We've all been watching the tumbling price action lately, but don't forget that Web3 is under construction.
Bear markets allow CEOs to think in terms of fundamentals and spend more time building meaningful technology. With the legion of new crypto users, there is plenty of new ground to build on. In 2021, the Web3 field will develop from 0 to 1. Right now, we need sane and well-funded companies that follow the blueprint to get bigger and stronger.
Today, I'm going to highlight 8 projects that are at the forefront of the crypto world. They're working on some really cool products.
1. Obol Network - Distributed Validator Technology (DVT)
Official Website: Obol.tech
Obol is a pioneer in "Distributed Validator Technology" (DVT). A DVT can run on multiple machines and clients simultaneously, while still functioning as a single validator on the network. DVT allows many computers to come online and have all of them participate in private key signing.
This technology facilitates the creation of a competitive ETH staking infrastructure and reduces network monopoly. The goal of Obol is to make validator uptime competitive while minimizing risk and leveling the playing field for the staking network.
Obol use cases:
A DAO would not trust a single member to pledge ETH to their treasury, but might trust a group of members to run validators and share responsibility;
· Members will not own 32 ETH alone, but can gather all ETH to build a shared node;
· Custodians may not entrust customers' ETH to a single pledge operator, but they may trust the operator network that cooperates through Obol technology.
How Obol stands out:
1. Obol is integrated into every staking protocol and consumer staking software;
2. Each pledge service company and protocol (Coinbase Cloud, Lido, RocketPool) share the verification risk through Obol and DVT;
3. The quantity and quality of liquid collateralized derivatives (stETH, rETH, etc.) have grown significantly and become competitive;
4. ETH stakers are able to compete through specialized and competitive services such as Coinbase.
2. LI.FI - Aggregator of L2 cross-chain bridge and DEX aggregator
Official website: LI.FI
Link "9 cross-chain bridges, 15 public chains, and all DEXs"
With the long-term growth of DeFi, the number of assets and chains in DeFi will grow by an order of magnitude. LI.FI is building a mesh liquidity network between every asset on every EVM compatible chain.
LI.FI has DEX and DEX aggregator, and also supports many EVM chains, such as Optimism, Arbitrum, Avalanche. LI.FI also builds many cross-chain bridges between all EVM chains. Because there are 9 different cross-chain bridge protocols, and countless DEXs, the transaction route from chain A (asset X) = to chain B (asset Y) is dazzling.
LI.FI automatically selects the best trading route, uses the most liquid and cheapest fees, and allocates assets reasonably at the lowest cost. LI.FI is a DEX aggregator built on top of the cross-chain bridge aggregator to simplify transactions.
How LI.FI stands out in DeFi:
1.LI.FI becomes a fluid mesh network between assets and chains in a multi-chain world with unlimited assets;
2. The application integrates LI.FI's gadgets to easily access the capital flow of the entire encrypted world;
3. The complexity of holding assets across multiple chains is eliminated;
4.LI.FI becomes the solution to direct all applications in all chains without losing funds through high fees or down the road.
3. Voltz – Internet Interest Rate Swap AMM
Official Website: Voltz.xyz
Voltz is an interest rate swap AMM (Automated Market Maker). Voltz leveraged Uniswap V3's liquidity engine to create an interest rate swap market. The Voltz protocol allows trading interest rates with leverage. You can use "floating rate for fixed rate" or "fixed rate for variable rate".
Yields are perhaps the most alluring thing about cryptocurrencies, and Voltz provides an infrastructure to build stronger, more expressive financial products around yielding assets. Compared with the original Internet bond market, the financialization of ETH after the merger still has a lot of room for development. Voltz is positioned to provide complex financial instruments around ETH, or provide yielding assets in DeFi.
How Voltz Stands Out Among Crypto Derivatives:
1. Voltz opens up a huge interest rate swap market to DeFi;
2. Create new markets that allow traders to synthetically trade the interest rate exposure of any asset at a variable rate of return;
3. The global interest rate market is no longer driven by central bank policies, but is driven by the supply and demand dynamics of DeFi;
4. Long-term game. The Voltz Protocol becomes a scalable derivatives protocol that goes beyond interest rate swaps and encryption to expand into the global derivatives market.
4. Tracer - Meta-Protocol of Derivatives
Official Website: Tracer.Finance
Tracer is a Meta-Protocol for derivatives. Derivatives are already very popular products in the encryption field, but the current derivatives protocol has not yet unlocked the full functionality of DeFi. And Tracer injects the entire core of DeFi into derivative products.
I think Tracer is "Uniswap in derivatives". Uniswap can trade around any Token, and Tracer can generate derivatives around any asset. Every TracerDAO product comes with a contract. Using Tracer's contracts, any price or data can be turned into an option, trade or future product.
How Tracer stands out among tokenized derivatives:
1. TracerDAO's Tokenized derivatives can be combined in DeFi, which greatly improves capital efficiency. Capital efficiency allows Tracer to capture TVL, and traders only need to invest 1 dollar of capital in Tracer to obtain income;
2. Tracer's contract enables the long tail of assets to have access to complex derivatives products, allowing it to gain market share and attention share from the broader crypto community (just like Uniswap);
3. The fluctuations in the metaverse become controllable, enabling DeFi treasury, DAO and individuals to consider issues from a long-term perspective;
4. Real-world commodities (water, oil, real estate) can enter the global derivatives market, creating new financial products.
