Cryptocurrencies had a dream run in 2021. From being treated as a fringe topic to becoming a potential disruptor of the traditional financial ecosystem, 2021 stood witness to the meteoric growth in the value of cryptocurrencies, as well as a significant change of momentum in terms of mainstream adoption and technological adoption. Between NFTs, metaverse, multichain projects, layer-2 scaling solutions, blockchain 3.0, web 3.0, play-to-earn games – there’s a lot that has happened in 2021.
Even though it is too early to predict how the cryptoverse will evolve in 2022, several projects have already raised the bar by introducing solutions that harness the potential of the underlying blockchain technology to meet a diverse range of real-world use cases. Here are five intriguing projects across the DeFi, trading, NFT, DAO, and security sectors poised to play key roles in the crypto ecosystem’s accelerating maturation.
Bridging Real-World Assets With DeFi
By design, TradFi (traditional finance) and DeFi (decentralized finance) are two different worlds. There isn’t much overlap between ecosystems, except the respective challenges each faces. For instance, the DeFi market is highly fragmented, leading to liquidity problems. On the other hand, the centralized nature of TradFi makes it extremely complicated for small and medium businesses to access funding opportunities as and when needed.
As the next logical step in the evolution of blockchain technology, Centrifuge has developed the first-ever decentralized lending protocol that connects real-world assets (RWA) to the on-chain ecosystem. Centrifuge is designed to connect borrowers and investors in a decentralized manner. The platform makes it extremely easy for borrowers to access financing by using their real-world assets as collateral. Concurrently, investors can diversify their exposure by investing in RWA-backed collateralized loans that have a low correlation with the crypto market.
Using Centrifuge, borrowers can tokenize real-world assets for use as loan collateral from its lending dApp Tinlake. There are no intermediaries in the process, and the platform is open to all investors and borrowers. In terms of interoperability, Centrifuge is built on Polkadot and its dApp Tinlake is bridged with Ethereum, helping users leverage the DeFi liquidity of Ethereum alongside the speed and low cost of Polkadot.
With DeFi 2.0 just around the corner, Centrifuge has connected two separate ecosystems and unlocked the trillion-dollar real-world asset market to drive more liquidity into the DeFi ecosystem.
Disentangling The Complex Crypto Trading Onramp
Even though cryptocurrencies have garnered mainstream recognition, only a handful of the global population uses them. Between the still foreign concept of digital currencies added to the many confusing CEX and DEX options, the entry barrier rises even higher.
Atani, an all-in-one crypto trading platform, aims to change this in 2022. The Atani team believes that the key drivers of crypto adoption are an accessible user experience and affordability. Accordingly, the platform has developed an end-to-end solution that makes crypto trading, investing, and portfolio management easy, straightforward, and cost-effective for a broader global population.
The Atani platform offers users free access to multiple exchanges, tax reporting, charting, notification management, and other valuable features. The team behind Atani has introduced a dedicated exchange aggregator that allows users to trade seamlessly across more than 20 leading exchanges like Kraken, Binance, Coinbase Pro, Huobi, and KuCoin from a single dashboard. Furthermore, the platform doesn’t add any fees on top of the transparent costs incurred from each exchange, making it a worthwhile destination for both beginners and professional traders alike.
Adding More Security To The Blockchain Ecosystem
In 2021, 37% of the crypto scams were using rug pulls compared to 2020, when it only accounted for 1%, highlighting that the blockchain ecosystem is in dire need of advanced security solutions. Conditions are poised to change drastically in 2022 with Avarta’s state-of-the-art on-chain identity verification and authentication service.
The most distinctive feature of Avarta is its unique approach to existing security flaws in blockchain authentication. Currently, identity authentication options are either pseudonymous solutions or centralized customer identification programs, eschewing the principle of decentralization.
