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2020NEXT Phase 8: New DeFi projects enter the market and compete for the top

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Bitcoin is out of the circle again, and more valuable projects are waiting to be discovered.

According to the beginning of the first phase of the event, the "2020 NEXT" series launched by Rhythm and KuCoin has discussed 10 valuable projects. At the beginning of 2021, the NEXT series has also started a new round of competition.

In the second half of 2020, the NEXT event and crypto users witnessed the changes in the crypto market. From the rise of liquidity mining to the NFT craze, to breaking through the $30,000 mark for the first time since the birth of Bitcoin. In 2021, the encryption market is moving towards a more diversified development. Bitcoin continues to go out of the circle, and the market may usher in a large number of new users. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for practitioners, so the significance of finding more value projects will be even greater than before.

In order to discover more high-quality projects and better capture the market heat, Rhythm BlockBeats has updated the candidate projects, Added 2 new items with good progress. The results of this campaign will be announced on January 11.

The eighth campaign will select dialogue items from the following 15 items based on the results of user assistance:

Arweave, a one-time paid permanent storage protocol;

Cross-chain decentralized Alpha Finance Lab;

Decentralized index protocol The Graph;

Terra Virtua, a well-known digital collection platform;

Derivatives DEX rookie Serum;

Decentralized trading protocol Injective Protocol;

new A generation of financial public chain project SperaX;

Ethereum Elastic Blockchain SKALE;

High-performance Layer 1 public chain Nervos;

Decentralized cloud computing blockchain network aelf;

Star sharding project NEAR;

High-performance public chain Solana;

DeFi liquidity mining leading project Yearn.finance;

First A DeFi protocol based on volatility index Pendle;

Composable DeFi platform Furucombo.

Arweave

Arweave is a one-time payment protocol for permanent file storage. Arweave provides a storage solution called Permaweb permanent network, which uses the immutable characteristics of the blockchain to directly write the content into the block for storage, so as to realize the so-called permanent storage function.

In March 2020, Arweave completed another $8.3 million strategic Investment, this round of financing was invested by Union Square Ventures, A16Z, and Coinbase Ventures.

Alpha Finance Lab

Alpha Finance Lab (Alpha) is a project focused on building cross-chain DeFi ecosystem products, which will capture DeFi in an innovative and user-friendly way Unresolved needs.

Alpha currently launched two products "Alpha Lending", " Alpha Homora". Alpha Lending is the first product launched by Alpha, built on Binance Smart Chain (BSC). The main function of Alpha Lending is to provide perpetual loans. After users deposit their assets into the system as collateral, they can obtain loans and obtain liquidity. Alpha Homora is the second product launched by Alpha. Through the Alpha Homora protocol, users can use leverage when participating in liquidity mining.

The Graph

The Graph is an indexing protocol for organizing and efficiently accessing data in blockchains and storage networks. The graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, IPFS, and POA, with more networks to come in the future. So far, more than 1700 subgraphs have been deployed for applications such as Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, and decentralized. On July 31, The Graph announced the launch of its incentivized testnet.

On October 14, 2020, The Graph announced the completion of two rounds Tokens were issued publicly, with a total financing of about 13 million US dollars, and the unit price of tokens is 0.03 US dollars. On December 18, The Graph announced the launch of its mainnet, and encrypted trading platforms such as Coinbase and Binance simultaneously launched its token GRT.

Terra Virtua

The concept of Terra Virtua was first proposed by the founders Gary Bracey and Jawad Ashraf in 2017. After years of development and clear positioning, Terra Virtua has evolved from a block-based Chain Economy's virtual reality entertainment platform has developed into a blockchain-based interactive NFT digital collectibles platform, compatible with all major platforms such as mobile phones, tablets, PCs, and of course VR.

Terra Virtua cooperates with many famous brands and IP Collaborate to create collections and their 3D animated models based on them that can interact not only with collectors, but with each other. Previously launched NFT collectibles of "Pacific Rim", "Top Gun", and "The Godfather".

Yearn.finance (YFI)

If Compound is the initiator of liquidity mining, then Yearn.finance (YFI) is the fuel that pushes this activity to a climax. The founder of YFI, Andre Cronje (AC), is a DeFi product developer known as a "workaholic" by the crypto community. He has launched several new products in just a few months, and even produced the "AC" effect.

YFI can be simply understood as a Executed smart bank account , which can automatically allocate your assets to low-risk investment strategies to help users obtain income. And its notable feature is the fair issuance model, and there is no pre-sale or pre-mining of tokens.