5. Blocknative - real-time infrastructure at the "pre-chain" layer
Official Website: Blocknative.com
Before transactions are executed in the blockchain, they are in an edge state called the "mempool", or pre-chain. Validators select transactions from a mempool, order them in a block, and add that block to the blockchain.
Mempools are a crazy, chaotic, and highly hostile place, and Blocknative is working hard to illuminate the dark forest of mempools. Its product, the gas detector, has become the new industry standard. Previous gas detectors looked at the average gas price of recent blocks to estimate the amount of gas required to execute a transaction. This is a best guess at predicting future gas prices through historical data.
Blocknative's gas detector looks at the gas cost of transactions in the mempool from the blockchain perspective, which is reading future data.
Blocknative’s gas detector demonstrates the true potential of the blockchain — the infrastructure for block producers to get a head start.
How Blocknative stands out for transparency:
1. The mempool blockchain infrastructure becomes as complex as the actual blockchain resource manager infrastructure;
2. Participants earn yield (ultimately benefitting ETH stakers the most).
6. Euler - Permission-free, governance-minimized money markets
Official website: Euler.finance
Euler is a money market protocol like Aave, Compound or Rari. While Euler faces stiff competition, it also has some unique strengths. Euler combines the asset availability of Rari Fuse pools with the capital efficiency of Aave or Compound's single shared liquidity pool model.
License-Exempt Asset Borrowing or Loan
Euler allows any asset that has an ETH Uniswap V3 transaction pair to lend and borrow. Euler uses Uniswap V3 as an oracle for asset prices, using a time-weighted average price algorithm.
Unlicensed asset listings are extremely risky for money markets, and we don't want to use bad debt as collateral. Euler governance controls this risk through the fee layer. The Euler model is a huge optimization of asset availability and capital efficiency in the lending space.
Improve the liquidation mechanism
Euler uses a Dutch auction-style liquidation mechanism. In Compound and Aave transactions, liquidators can obtain a certain percentage of collateral, and very large positions can bring huge returns to liquidators, but are not conducive to large depositors.
Liquidation costs are mostly fixed. The gas cost to liquidate a $100 million position is the same as a $1000 position. The reward for liquidation in Euler starts at $0 and slowly increases until the liquidator steps in and accepts the reward. This reduces the amount of over-collateralization required by depositors because liquidation penalties are minimized, thereby improving the capital efficiency of the financial system.
How Euler stands out in lending:
1. Euler provides unprecedented borrowing opportunities for new assets;
2. Even assets that already have borrowing opportunities can find higher utilization in Euler (and thus higher fees);
3. Generally speaking, more assets can obtain more opportunities in DeFi, thereby increasing the net utility of the entire DeFi.
7. Aztec Network - L2 Rollup with built-in privacy
Official website: Aztec.Network
The Aztec network is a unique L2 Rollup, which is Zcash as Ethereum's L2.
The Aztec network acts as a privacy shield for ERC-20 Token transactions and other DeFi interactions. Once the deposit is included in a Rollup block, the user generates a set of UTXO notes representing the amount of the deposit Token.
Once the Token enters the Aztec network, all subsequent transfers are confidential and anonymous. The identities of senders and receivers are hidden, transaction amounts are encrypted, and network observers cannot even see which asset or service a transaction belongs to.
Aztec Connect
Aztec Connect allows users to bring privacy-preserving ZK assets on Aztec to Ethereum's public DeFi protocol.
Aztec Connect is essentially the V/P/N of Ethereum users. Like V/P/N, Aztec Connect hides the transaction initiator and fully protects user privacy, while reducing gas costs by batch processing user operations.
8. Disco.xyz - private data package for metaverse and real world
Official Website: Disco.xyz
Disco opens up a whole new dimension in Web3. Will turn the financial metaverse (the world we currently live in) into the fun metaverse (the land of dreams).
Disco is the metaverse data package, where social capital is stored. Credentials for participation in DAOs, participation in DeFi applications, or certificates of completion of educational courses can be stored. Anything that can be verified can be placed in your Disco packet, thus becoming an object that the Metaverse can interact with. With the Disco packet, all represented identities can be collected.
Disco packets are not subject to any set of private keys. Private keys for data packets can be freely exchanged, unbinding identities tied to individual Ethereum addresses and removing them from the global ledger with maximum transparency.
Data layer between Web2 and Web3
While Disco is a company that serves VCs and DIDs, Disco is just one product among many. Disco is the first platform to leverage these standards in Web3 identity impersonation. The more people who adhere to the standard, the larger the network becomes, kind of like ERC-20 and cryptocurrencies. The Web2 protocol can also use this technology. These technical standards are based on cryptography, and because VC and DID are not based on the chain, they can interoperate on the entire Internet stack.
With this technology, we can finally shift the power structure of Web2 applications to a more user-centric one.