The Climate Change Positivist maintains a primary reward distribution based on staking. It looks to have this method as its primary protocol mechanism for value acquisition. KlimaDAO The protocol mints and distributes tokens to stakers when there is an excess of reserves per token. The reward rate (as was significant with the OlympusDAO), is a controlling factor in the amount to be minted and distributed to stakers. We call the Reward rate a rebased supply %. However, this development could heavily slow the supply expansion pace of the protocol, with a detrimental backlash. This is so because when the Carbon Custodied (CC) of the treasury is higher than assets needed as backing for the KLIMA, rapid expansion should be avoided as it causes a price fall. An sKLIMA rebase occurs to keep both the KLIMA and sKLIMA in line. The development accrues since the treasury deposits KLIMA into the distributor contract, which then deposits it in the staking contract. This mechanism brings about more KLIMA than it breeds sKLIMA, causing the need to keep them in parity, as we mentioned. The user then owns a larger percentage of the portion of rebase since all KLIMA is staked. This reward illustration pictures it further: This translates to AKR(Annualized KLIMA Rewards): The DAO seeks to add value to an evolving green treasury and foster liquidity for vital environmental assets, similar to TempleDAO’s win-win situation. KLIMA DAO – Bonding The KLIMA DAO bonding protocol leverages the intrinsic value of KLIMA to give a price quote and further decides each bond’s premium charge: Although the KLIMA DAO doesn’t match the potential of unique and appealing projects like the Olympus, it gets interesting. The premium charge depends on two variables: the system’s overall debt and an external controllable variable. This links price to outstanding bond numbers, as seen in the illustration below. In earnest, demand (more bonds) determines the premium and discount ratio, and this can be vice versa. Carbon Custodied (CC) refers to the tokenised carbon offsets held in the treasury reserves. For each KLIMA token minted, there are some carbon offsets in the treasury. Stakers can then look to rebase rewards and expect payment when there are any excess reserves above the 1 tonne/KLIMA Intrinsic Value. The formula below illustrates expectations from the pool as offsets are bought and sold. This becomes so because an LP share fluctuates in value in terms of offset tonnage. It becomes logical to mark it down to relay the reality that all the carbon will not be resigned to the pool in the highly volatile market. Where K is the constant product of the LP pool. It’s important to know that the KLIMA token is backed by a substantial average of the price and quantity of several carbon assets, resulting in Carbon Custodied. It’s not serious, but it’s worth the attention because Naked carbon assets representing one tonne of carbon per token (BCT, MCO2etc) contribute a carbon custodied value of 1 tonne per token. 7. Snowbank – Auto-compounding Shorts for SB, Snowbank was a Wonderland . project built on Avalanche blockchain The project had achieved a few landmarks, including supporting auto compounding and facilitating cost-effective stable asset swaps. Among innovations of the SNOB project were Lava,  which brought liquid Avax staking to the blockchain. However, the project failed and went into redistribution. 8. Spartacus Rebase Mechanism – Backing for Intrinsic Value The token project earns a space on the Coingecko list. Emerging in the ember period of 2021, the token comes as one of Olympus forks on fantom. Spartacus However, similar to the KLIMA DAO, SPA will also back tokens. It bases governance on treasury growth via bond purchases and liquidity fees that provide backing and offer intrinsic value. 9. Rome – MMORPG Gaming Governance Orientation maintains a similar mechanism as the Olympus DAO. The project employs a gaming system to serve as a reserve currency. Rome DAO Exploring gaming for governance, in Rome’s case, staking takes place over Moonriver, the first layer of the Polkadot blockchain on which it is built. 10. Invictus – Dynamic Rebasing implements Dynamic Rebasing to create a new systemic approach to having a decentralised reserve currency. Dynamic Rebasing is the rebasing mechanism where every contract block adapts to the treasury size. Invictus DAO Dynamic rebasing occurs rapidly and has a pretty fast adaptation to the treasury development.  When the treasury increases, say you stake  (◎,◎) = (3,3), your staked balance increases almost instantly. The OHM Fork’s rebasing mechanism continues to be time sensitive as it solves bothering issues like larger holders of the token selling directly after a rebate. The rebase impacts by putting downward pressure on IN prices in concentrated windows after an 8-hour period. It means rewards get growing contributions across every time frame. Invictus stalkers will be glad to know and boast of their stakes being processed and auto-compounded almost immediately. This goes to say staking and compounding the Invictus token will work harder for stakers, contrary to conventional platforms such as the OlympusDAO. Conclusion With focus given to OHM Forks rebase and bonding mechanisms, this post gave an overview of the top rebase tokens on Coingecko. It is a further acknowledgment that pretty fast. DAOs are taking the stage Innovation, uniqueness and appeal are key attractions, and the Olympus DAO remains the most prominent project in this regard. Being the first market mover, most other projects are forks of it. If you want to learn more about topics such as blockchain, tokenomics, and DeFi make sure to ! get in touch Also Published here