Avarta has introduced a 4-in-1 solution for the blockchain ecosystem, including a biometrically-secure multichain wallet, an anti-bot mechanism for DEX listings, a multi-signature wallet, and a multichain and decentralized identity management with risk-based scoring. With Avarta’s military-grade security-enabled identity wallet, users exert complete control over their private keys. Plus, the platform’s cross-chain support enables users to consolidate all of their keys into a single wallet, removing the need to store multiple keys, passwords, and seed phrases.
Additionally, Avarta issues an Avarta Trust Score based on each user’s on-chain transaction history. This score works just like a credit score in TradFi, but it grants users full control over how the information is disclosed to service providers. Since the entire DeFi ecosystem relies on “trust,” the Avarta Trust Score will play a key role in lowering the rate of scams and rug pulls while helping DeFi expand its dominance.
Unlocking A World Of Innovative Funding Opportunities Via NFTs
When the term NFT is mentioned, most people think about overly-priced digital collectibles. But there’s so much potential in NFTs that’s yet to be unlocked. 2021 saw the meteoric growth of NFTs as trade volumes shattered all previous records. And in 2022, Solv Protocol, an open and transparent allocation trading marketplace on-chain, aims to unlock a diverse range of financial use cases with NFTs.
By merging NFTs with DeFi, Solv Protocol is disrupting traditional crowdfunding models. The platform recently introduced its ERC-3525 token standard, which combines the liquidity feature of the ERC-20 tokens and the descriptive attributes of the ERC-721 tokens to enable users to create complicated financial contracts easily. Dubbed Financial NFTs, this new class of NFTs leverages the newly created ERC-3525 token standard to express the multi-dimensional attributes of assets in the form of splittable NFTs.
Since each Financial NFT, also called “vouchers,” combine distinct features of the ERC-20 and ERC-721 token standards, they can be split into smaller parts, helping users flexibly trade, split, merge-lock, or use them in any other manner they prefer. As a result, users can implement TradFi models on-chain using ERC-3525 tokens like vesting, convertible bonds, fixed-term deposits, and other similar options.
The platform has also launched the first-ever Initial Voucher Offering (IVO) fundraising model, allowing projects to raise funds by issuing their own ERC-3525 tokens. The IVO offers more flexibility considering each “voucher” can be split into smaller parts while maintaining similar release parameters depending on the project’s tokenomics and long-term goals.
Spearheading The Efforts To Build A DAO For NFT Creators
The unprecedented demand and growth of NFTs in 2021 has left investors worldwide spellbound. With more and more influencers, celebrities, and renowned personalities joining the NFT bandwagon, the sales of NFTs shot through the roof. However, despite the monetary value of NFTs, the burgeoning segment is primarily driven by a few key marketplaces.
These marketplaces offer creators the option to accrue royalties as part of all subsequent sales of their original work. However, these marketplaces only offer royalties to creators if sales occur on the same platform where the NFT was originally minted, limiting the earning potential of creators.
To address the problem of unfair royalty distribution, CXIP, a minting-as-a-service (MaaS) platform, offers personalized smart contracts for content creators to highlight their contribution to each NFT produced through on-chain provenance. CXIP ensures that creators receive their fair share of royalties through these measures, irrespective of the platform where the NFT was sold.
To improve the value proposition even further, CXIP is also airdropping NFTs to every creator who has ever minted NFTs on Ethereum. Each user can claim $CXIP Tokens and join the CXIP DAO, the largest DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) of creators globally. The CXIP DAO consists of leading artists and brand advocates like Pharell Williams, Chad Knight, Jen Stark, Daniel Arsham, Justin Aversano, and the co-founder of CXIP Jeff Gluck.
Looking Ahead Towards A Bigger, Bolder, and Brighter Future For Blockchain
As blockchain technology continues to mature, the projects mentioned above will play key roles in bringing new features to their respective segments, helping attract more widespread attention in 2022. That said, bear in mind that these are just a few initiatives from the long list of promising projects destined to forge the foundation of Web 3.0 and DeFi 2.0.