NEAR

Star sharding public chain NEAR has had a lot of good news since September this year. On September 25, NEAR’s official account announced that the foundation has completely withdrawn from the operation of nodes, and the NEAR mainnet has been decentralized. Then on October 13, NEAR launched the final stage of the mainnet, and the transfer function has been opened.

NEAR, as one of the strong competitors of Ethereum, has won the awards including ;Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Homebrew, Amplify, MetaStable, Baidu Ventures, SVAngel, ACCOMPLICE and other investment institutions invested.

Nervos

As one of the representatives of domestic public chains, Nervos has always been concerned by encryption users. Its flexible underlying cryptography primitives enable Nervos to provide an interoperability level 2.0 experience, allowing it to follow the standards of all existing chains, thereby opening up with other existing entrances and realizing the vision of integrating them together. Users can enter the blockchain world from any portal and operate any asset in the digital world, and none of these problems can be solved by inventing a new standard or portal.

SKALE Network

SKALE Network is a Layer 2 expansion solution that is fully compatible with the Ethereum mainnet. Its block generation time reaches the sub-second level, and the throughput of each SKALE chain can achieve 2000tps, and it can deploy full-state smart contracts, support decentralized storage, implement Rollups scheme and EVM machine learning. SKALE closed its public sale on September 11, selling over 167 million SKL tokens worth just over $5 million. This was followed by the announcement of the second phase of its mainnet on October 1.

Solana

The Solana network adopts a PoH-based clock mechanism, and also optimizes the consensus mechanism, data broadcasting, parallel transaction processing, and state data storage with a separate node network. In order to achieve high throughput, low latency and low cost while ensuring a certain degree of decentralization and security, it can meet the needs of users in most scenarios.

This year, the Serum project, which was consulted by SBF, became the The first decentralized exchange on the chain that supports cross-chain transactions without third-party trust. On August 14, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted that the Serum project based on the Solana public chain had completed its first on-chain transaction, and the transaction fee was only 0.000005 SOL (approximately $0.000019).

aelf

aelf is a project to build a decentralized cloud computing blockchain network, and the team is based in Singapore. aelf is not only a chain, but a main chain with multiple side chains to reduce traffic and maximize transaction speed and efficiency. The main chain is the core of the ecosystem and is connected with multiple side chains at the same time.

On October 16 this year, aelf Enterprise 1.0.0 RC Version 1 is officially released. On December 10, the aelf mainnet was officially launched. After the mainnet goes live, aelf will follow the new version of the mainnet launch roadmap and complete the work related to the mainnet launch in stages. At the same time, the aelf technical team will continue to improve the functions of the mainnet and focus on building a DApp ecosystem.

Injective Protocol

Injective Protocol is a Layer2 derivatives trading protocol, based on the Ethereum network, which integrates a verifiable delay function (VDF), and passes the proof of elapsed time (Proof of Elapsed Time) A decentralized transaction protocol that avoids transaction cheating and bad transactions by avoiding order conflicts in the same block.

The agreement has recently completed a seed round of financing. Although the specific amount has not been disclosed, the investment comes from well-known institutions and individuals, including Pantera Capital, QCP Soteria, Axia8 Ventures, K42, Krypton Capital, etc.

SperaX

Sperax is a decentralized financial infrastructure supported by top blockchain venture capital institutions OV, FBG, etc., and participated by top North American cryptographers. Sperax was established in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, USA in 2018. Our current members are mainly located in the United States, Singapore and China. On August 20 this year, Sperax announced the completion of the token sale. A total of approximately 250 million SPA tokens (approximately 4.7% of the total token supply) worth approximately $4.7 million were sold.

Furucombo

Furucombo is a tool built for DeFi users, just like building your own DeFi Lego bricks, you can design your own DeFi strategy by simply dragging and dropping without programming. It visualizes the complex DeFi protocol as a multi-layered composition of operations. Users only need to input/output the relevant token amount, and set the multi-layer operation sequence (we call it "Lego block combination"), and then Furucombo will package all the data sets into one transaction and send it out. It is a great tool for users who want to perform operations across different protocols, especially those who want to take advantage of flash loans.

Pendle (formerly known as Benchmark )

Pendle focuses on two things: 1. Yield Tokenization; 2. An AMA that trades tokenized yield and other time-decaying assets.

These two features allow users to lend assets Lock-in benefits, traders can estimate changes in earnings. Pendle means that information on the chain can be traded across time ranges, creating new profits through a revenue strategy similar to Yearn Vaults, and maximizing the return rate of protected assets. In addition, Pendle is also an agreement that can be freely traded across time latitudes on the chain. It can create a forward yield curve through tokens, thereby bringing greater development visibility and efficiency to the lending market.