The Rise of Rebase Tokens in DeFi

The idea of having an inter-functional, interconnected, and interoperable network has been flaunted a lot within the Web3 ecosystem. This popular rhetoric (mainly spread by the crypto folk) started to invade the internet, promoting concepts such as the “transferability of value outside of a (game) ecosystem”, the ability to purchase an asset in an ecosystem, that can later be used in another one, and driving community empowerment (not sure in which ways). In fact, many have concluded that we might have to “move all of our internet infrastructures on blockchain” altogether and “rebuild everything from the ground up” if we ever, want to get to anything close to what some claim technology can do . in the future, today Besides the things enumerated above and getting rid of 3rd parties and centralized systems, not to mention big tech owning our data, it turns out that most Web3 “solutions” to those problems are rather . incoherent And the interoperability of data and assets with the help of NFTs… is one of the things on the list. But even so, using “Web3” logic, this piece will critically explore why blockchain does not solve any (so-called) interoperability issues and how NFTs are void of any value in this sense. Let’s start with the basics. If you already know this, feel free to skip the next 3 sections. The basics are important to understand where the misconception has emerged from. The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is an ownership record stored on a blockchain and linked to the assets that it represents. Those assets are typically stored on IPFS (decentralized cloud storage) or anywhere online or offline. The most popular blockchain for those tokens is Ethereum. As you may already know, Ethereum became the go-to network, as it is programmable, it allows smart contract deployment so developers can create their own decentralized applications (dApps) on it. Given that there are currently so many applications populating this blockchain, the Ethereum foundation set up a series of mandatory “standards” that tokens deployed on it must meet. This means that their smart contracts (the bit of program that issues those tokens) follow some consistent rules and cover the same functions (functions as in eg. balanceOf(owner) ownerOf(tokenId) etc, not functionalities). There are no standards regarding the metadata or purposes of tokens. We all love consistency and industry-wide standards, don’t we? There are a number of other blockchains that allow transactions of non-fungible tokens and that have created their own standards (eg. Solana), but this topic is outside of the scope of this article. We will focus just on Ethereum as a case study. A Quick Review of the Ecosystem There are so many blockchains out there that cross-chain communication became a headache inside of the “Web3” movement in itself (needless to bring anything up about interoperability… or the whole internet). The chaotic (and sometimes fast-paced) developments in the space lead to the creation of “layers” that act like a twisted web of blockchains. To quickly review some of them: layer 0 example is PolkaDot (aims to be the main connector between other networks and developed a system of parachains to achieve this), layer 1s are classic OGs such as Ethereum, Solana, Cardano (“unbothered” blockchains) and layer 2s, such as Polygon, Cradano Hydra (concerned about scalability). Talking about Ethereum’s layer 2s, they are (theoretically) compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) and able to communicate with this network to ease traffic. However, no one seems to be talking about to what extent those blockchains are actually compatible. Here are some examples: Moonbeam, which is a PolkaDot parachain, can execute Ethereum Virtual Machine contracts and it supports ERC721, ERC1155 & ERC20 standards. Moonriver, a Kusama parachain is supposedly fully EM compatible as well.  However, PolkaDot and Kusama blockchains, themselves, do not support ERC tokens and they have their own standards (not suggesting that they should, just how it is). Milkomeda, an EVM sidechain of Cardano, supports ERC 20 but is not compatible with ERC721 & 1155. Overall, very cute, simple to wrap your mind around, and user-friendly, right? Now let’s just ignore what we’ve discussed and let’s imagine that all blockchains are interconnected as a massive spiderweb, that internet is run on blockchain and all of the apps that we use are decentralized, so that we can get back to our NFTs. Why is it believed that NFTs power up interoperable assets? Interoperability is seen as a property enabling different software to exchange information without restriction. So, if the networks that allow those data transfers are interconnected and compatible, or if multiple environments (metaverses) are built on top of the same network, this should mean that those assets can be used in the same way across multiple dApps, right? And that consumers of brands such as Nike (and other brands entering “the metaverse” to leverage NFTs for digital fashion), will be able to acquire an item in a digital world and sell it in another metaverse – making it easier for brands to sell more.  Right? Wrong! Why NFTs don’t actually facilitate interoperability? Simply put: it is not about the token or its blockchain, it is about the assets that the NFT is linked to. People believe that NFTs are just pictures that can be cropped and pasted from one environment/game/dapp, to the other, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The token in itself can (theoretically) be compatible and transferable across many apps built on the same blockchain, however its assets must make sense in the new environment they’re transferred to. The most common “use-case” where you hear about the interoperability of NFTs is with games, so let’s discuss about them. There are many types of game engines and iterations used in the industry, meaning that the majority of games have different development environments requiring and using different tools, specialized elements, and customized software components. Assets are designed to fit a specific narrative and purpose Problems such as whether or not an asset fits in with the new landscape from another game (from things like proportions to the overall aesthetic) and more complex questions such as how useful this asset can be in the other game, how it can be utilized, how it interacts with the rest of the assets and so on, will need to be answered. And in an ecosystem of tens (maybe hundreds in the future) of blockchain games, this will be extremely, extremely hard to achieve. That’s if you do care about user experience at all. Think about it this way: if you want to photoshop yourself (the NFT) on a beach (the environment), you don’t just paste your picture onto another photo of a beach. You’d have to use more advanced editing to create a realistic visual and ensure that all the elements blend in adequately. Another way to look at this is: would an NFT yacht from another game make any sense in Need for Speed? Other than that, depending on the game complexity, we can talk about of files making up an asset – including visuals, sounds, animations and effects and all sorts of functionality code that provide the whole game experience created by the said asset. This is due to the fact that everything has to be optimized for the best experience in the specific game. thousands or tens of thousands Now you can probably guess that those are big fat files with gigabytes of data. Where is all of that information going to get stored? On slow IPFS? Not so fun fact: The Interplanetary File System (IPFS- the holy grail of NFT storage used by countless projects and businesses) is just a distributed ledger, not a blockchain. Data here is not . The address that points to the respective file location remains permanent but the files themselves can actually get lost as they are passed around the distributed hash table. immutable Also, assets that are stored “off-chain” can absolutely get deleted, lost or destroyed, so good luck with that. Actually, nothing is ever permanent because, at the end of the day, the data must be stored on someone’s hardware. If that gets damaged, say bye-bye to your “permanent” NFTs. Decentralized games at present If “interoperability” was so easy, those “metaverses” that we have should’ve mastered it already. But they didn’t. And if they didn’t, yet asset interoperability in games is a problem solved by NFTs and blockchain, one can only wonder what stopped Web3 folk from doing what they preach… Let’s take a slightly more in-depth look at 2 of the most popular blockchain games on the market, namely Decentraland and Sandbox. They don’t even allow the same file types for 3D asset deployment (and bear in mind that the 3D model itself is only a component of what makes the object in a game). Decentraland’s requirements (glTF format) Sandbox, using VoxEdit for NFT creation (VXM file extension) To solve all of those “problems”, you’d most likely need an overseeing agency/authority to impose the same rules for all developers and to concomitantly enforce those standards across the board. But this would defy the idea of decentralization. Then if industry-wide standards in gaming are willingly and unanimously created, together with a functioning software architecture, you don’t actually a blockchain or NFTs to power this up. need The blockchain and user experience antithesis Let’s turn back at the example from the LinkedIn screenshot at the beginning of this article. NFTs and blockchain would not essentially solve any of the problems enumerated by the individual (his assets becoming obsolete with the game upgrade) or improve his gaming experience. Why?  Because no one can dictate to the game developers, or the board in charge of the business operations, what assets to keep supporting, what to discontinue and what new things to prompt users to buy, regardless of whether or not they come under the form of an NFT. The packaging is irrelevant. These decisions are usually taken as a result of data analysis from their gamers, user experience aims and revenue targets. Then, if the developers decide to allow his old assets in the new game iteration, they can easily do this without NFTs. The “so-called” value added by blockchain in this equation is 0. In fact, it would add some additional hurdles to setting up wallets, managing keys, transferring funds to cover gas fees, etc. Conclusions? Don’t believe everything that you read (especially articles that are essentially marketing material). To recap, the 3 main digital asset management problems that stay in the way of interoperability (and that are not solved by NFTs) are: cross-compatibility, file storage and business goals. Cross-compatibility: The narrative around “token standards” and blockchain layers may mislead people into believing that digital assets must be easily transferable across the games built on the respective blockchains The NFT is not the asset in itself, but only a record on the blockchain that is linked to the said asset (which can consist of visuals, 3D models, sounds, animation, code defining its interactions, purpose, how the object fits into the specific narrative and so on) Interoperability problems within the gaming industry arise from the uniqueness of each game environment & engine and the specifics of an asset that is built to perform a certain function in a given context Storage: NFTs are not “forever” and the safety of your actual assets depends on where and how they are stored IPFS is not an optimised solution for storage in this situation & (centralized) cloud would still remain the backbone, which is contradictory to the overall concept Business goals: What happens (or does not) in a game directly affects the user experience: a negative experience → user churn → no revenue Game assets are not a separate component from the overall product - they evolve once with the vision, mission and goals of the company

Debunking the Interoperability Myth Powered by NFTs

Desacreditando el mito de la interoperabilidad impulsado por NFT

Démystifier le mythe de l'interopérabilité alimenté par les NFT

एनएफटी द्वारा संचालित इंटरऑपरेबिलिटी मिथक को खत्म करना

NFT を利用した相互運用性に関する神話を覆す

Desmistificando o mito da interoperabilidade alimentado por NFTs

Khai phá huyền thoại về khả năng tương tác được cung cấp bởi NFTs

揭穿 NFT 驱动的互操作性神话

DappRadar is now the World’s Dapp Store, leading in all dapp analytics and discovery areas. The company has more than 40 blockchains, more than 10,000 dapps, and over 2,000 NFT collections, sending 1 million users to dapps every month. : Vested Interest Disclosure The author's an independent contributor, and while HackerNoon has reviewed the story for quality, the claims hereon belong to the author. #DYOR Understanding the State of Crypto with DappRadar Ishan Pandey: Hi Skirmantas, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind ? DappRadar Founded by myself and Dragos Dunica over a weekend, DappRadar is now the World’s Dapp Store, leading in all areas of dapp analytics and discovery. Growing from two dedicated admirers of the decentralized world, DappRadar stands almost 60 pioneers deep, with headquarters in Lithuania and strategic outposts in the UK and China. DappRadar has grown tremendously over the last few years. But it all started from the needs of two young men looking for decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain. Skirmantas Januškas: There wasn’t anything central or in any kind of friendly list. But we kept hearing about these apps on the blockchain. There were only Reddit threads and tweets to look through. We found ourselves building the first iteration of DappRadar for ourselves. We just wanted to bring all the dapps on Ethereum into one place – then I shared it on my Reddit account. People were interested straight away as we had just made their lives much easier. That’s a premise that’s remained with DappRadar. DappRadar launched on February 4, 2018, as a weekend project. It all started with just Ethereum and a handful of dapps. However, the EOS and Tron blockchains started expanding their dapp ecosystems in the following six to eight months. By the end of 2018, DappRadar had three blockchains integrated and a few hundred dapps. At this point, the pair decided to focus all efforts on building a more extensive and comprehensive dapp tracking system, DappRadar. Furthermore, after a wild couple of years, the cryptocurrency markets cooled off, heading into a bear market situation for almost two years. Importantly, this is when we decided to get our heads down and build. During that down market, many waves of different dapps trying to break out and get early adopters and cryptocurrency holders engaged. The situation played into the hands of dapps as many investors were now sitting on tokens they didn’t want to sell, looking for utility. Hot potato, game theory dapps, shrimp farms, roll the dice with dividend tokens style applications came and went as developers played with different ideas. It was so different from what it is today, and it’s incredible how far things have come in three years. It’s remarkable to be playing a part in that journey. Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a little bit about DappRadar and the current market for decentralized applications in terms of yield? Skirmantas Januškas: DappRadar has become The World’s Dapp Store and is blockchain and category agnostic, supporting more than 40 blockchains, more than 10,000 dapps, and over 2,000 NFT collections, sending 1 million visitors to dapps every month. These numbers are growing every month and the current market for dapps is buoyant with more users than ever. Ishan Pandey: What new data trends are we seeing in the blockchain industry? The dapp market is currently in one of the most exciting places it’s ever been due to waves of more user-friendly crypto projects entering the space and ramping up dapp usage. The strongest trends can be seen in gaming and NFTs since around the third quarter of 2021 and persist today with more than half of all dapp usage in Q1 2022 coming from games, which represents a 2,000% increase from the previous year. More importantly, users are making a passive income from playing games and learning about DeFi mechanics. Skirmantas Januškas: NFTs brought about a shift in thinking in crypto as suddenly complex financial instruments came in the shape of visual avatars or images with arguably far more appeal to regular people. The NFT hype of 2021 doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, but investors have had a year or so to better understand the landscape and pick good projects that want to offer real utility and growth. Alongside this, we see the emergence of bigger players within the gaming and NFT space. Companies like Yuga Lab’s acquisition of the CryptoPunks IP, the release of Moonbirds collection, the BAYC official token ApeCoin and rapid price appreciation of collections like Azuki point toward powerful cliques forming that will weird increasing amounts of influence and power in the crypto world as we move forward. In the world of gaming, Animoca Brands invests and builds in and with many different projects, all in the effort to make blockchain gaming mainstream. Ishan Pandey: Web3 is an attempt to integrate blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized applications together, although its exact utility is difficult to determine. Please elaborate a little on your thoughts about Web 3.0? For me, it’s essential to keep in focus that Web3 refers to the next interpretation of the internet and focuses on decentralization and user ownership. The core vision is one of empowerment and financial independence. Moreover, it’s one of evolution for mankind. Your Web3 wallet is how you are identified, log in to applications, prove that you own things, and authorize something to happen. You can keep your wallet anonymous if you want to. The important thing is that you, and only you, control your wallet. More importantly, anybody with a device can use Web3. That’s why we say it’s permissionless. All you need is your Web3 wallet and enough currency in it to pay for the things you want to do. Skirmantas Januškas: Furthermore, the idea that some people have already been priced out of certain cryptocurrencies or NFT collections doesn’t have the same repercussions in Web3. In Web3 an individual or group can start their own project without the constraints of physical property or huge overheads. These days a 14-year-old can start the next billionaire boys club, and it’s happening. Ishan Pandey: Solana’s blockchain has started to generate hefty revenue for its network due to its remarkable speed. Do you think Dapp developers will benefit from moving to Solana? DappRadar is blockchain agnostic, but of course, we see the unique propositions of each network. Solana’s stated mission is to support all high-growth and high-frequency dapps and to democratize the world’s financial systems. At its core, Solana offers scalability to dapps and is capable of supporting over 50,000 transactions per second. Furthermore, transaction costs on the network are estimated to cost approximately $10 for 1 million transactions. Based on these aspects, Solana is set up to deal with the majority of decentralized applications tracked by DappRadar from across various categories such as DeFi, Gaming, and NFTs. Skirmantas Januškas: Solana offers a great solution to dapp developers looking for scalability and speed so we are not surprised to see tremendous growth in both its dapp ecosystem and TVL figure. Platforms like Orca, Magic Eden, and Raydium are building strong user bases and continue to offer the services people want. However, Solana - like Ethereum - will not carry the crown alone. We believe in a multichain future where various blockchains attract an audience. More importantly, value and information will transfer swiftly and smoothly between these different blockchains, all while the regular consumer won’t notice anything about the complexities in the background. Ishan Pandey: What are your views on NFTs and NFT collateralization? NFTs have been on our radar for years (pardon the pun), and Dragos and I started this journey with a solid idea that NFTs would revolutionize the industry through actual ownership. We pivoted hard in 2021 as a company to focus on the emerging asset class, and it paid off. We now have the most comprehensive NFT tracking in the space and are the go-to data provider for the world’s leading media outlets. Skirmantas Januškas: What we have seen emerge over the last 18 months has been incredible to observe as DappRadar, and as individuals - the birth of a new asset class with its audience and mechanics that seem to defy cryptocurrency market trends. More importantly, NFTs have brought investors into the space with a more visually appealing investment option that can provide further utility in metaverse platforms. The sky is the limit, but I think now it’s all about top collections delivering on promises made while new ones carefully consider that the audience for NFTs is now far savvier than it was just a year ago. Instead of using a bank that would require a person to put up their home or car as collateral, people can now leverage their NFTs through specialized services that connect owners of digital art and collectibles NFTs with lenders. The main idea of NFT collateralization is to give people who potentially sunk considerable amounts of money into NFTs a way to release some equity without selling their digital assets. It also gives people a way to make a passive income on their investments through lending. Lenders are also attracted to using NFT collateralization services by the potential of charging rates that far exceed traditional loans. In theory, a lender could also take ownership of a valuable NFT if a borrower defaults. Ishan Pandey: What are your views on GameFi and Play-2-Earn? GameFi and Play-to-Earn gaming are developments at the forefront of what blockchain technology can do to enhance digital consumer experiences. Blockchain technology on its own already provides users with actual digital ownership, the ability to trade digital assets as if these are physical ones. While GameFi or gamified financial services provide a sense of entertainment to otherwise passive and arguably boring financial services, play-to-earn or play-and-earn gaming takes the most significant entertainment industry to another level. Skirmantas Januškas: Gamers spend around 8 hours and 27 minutes per week playing video games. That’s 442 hours per year. In the United States, gamers spend an average of $84 per year on in-game content, not counting regular game purchases. Game companies need these gamers, these communities, to build a fun experience for everybody. Yet, gamers spend time and money without getting anything in return. Play-to-earn gaming changes this and allows gamers to earn something from their time spent. It’s still early, but we at DappRadar see the revolution happening, embracing this new game paradigm. Ishan Pandey: What does the roadmap ahead look like for DappRadar? Where the first quarter of 2022 was about laying the technical foundation for our road ahead, the second quarter will be about paving the way. The road ahead is an exciting one for DappRadar and our community. When we started the calendar year, we dedicated lots of time and development resources to improving our infrastructure. Profiles that first couldn’t load because they contained too many NFTs, now load within seconds. Not only did we optimize our servers, but we’ve also reduced the amount of data required to load visuals of NFTs. This has become a big win for our users, especially those with mobile data packages. Our efforts for optimization will never end, and this is just one example of how we improve our product. Skirmantas Januškas: In addition, we’re on a hiring spree! We’re growing our development and marketing teams in order to build better, faster, and communicate with our audience more clearly. At the same time, DappRadar is creating partnerships with some of the most promising blockchain protocols. We started tracking dapps on Optimism and Hedera, Moonbeam, Moonriver, Everscale, Algorand, KardiaChain, Cronos, Fantom, Oasis, and Shiden. In 2022 we will transform and supercharge this key product with all kinds of new features. Think about more metrics, trending dapps, and tighter integration of the rankings into the portfolio and the dapp product pages. The DappRadar Rankings on steroids give users deeper insights while also integrating the product into the user experience throughout the website. We will also upgrade the dapp product pages. We will introduce special features tailored for gamers on these pages, hopefully helping those who are excited about play-to-earn gaming and GameFi. our rankings We’re not only working on improving existing features, but we will also add new ones to DappRadar. Right now, you can find and the most popular based on their trading volume, but we don’t offer a proper way to dive deeper into collections yet. This will change. Soon you can check out entire collections, jump into their metadata, and follow and analyze them. DappRadar will launch the NFT Collections Explorer to help you discover, analyze, and track. the latest NFT sales NFT collections What’s the cherry on the cake? We’re working on a native app for iOS and Android. In the app, users will be able to engage with the most popular and personal elements of the DappRadar website. The most interesting proposition here is that everything will be available for free, but users with a DappRadar PRO membership get enhanced and supercharged versions of our services. Anybody can become a PRO member, simply by holding 5,000 RADAR tokens in their wallet. Ishan Pandey: What trends do you see in the funding scene for the blockchain industry? The amount of capital invested in blockchain games in Q1 is overperforming the $4 billion raised in 2021. In the first three months of 2022, VCs and investors have raked at least $2.5 billion into blockchain games and their underlying infrastructure. At this pace, play-to-earn and metaverse-related projects will add $10 billion this year to keep building the future of this industry. Skirmantas Januškas: In March 2022, over $785 million was invested across different projects. , the studio behind the renowned NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), received a $450 million investment led by Animoca Brands, with The Sandbox, FTX, and Coinbase involved in the deal. The investment further cements the status of Yuga Labs as one of the names to follow in the Web3 narrative. It also boosts the team’s metaverse plans as they prepare for the launch of Otherside. Otherside will become an interoperable metaverse platform involving play-to-earn games, fashion, and media. Yuga Labs It is also worth highlighting the $200 million investment led by Temasek in Immutable-X (IMX). The investment brings the value of the Sidney-based Ethereum scaling solution to a $2.5 billion Series C valuation. IMX hosts two popular blockchain games in and Guilds of Guardians. Furthermore, Gary V’s Book Games have already seen more than $100 million in NFT trading volume on Immutable X. These dapps will be joined by Illuvium and in the upcoming months. The capital raised will bring flexibility to keep building and scaling the IMX product further. Investors see the bigger picture here. NFTs and gaming will pave the way for mainstream users to show interest in blockchain technology. At the same time, improved tech and better user experiences will make onboarding even easier. Gods Unchained Ember Sword Don’t forget to like and share the story!

Understanding the State of Crypto with DappRadar 

We're on the verge of a historical event that is poised to shake up the entire Polkadot ecosystem. The long-anticipated parachain slot auctions are about to begin on Kusama – the scalable multi-chain network for early-stage Polkadot deployments – as the developers have entered . the final stage of preparation In the course of the next several weeks, teams will start competing for up to 30 parachain slots that will enable their projects to benefit from high transaction speed and security ensured by Kusama Relay Chain. We’ve prepared a quick guide on PLOs to help you support the up-and-coming Web3 project of your choice and potentially secure some profitable staking opportunities in the process (and probably a bunch of extra rewards on top of that!). Kusama, parachains, and crowdloans — here's what you need to know When Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot, first introduced Kusama, it had nearly the same code base as Polkadot, despite one crucial difference — all the newest updates are scheduled to happen on Kusama first. and are among those features which will make their grand debut on Kusama for testing and further optimization. Parachain slot auctions crowdloans Parachains are layer-1 blockchains that run by individual projects in parallel within the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem (hence the name). Connected to and secured by the central Relay Chain, parachains share and benefit from the security, scalability, interoperability and governance of Polkadot/Kusama. The concept of crowdloans allows projects to secure a parachain slot even if they don't have enough KSM — Kusama's native token — in their treasury, but have enough supporters that are willing to loan their KSM to fund its development. That ultimately makes Kusama a healthier, more diverse and inclusive ecosystem. Here’s how it works: KSM holders stake their tokens to support the project’s vision. If the project wins, they might get additional rewards for their effort on top of staking benefits – although, that depends on the project. Parachain slot auctions, in turn, are a form of unpermissioned that have been modified to be secure on a blockchain. In short, later bids will have a higher probability of losing by design since there will be a retroactively determined close moment that might precede the time that a bid was submitted. candle auctions (Picture originally found in Dan Reecer's on Polkadot & Kusama Crowdloans and Parachain Auctions) Medium guide PLOs & Crowdloan strategies — how to choose one? When researching a parachain one considers backing with KSM, they need to keep in mind the following important variables: First, see the projects’ timeline and try to calculate approximate staking rewards based on what they’re offering. Additionally, you might want to make sure that the project’s promised APY (annual percentage yield) includes extra rewards beyond staking KSM in Kusama Relay Chain. Leasing period of the parachain slot — and the promised APY Analyze the GitHub repository to make sure that the project’s parachain is ready to be deployed on Kusama. Readiness of the project Ask the following questions: What kind of value does it bring to the ecosystem? Will the Parathread capacity be enough for the project? Is their Parachain planning to collaborate with other teams in the ecosystem as it goes forward? Fundamentals of the project Parachain contenders: An Overview for KSM holders Essentially, we can distinguish projects who will be participating in Kusama parachain auctions by two types: a) Contenders with a live protocol on another chain Key markers for this type of projects include an ERC-20 token that was introduced to the open market before the Kusama PLO. These tokens are tradeable and hence an approximate market evaluation, which might help you estimate the project’s growth potential. Another distinguishing feature is that in the near future these teams are planning to move the same parachain token to Polkadot. Please note that rewards are usually vested at a ~ 30/70 ratio throughout the lease period, although the terms may vary depending on the project. Notable projects: – decentralized storage network for the Web3 ecosystem (Crowdloan rewards : a total of 90,000 $CRU will be distributed + 18 million $CSM; guarantors will be able to earn extra rewards) Crust strategy – Cross-chain liquidity protocol built on Substrate (Crowdloan rewards strategy: currently unknown; HydraDX’s token on the Kusama parachain is $HDX) HydraDX – Substrate-based privacy-preserving cloud computing service (Crowdloan rewards : 1 locked $KSM = 100 $PHA before the Khala Crowdloan reaches the required 150,000 KSM; extra 0.5% on the additional contribution for Referrals) Phala strategy – server-less IoT platform for connecting robotics under Polkadot and Ethereum (Crowdloan rewards : 1 locked $KSM = 1 $XRT; backers get to enjoy increased staking of 125% return for the next 48 weeks) Robonomics strategy b) Unlisted projects without tradeable tokens Unlike participants with a live protocol, these projects don’t have tradeable tokens yet, and the only way to participate in their initial distribution will be through DOT/KSM crowdloans. Therefore, participating in their auctions is a great way to gain early access to those tokens (and “moon” potential) — all while boosting their underlying projects with your locked KSM. Notable projects: – EVM-compatible network optimized for DeFi, offering a suite of financial applications (Crowdloan rewards : 1 locked $KSM = 12 or more $KAR, which will be minted at launch with a fixed total supply of 100,000,000) Karura strategy – multi-chain decentralized application layer on Kusama (Crowdloan rewards : the earlier you join the crowdloan, the more $SDN you get) Shiden strategy – companion network to Moonbeam, Polkadot smart contract platform for building natively interoperable blockchain applications (Crowdloan rewards : a total of 3,000,000 $MOVR tokens — 30% of the Moonriver network — will be allocated to reward crowdloan contributors) Moonriver strategy – decentralized heterogeneous cross-chain bridge protocol (Crowdloan rewards strategy: currently unknown; Darwinia Network’s token on the Kusama parachain is $CRING) Darwinia Network – decentralized asset financing protocol that bridges real-world assets into DeFi (Crowdloan rewards : all participants that lock DOT for Centrifuge’s parachain slot in the crowd loan will receive the Centrifuge token as a reward; rate is currently unknown) Centrifuge strategy – Cross-chain money market that combines pooled lending with synthetic assets (Crowdloan rewards strategy: $EQ holders will receive new $GENS tokens at a 1:10 ratio once Genshiro’s genesis block is mined; see extra details ) Genshiro here – DeFi protocol unlocking liquidity of staked assets being built on the Polkadot ecosystem (Crowdloan rewards strategy: currently unknown; StaFi’s token on the Kusama parachain is $rKSM) StaFi – blockchain protocol for issuing anonymous, verifiable credentials (Crowdloan rewards strategy: currently unknown) Kilt – experimental blockchain with community-managed treasury, decentralised proposal system and network of DAOs (Crowdloan rewards : participants will collect half of the 20% of $HEDG distributed to Edgeware holders) Hedgeware strategy

Participate in Parachain Lease Offerings (PLOs) on Kusama: A Beginner's Guide To Crowdloaners

We are approaching the end of Q1 2021, and it seems like the crypto bull run isn't showing any signs of slowing down. The public interest that the crypto market has gained during this bull run has been unprecedented. As of Q1 2021, , and it is clear that we are moving towards a multi-chain universe, where each chain is specialized around solving a particular set of problems. we have more than 1,050 public blockchains However, most of these chains exist in silos and have no cross-chain interoperability, which has resulted in a . As the number of chains is increasing, so is the problem of interoperability. fragmented market for growing crypto users Polkadot is one of those projects that aims to solve this problem with its unique approach, where developers can launch specialized blockchain platforms on top of the Polkadot network, which can communicate and transact with each other, and also with external public chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, we will explore the Polkadot ecosystem outlining five of my favorite projects making some headway. If you are new to Polkadot, I' highly recommend reading my detailed all-in-one guide that can give you an excellent introduction. So let's begin! Acala Acala is probably one of the most anticipated and promising projects in the Polkadot ecosystem right now that will serve as a DeFi hub, powering cross-blockchain open finance applications built on top of the Polkadot network. Acala, , is a specialized finance chain that offers a platform for smart contracts and bridges. It comes with the three main built-in financial primitives: with a native token ACA Decentralized Stablecoin DeX with unified liquidity provisioning Staking Derivatives For those of you who aren’t familiar, are the essential building blocks that sit at the core of any DeFi system. These primitives are independent, and when combined together, they can be used to build larger and complex systems. Financial Primitives As an analogy, we have cryptographic primitives like SHA-256, RSA, AES, etc., that serve as the backbone of any blockchain protocol we see today. The of Acala , or the Acala Dollar, is trustless and backed by mature crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Since the Acala chain is built with Parity Substrate Framework on top of Polkadot, the Acala Dollar is fully backed by the shared security of the underlying Relay Chain - one of the superpowers of Polkadot. decentralized stablecoin (ticker: aUSD) Interoperability is one of the key features of Polkadot, and it will greatly benefit the Acala Dollar as it will not only have access to other assets on Polkadot, but you could also transfer aUSD to other parachains on the network. The second primitive is the , which will be the first DeX ever built on Polkadot and Kusama. The DeX will incorporate a Curve AMM model that will minimize impermanent loss, fees, and slippage by building liquidity pools that will pair similar crypto-asset groups, like stablecoins. decentralized exchange This DeX will also feature a for the Acala network, which means that instead of just trading, it can also be used for liquidation in cases where there is a risky position that needs to be liquidated. Unified Liquidity Provisioning mechanism Another noticeable feature that comes with the DeX is , which allows you to pay gas fees in any token simply by tapping in the leverage. Flexy Fee is the third primitive that sits at the core of the Acala chain. The reasoning behind offering staking derivative products is pretty genius; Polkadot has a PoS consensus and the native token DOT can generate yield, so it’s in natural competition with any of the yield generating DeFi activities happening on the network. Trustless Staking Derivative This trustless staking derivative was created to release some of the derived value out of the locked staking assets. Users can lock their DOT tokens into the staking pool, and in return, they get as a representation of their staked assets. Liquid DOT (LDOT) This derivative can also be used as collateral across the network; you can swap, stake, or use it in other parachains on the network. The exchange rate between L-DOTs and the underlying DOTs is likely to increase over time as staking rewards are accrued. These three primitives together will power , an all-in-one DeFi service center where you can borrow , earn interest, trade tokens on DeX, and take part in the governance process. Acala apps aUSD Recently, Coinbase Ventures announced that they would invest in Acala and its sister network Karura on Kusama. This will further help the Acala project to accelerate its growth and adoption. Moonbeam Moonbeam is a on Polkadot that is fully Ethereum Compatible. developer-oriented smart contract parachain We are moving towards a multi-chain ecosystem where each chain specializes in certain aspects; think of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. However, these chains work in silos with no cross-chain integration, resulting in fragmented markets, both for users and developers. Ethereum is the most affected because the bulk of the activity is happening on ethereum for the last two years, be it DeFi protocols, stablecoins, NFTs, DeXes, etc. But, as you might have guessed, . The cost-efficiency and scalability challenges are among the many reasons pushing projects to explore other chains and build on them. Ethereum has become a VERY congested place for new and existing innovations However, one of the main points of friction while moving to another platform is the prospect of taking all of the existing codebase and writing it in a different technology stack. If Ethereum based projects want to deploy on Polkadot, they will have to port their solidity based smart contracts, and Web3 based frontend has to be rewritten using Polkadot.js and substrate, which can be a big point of friction. Here comes the Moonbeam! Moonbeam lowers that friction by creating support for solidity based smart contracts, and creating a Web3 compatible service provider so projects can easily move their frontends to Moonbeam. Developers can quickly deploy their EVM based smart contracts to Moonbeam and become part of the Polkadot ecosystem, without worrying about building custom chains and working with complex integrations. Web3 RPC, accounts, keys, subscriptions, logs, and also add some enhanced feature sets like on-chain governance, staking, and cross-chain integrations. Moonbeam mirrors everything that Ethereum offers; With Moonbeam, you can: Re-deploy your EVM based smart contracts and become part of the Polkadot ecosystem without worrying about rewriting your codebase. Subscribe to events for things like balances and on-chain transactions. Use your existing Ethereum accounts and keys, and seamlessly interact with Moonbeam. Have Web3 RPC endpoints for your DApp frontend. By deploying your Ethereum applications on Polkadot, you can access an entirely new market segment and newer use-cases that come with Polkadot, without much of a hassle. You can also take advantage of a range of different assets that will be available on polkadot like the Acala Dollar (aUSD) or bridged assets from Bitcoin and Ethereum’s ERC-20. that is used to pay for the execution of smart contracts, transaction fees (which are already paid for), and governance. You can also use GLMR to nominate collators who are the block producers for the Moonbeam network. Moonbeam has a native token called Glimmer (ticker: GLMR) PureStake, the company behind Moonbeam and Moonriver, has successfully recently. This funding round was led by Binance Labs, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital and IOSG Ventures. raised $6 million As Moonbeam is gearing up for the parachain slot auction, this financing round might play a significant role in winning the slot. PolkaBTC Bitcoin is coming to Polkadot, and PolkaBTC is going to make that happen. PolkaBTC is a trustless Bitcoin gateway for Polkadot, developed by the awesome team at Interlay, using a trustless bridge from Bitcoin to Polkadot based on XCLAIM. XCLAIM is a framework for financially trusted blockchain interoperability backed by top-tier research. , where users will be able to mint 1:1 Bitcoin-backed wrapped assets as PolkaBTC tokens and move them across other parachains on the Polkadot network using XCMP/SPREE. PolkaBTC is essentially a BTC-Parachain The BTC-Parachain has no central authority and will be run by a decentralized network of individuals. Anyone can operate this bridge, and you don't need any additional token to become a maintainer. You can always redeem your PolkaBTC tokens for BTC or be reimbursed in any collateral currency - that’s a for the PolkaBTC token holders. strong guarantee Here is how this BTC-Parachain works under the hood: - PolkaBTC can be created on the BTC-parachain by locking your BTC with vaults. Vaults are trustless and collateralized intermediaries on Bitcoin. Once you lock up your BTC, the Interlay’s monitoring service generates proof of payment and issues 1:1 PolkaBTC tokens. Issuance (Minting) -  Once you have your PolkaBTC tokens, you can use them across a wide range of applications within the Polkadot ecosystem, like DeXes, stablecoins, lending, and borrowing protocols. Transfer and Trade - Users can get the equivalent amount of BTC by burning their PolkaBTC tokens on the BTC-Parachain. The redeemed BTC are sent to your wallet address by a vault once the PolkaBTC tokens are burned. Users can also get reimbursed in DOTs, or in any collateral currency. Redeem PolkaBTC tokens have no expiration date, and they can remain on Polkadot indefinitely until they’re burned to execute a redeem request. You can also get PolkaBTC tokens on Polkadot without having a BTC wallet, which is only needed if you want to redeem your tokens. Let’s briefly talk about as they sit at the core of the whole process. They make sure the BTCs are locked, and the equivalent amount of PolkaBTC tokens exist. Users can choose a vault they like on the BTC-Parachain, or become their own vault if they want to, by providing collateral in DOTs. Vaults Vaults are liquidity providers; they earn fees in PolkaBTC on issuance and redeem process and also earn a yield on their DOT collateral. Large liquidity providers can open up their own vaults and retain custody of their BTC holdings. To ensure safety of the funds, for their equivalent amount of BTC holdings. PolkaBTC bridge parachain ensures correct behaviour of these vaults. Vaults must be over-collateralized by 150% with DOT collateral If a vault goes offline, behaves in a wrong way or fails to execute a redeem request, then all the collateral is slashed. In that case, users can either try with another vault or be reimbursed in DOT along with a small bonus for the inconvenience. To fully trust the BTC-Parachain bridge, you only have to ‘ that these two statements are true; trust’ Trust that Bitcoin is secure Trust that Polkadot is secure Other than that, the whole system's design is highly secure and foolproof, and ensures that your funds are safe and secure. Darwinia Network Darwinia Network is a fully decentralized cross-chain bridge network that is built using Parity Substrate. Their primary focus is to like EOS, Polkadot, Ethereum; and facilitate them with cross-chain assets transfer and general remote chain call. connect heterogeneous blockchains This decentralized cross-chain bridge network can have a range of different applications in Defi, cross-chain NFT trading market, blockchain-based games, etc. Darwinia Network allows any parachain on Polkadot to communicate with external public chains and in a decentralized and trustless manner. The beauty of Darwinia Network is that there will be no middlemen, and the assets will flow freely between any chain in a trustless environment. transfer value Interestingly, Darwinia Bridge Chain has two separate operating modes; Solo Mode and Polkadot Connection Mode. - In this mode, Darwinia Network will not be connected to Polkadot, and will operate as an independent public chain, with its own consensus, business logic, and applications. Solo Mode Darwinia Network will also have the same cross-chain bridge functionality in solo operating mode to enable heterogeneous chains to communicate with each other and transfer value. - In this mode, Darwinia Network will act as a parachain on top of the Polkadot relay chain. It will benefit from the shared security model of the underlying relay chain and interact with validators and collators. Polkadot Connection Mode When connected to Polkadot, Darwinia Network will still use its through its own set of validators and staking mechanism. The local consensus will also be inline with Polkadot’s global consensus but will achieve faster block confirmation times and higher transaction throughput. local consensus You might be thinking that Polkadot already has an official Polkadot-Ethereum bridge and a few other projects working on the same lines, then how does Darwinia Network differentiates itself from other projects? Polkadot-Ethereum official bridge uses GRANDPA consensus model, with a bunch of authorities on ethereum that are authorized by Polkadot validators. For large amounts of transactions, this model can become computationally heavy. Darwinia Network uses a that uses to make things more efficient. The MMR algorithm essentially and summarizes all blocks from genesis to the current block. light client of GRANDPA Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) crypto algorithm finger-prints the chain history This greatly enhances the efficiency for block confirmation. Imagine if you want to confirm the 1,000th block on Ethereum; you will have to relay/store/verify every block in the range 0-1,000 to confirm the 1,000th block. With MMR, since you have the fingerprint of the entire chain history, you can immediately verify the data integrity between any block within the range of 0-1,000 in a fraction of a time. Darwinia Network has a thriving application ecosystem already. Some of the ongoing projects are: - The world’s first NFT + Defi integrated virtual simulation blockchain game that supports cross-chain interactions. Evolution Land -  A high precision data explorer for substrate-based blockchains. Subscan (Explorer) - A DEX that can realize automatic cross-chain transactions between tokens. Defi Token DEX - The decentralized NFT auction market supporting cross-chain auctions. NFT Market Darwinia Network also incorporates . DVM is an EVM compatible virtual machine that can run EVM based smart contracts and DApps. DVM or Darwinia Virtual Machine , which is used to pay gas fees for transactions, storage, and smart contract execution. Users can also stake their RING tokens on the network and as a reward. The native token for Darwinia Network is called RING earn KTON tokens PolkaFoundry Do you know what’s the in the blockchain space? ‘killer app' Probably none! The entire blockchain ecosystem is fragmented, and there is no platform offering all-in-one services for the application developers to build and launch their DApps. PolkaFoundry is going to change that! PolkaFoundry is a . The whole platform consists of the following components to facilitate developers build DeFi & NFT apps in a frictionless way: One-Stop Production Hub for Defi and NFT applications on Polkadot PolkaFoundry blockchain (a public blockchain) PolkaID (an identity service) DocuGuard (a document storage service) Decentralized PolkaGate (an oracle service) By providing these building blocks, PolkaFoundry makes it super easy for developers to manage identities, store files, and access Oracle data while building and testing their DeFi and NFT apps. In Phase 1, the PolkaFoundry platform will be , and in phase 2, it will be built using the Parity Substrate framework. originally developed in Tendermint By launching on Polkadot, PolkaFoundry will take advantage of the true interoperability offered by the Polkadot ecosystem. The applications launched on PolkaFoundry will also interact with other assets and parachains across the Polkadot network and will also connect to bridges so applications could communicate with external chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The decentralized oracle service (PolkaGate) will connect to external data providers like Chainlink, Kylin, Oraichain, and others. Along with the identity service (PolkaID), Oracle, and document storage service, PolkaFoundry offers a perfect recipe for DeFi apps that want to do KYC and rely heavily on external oracle data. One interesting aspect of PolkaFoundry is that, unlike others, it focuses on solving UX issues that are commonly present in DApps. Due to so many complex crypto concepts and user journeys inside the Dapps, the audience is often just limited to crypto enthusiasts. PolkaFoundry changes that by offering the following three things to the DApp developers. - The signing key will be used instead of a private key, and comes with an expiration date and a small set of permissions. Signing Key - The transaction fees can be paid in a decentralized manner and offer more monetization methods like pay-as-you-go, freemium, etc. Flexible Payer - The PolkaID will convert keys into different parts (shards) and distribute them to multiple and secure key management services. This will provide more security and prevent illegal access. PolkaID PolkaFoundry is also EVM compatible, so you can seamlessly port your Ethereum based applications and smart contracts to PolkaFoundry without worrying about the code changes. With that said, you can build a wide variety of applications on Polkadot, including NFT auction marketplaces, open lending platforms, cross-chain Dex, derivatives, insurance products, and prediction markets. This is it from my side! The Polkadot ecosystem is getting better, and we will see a lot of exciting projects in the coming future. Over and out! 👋 Haroon (Follow me if you like this article)

5 Polkadot Projects Worth Checking Out [April 2021]

The Sea Lady by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT I Just precisely what happened after that has been the most impossible thing to disinter. I have given all the things that Melville remembered were said, I have linked them into a conversation and checked them by my cousin’s afterthoughts, and finally I have read the whole thing over to him. It is of course no verbatim rendering, but it is, he says, closely after the manner of their talk, the gist was that, and things of that sort were said. And when he left Chatteris, he fully believed that the final and conclusive thing was said. And then he says it came into his head that, apart from and outside this settlement, there still remained a tangible reality, capable of action, the Sea Lady. What was she going to do? The thought toppled him back into a web of perplexities again. It carried him back into a state of inconclusive interrogation past Lummidge’s Hotel. [286] The two men had gone back to the Métropole and had parted with a firm handclasp outside the glare of the big doorway. Chatteris went straight in, Melville fancies, but he is not sure. I understand Melville had some private thinking to do on his own account, and I conceive him walking away in a state of profound preoccupation. Afterwards the fact that the Sea Lady was not to be abolished by renunciations, cropped up in his mind, and he passed back along the Leas, as I have said. His inconclusive interrogations elicited at the utmost that Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel is singularly like any other hotel of its class. Its windows tell no secrets. And there Melville’s narrative ends. [287] With that my circumstantial record necessarily comes to an end also. There are sources, of course, and glimpses. Parker refuses, unhappily—as I explained. The chief of these sources are, first, Gooch, the valet employed by Chatteris; and, secondly, the hall-porter of Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel. The valet’s evidence is precise, but has an air of being irrelevant. He witnesses that at a quarter past eleven he went up to ask Chatteris if there was anything more to do that night, and found him seated in an arm-chair before the open window, with his chin upon his hands, staring at nothing—which, indeed, as Schopenhauer observes in his crowning passage, is the whole of human life. “More to do?” said Chatteris. [288] “Yessir,” said the valet. “Nothing,” said Chatteris, “absolutely nothing.” And the valet, finding this answer quite satisfactory, wished him goodnight and departed. Probably Chatteris remained in this attitude for a considerable time—half an hour, perhaps, or more. Slowly, it would seem, his mood underwent a change. At some definite moment it must have been that his lethargic meditation gave way to a strange activity, to a sort of hysterical reaction against all his resolves and renunciations. His first action seems to me grotesque—and grotesquely pathetic. He went into his dressing-room, and in the morning “his clo’es,” said the valet, “was shied about as though ’e’d lost a ticket.” This poor worshipper of beauty and the dream shaved! He shaved and washed and he brushed his hair, and, his valet testifies, one of the brushes got “shied” behind the bed. Even this throwing about of brushes seems to me to have done little or nothing to palliate his poor human preoccupation with the toilette. He changed his gray flannels—which suited him very well—for his white ones, which suited him extremely. He must deliberately and conscientiously have made himself quite “lovely,” as a schoolgirl would have put it. [289] And having capped his great “renunciation” by these proceedings, he seems to have gone straight to Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel and demanded to see the Sea Lady. She had retired. This came from Parker, and was delivered in a chilling manner by the hall-porter. Chatteris swore at the hall-porter. “Tell her I’m here,” he said. “She’s retired,” said the hall-porter with official severity. [290] “Will you tell her I’m here?” said Chatteris, suddenly white. “What name, sir?” said the hall-porter, in order, as he explains, “to avoid a frackass.” “Chatteris. Tell her I must see her now. Do you hear, ” now? The hall-porter went to Parker, and came half-way back. He wished to goodness he was not a hall-porter. The manager had gone out—it was a stagnant hour. He decided to try Parker again; he raised his voice. The Sea Lady called to Parker from the inner room. There was an interval of tension. I gather that the Sea Lady put on a loose wrap, and the faithful Parker either carried her or sufficiently helped her from her bedroom to the couch in the little sitting-room. In the meanwhile the hall-porter hovered on the stairs, praying for the manager—prayers that went unanswered—and Chatteris fumed below. Then we have a glimpse of the Sea Lady. [291] “I see her just in the crack of the door,” said the porter, “as that maid of hers opened it. She was raised up on her hands, and turned so towards the door. Looking exactly like this——” And the hall-porter, who has an Irish type of face, a short nose, long upper lip, and all the rest of it, and who has also neglected his dentist, projected his face suddenly, opened his eyes very wide, and slowly curved his mouth into a fixed smile, and so remained until he judged the effect on me was complete. Parker, a little flushed, but resolutely flattening everything to the quality of the commonplace, emerged upon him suddenly. Miss Waters could see Mr. Chatteris for a few minutes. She was emphatic with the “Miss Waters,” the more emphatic for all the insurgent stress of the goddess, protestingly emphatic. And Chatteris went up, white and resolved, to that smiling expectant presence. No one witnessed their meeting but Parker—assuredly Parker could not resist seeing that, but Parker is silent—Parker preserves a silence that rubies could not break. [292] All I know, is this much from the porter: “When I said she was up there and would see him,” he says, “the way he rooshed up was outrageous. This is a Private Family Hotel. Of course one sees things at times even here, but—— “I couldn’t find the manager to tell ’im,” said the hall-porter. “And what was authorised to do? I “For a bit they talked with the door open, and then it was shut. That maid of hers did it—I lay.” I asked an ignoble question. [293] “Couldn’t ketch a word,” said the hall-porter. “Dropped to whispers—instanter.” II And afterwards— It was within ten minutes of one that Parker, conferring an amount of decorum on the request beyond the power of any other living being, descended to demand—of all conceivable things—the bath chair! “I got it,” said the hall-porter with inimitable profundity. And then, having let me realise the fulness of that, he said: “They never used it!” “No?” “No! He carried her down in his arms.” “And out?” “And out!” [294] He was difficult to follow in his description of the Sea Lady. She wore her wrap, it seems, and she was “like a statue”—whatever he may have meant by that. Certainly not that she was impassive. “Only,” said the porter, “she was alive. One arm was bare, I know, and her hair was down, a tossing mass of gold. “He looked, you know, like a man who’s screwed himself up. “She had one hand holding his hair—yes, holding his hair, with her fingers in among it.… “And when she see my face she threw her head back laughing at me. “As much as to say, ‘ ’im!’ got “Laughed at me, she did. Bubblin’ over.” I stood for a moment conceiving this extraordinary picture. Then a question occurred to me. [295] “Did laugh?” I asked. he “Gord bless you, sir, laugh? ” No! III The definite story ends in the warm light outside Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel. One sees that bright solitude of the Leas stretching white and blank—deserted as only a seaside front in the small hours can be deserted—and all its electric light ablaze. And then the dark line of the edge where the cliff drops down to the undercliff and sea. And beyond, moonlit, the Channel and its incessant ships. Outside the front of the hotel, which is one of a great array of pallid white facades, stands this little black figure of a hall-porter, staring stupidly into the warm and luminous mystery of the night that has swallowed Sea Lady and Chatteris together. And he is the sole living thing in the picture. [296] There is a little shelter set in the brow of the Leas, wherein, during the winter season, a string band plays. Close by there are steps that go down precipitously to the lower road below. Down these it must have been they went together, hastening downward out of this life of ours to unknown and inconceivable things. So it is I seem to see them, and surely though he was not in a laughing mood, there was now no doubt nor resignation in his face. Assuredly now he had found himself, for a time at least he was sure of himself, and that at least cannot be misery, though it lead straight through a few swift strides to death. They went down through the soft moonlight, tall and white and splendid, interlocked, with his arms about her, his brow to her white shoulder and her hair about his face. And she, I suppose, smiled above him and caressed him and whispered to him. For a moment they must have glowed under the warm light of the lamp that is half-way down the steps there, and then the shadows closed about them. He must have crossed the road with her, through the laced moonlight of the tree shadows, and through the shrubs and bushes of the undercliff, into the shadeless moon glare of the beach. There was no one to see that last descent, to tell whether for a moment he looked back before he waded into the phosphorescence, and for a little swam with her, and presently swam no longer, and so was no more to be seen by any one in this gray world of men. [297] Did he look back, I wonder? They swam together for a little while, the man and the sea goddess who had come for him, with the sky above them and the water about them all, warmly filled with the moonlight and set with shining stars. It was no time for him to think of truth, nor of the honest duties he had left behind him, as they swam together into the unknown. And of the end I can only guess and dream. Did there come a sudden horror upon him at the last, a sudden perception of infinite error, and was he drawn down, swiftly and terribly, a bubbling repentance, into those unknown deeps? Or was she tender and wonderful to the last, and did she wrap her arms about him and draw him down, down until the soft waters closed above him into a gentle ecstasy of death? [298] Into these things we cannot pry or follow, and on the margin of the softly breathing water the story of Chatteris must end. For the tailpiece to that, let us put that policeman who in the small hours before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady had been wearing just as the tide overtook it. It was not the sort of garment low people sometimes throw away—it was a soft and costly wrap. I seem to see him perplexed and dubious, wrap in charge over his arm and lantern in hand, scanning first the white beach and black bushes behind him and then staring out to sea. It was the inexplicable abandonment of a thoroughly comfortable and desirable thing. [299] “What were people up to?” one figures him asking, this simple citizen of a plain and observed world. “What do such things mean? “To throw away such an excellent wrap…!” In all the southward heaven there were only a planet and the sinking moon, and from his feet a path of quivering light must have started and run up to the extreme dark edge before him of the sky. Ever and again the darkness east and west of that glory would be lit by a momentary gleam of phosphorescence; and far out the lights of ships were shining bright and yellow. Across its shimmer a black fishing smack was gliding out of mystery into mystery. Dungeness shone from the west a pin-point of red light, and in the east the tireless glare of that great beacon on Gris-nez wheeled athwart the sky and vanished and came again. [300] I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little way, a stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast serenity of night. THE END About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). The Sea Lady. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35920/35920-h/35920-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

Moonshine Triumphant 

19 July, 2024/--SINGAPORE – ZKEX.com, the industry’s first multi-chain Super DEX, has raised $2.5 million in its latest funding round. This seed round features investors such as Fenbushi Capital, KXVC, and RockTree Capital. The funds will support ZKEX.com’s roadmap to launch its fiat on-ramp service, mobile app, and Telegram bot in the upcoming quarter. ZKEX.com offers crypto traders the functionality of a centralized exchange (CEX), including multi-chain Convert, Spot, Derivatives, and cross-chain Bridging. Unlike traditional CEXs, ZKEX.com allows users to trade native assets on any blockchain directly from their self-custodial wallets, eliminating the need to hand over token custody to the exchange. The protocol is the first decentralized exchange (DEX) in industry to address the problem of liquidity fragmentation across different blockchains by using zero-knowledge technology to create a secure, unified trading layer. The round saw participation from Fenbushi Capital, KXVC, RockTree Capital, NGC Ventures, L2 Iterative Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, IDG Blockchain, Whale Ground, Moonhill Capital, Blocklabs Capital, Optic Capital, Hyperithm Group, and G20 Group. Over the past 12 months, decentralized crypto exchanges have experienced significant growth, with monthly trading volumes rising from approximately $100 billion to over $250 billion by early 2024. This growth aligns with an increase in active user wallets from 3 million to over 4 million and zero-knowledge projects securing over $400 million in funding. “We’re obsessed with making multi-chain trading simple, fast, and cheap, offering a similar experience to a CEX without compromising the principles of self-custody and decentralization,” said Balal Khan, co-founder. “Users can onboard from any network and start trading with native assets in under a minute. In a few clicks, you could use your USDT on zkSync to spot buy ETH, short sell it with a perpetual contract, close both positions as limit orders, and withdraw profits as USDC on Base.” Security remains a critical concern in the blockchain industry, with over 150 major hacks involving cross-chain bridges and exchanges in the past two years, leading to billions in lost or stolen crypto assets. “ZKEX.com has addressed one of crypto’s biggest security challenges - the ability to safely use any supported stablecoin to directly trade tokens on any connected chain, without intermediaries,” said Omer Ozden, Chairman of RockTree Capital. “The core team brings years of experience from top-tier CEXs to decentralized on-chain trading, and we’re excited for what’s ahead,” he added. ZKEX.com operates on an aggregated Layer 3 (L3) built on zkLink, LayerZero, and Polyhedra, guaranteeing the security of deposits, withdrawals, and transactions across chains with zero-knowledge proofs and achieving settlement speeds of up to 1000 transactions per second. About ZKEX ZKEX.com is the Web3 industry’s first Super DEX, an ultra-secure, multi-chain crypto exchange that offers the functionality of a centralized exchange while maintaining asset self-custody. Users can trade tokens and move assets across 10 chains and rollups, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, Linea, and opBNB. All transactions are secured with zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring the safety of users’ funds at all times. For media inquiries, please contact team@zkex.com Website: zkex.com ｜ Docs  ｜ Blog  ｜  Twitter ｜ Discord ｜ Telegram This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. 19 July, 2024/--SINGAPORE – ZKEX.com, the industry’s first multi-chain Super DEX, has raised $2.5 million in its latest funding round. This seed round features investors such as Fenbushi Capital, KXVC, and RockTree Capital. The funds will support ZKEX.com’s roadmap to launch its fiat on-ramp service, mobile app, and Telegram bot in the upcoming quarter. ZKEX.com offers crypto traders the functionality of a centralized exchange (CEX), including multi-chain Convert, Spot, Derivatives, and cross-chain Bridging. Unlike traditional CEXs, ZKEX.com allows users to trade native assets on any blockchain directly from their self-custodial wallets, eliminating the need to hand over token custody to the exchange. ZKEX.com ZKEX.com The protocol is the first decentralized exchange (DEX) in industry to address the problem of liquidity fragmentation across different blockchains by using zero-knowledge technology to create a secure, unified trading layer. The round saw participation from Fenbushi Capital, KXVC, RockTree Capital, NGC Ventures, L2 Iterative Ventures, Crypto.com Capital, IDG Blockchain, Whale Ground, Moonhill Capital, Blocklabs Capital, Optic Capital, Hyperithm Group, and G20 Group. Over the past 12 months, decentralized crypto exchanges have experienced significant growth, with monthly trading volumes rising from approximately $100 billion to over $250 billion by early 2024. This growth aligns with an increase in active user wallets from 3 million to over 4 million and zero-knowledge projects securing over $400 million in funding. “We’re obsessed with making multi-chain trading simple, fast, and cheap, offering a similar experience to a CEX without compromising the principles of self-custody and decentralization,” said Balal Khan, co-founder. “Users can onboard from any network and start trading with native assets in under a minute. In a few clicks, you could use your USDT on zkSync to spot buy ETH, short sell it with a perpetual contract, close both positions as limit orders, and withdraw profits as USDC on Base.” “We’re obsessed with making multi-chain trading simple, fast, and cheap, offering a similar experience to a CEX without compromising the principles of self-custody and decentralization,” said Balal Khan, co-founder. “Users can onboard from any network and start trading with native assets in under a minute. In a few clicks, you could use your USDT on zkSync to spot buy ETH, short sell it with a perpetual contract, close both positions as limit orders, and withdraw profits as USDC on Base.” Security remains a critical concern in the blockchain industry, with over 150 major hacks involving cross-chain bridges and exchanges in the past two years, leading to billions in lost or stolen crypto assets. “ZKEX.com has addressed one of crypto’s biggest security challenges - the ability to safely use any supported stablecoin to directly trade tokens on any connected chain, without intermediaries,” said Omer Ozden, Chairman of RockTree Capital. “The core team brings years of experience from top-tier CEXs to decentralized on-chain trading, and we’re excited for what’s ahead,” he added. “ZKEX.com has addressed one of crypto’s biggest security challenges - the ability to safely use any supported stablecoin to directly trade tokens on any connected chain, without intermediaries,” said Omer Ozden, Chairman of RockTree Capital. “The core team brings years of experience from top-tier CEXs to decentralized on-chain trading, and we’re excited for what’s ahead,” he added. ZKEX.com operates on an aggregated Layer 3 (L3) built on zkLink, LayerZero, and Polyhedra, guaranteeing the security of deposits, withdrawals, and transactions across chains with zero-knowledge proofs and achieving settlement speeds of up to 1000 transactions per second. ZKEX.com ZKEX.com About ZKEX ZKEX.com is the Web3 industry’s first Super DEX, an ultra-secure, multi-chain crypto exchange that offers the functionality of a centralized exchange while maintaining asset self-custody. Users can trade tokens and move assets across 10 chains and rollups, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, Linea, and opBNB. All transactions are secured with zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring the safety of users’ funds at all times. For media inquiries, please contact team@zkex.com team@zkex.com team@zkex.com Website: zkex.com ｜ Docs ｜ Blog ｜ Twitter ｜ Discord ｜ Telegram zkex.com zkex.com Docs Docs Blog Blog Twitter Twitter Discord Discord Telegram Telegram This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here. This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here . here here

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