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As 2020 comes to a close, the DeFi industry has continued to dominate with nearly $15 billion in total value locked (TVL). The year that began with a lingering bear market evolved into one of the most exciting six-month crypto stretches in the past decade. The DeFi movement saw Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange, surpass centralized exchange giants like Coinbase in daily volume. And even after a September swoon, the DeFi market has come roaring back.
Despite a tumultuous year otherwise, one clear takeaway we have from 2020 is that crypto users clearly support DeFi and are increasingly comfortable using more and more complex DeFi products. Despite a challenging initial learning curve and the always-on spectre of regulation, DeFi and blockchain seem to have become a fixture in our modern financial landscape.
As decentralized technology hits the mainstream, we see more quality projects that are blazing new trails for DeFi. The industry that entered 2020 with a suite of protocols that mimicked basic financial functions like lending, borrowing and trading is prepping for a new year in 2021 filled with a whole host of new niche use case applications.
The following list comprises five upcoming launches to watch before 2020 ends. The list includes DeFi insurance, cross-chain protocols, and two of Polkastarter’s upcoming initial decentralized exchange offerings (IDOs).
1. Royale (ROYA)
Royale has pioneered the application of DeFi to the largely untapped multi-billion-dollar iGaming market. It is the first decentralized platform to specifically target this new #iGDeFi (iGaming DeFi) niche.
Royale provides DeFi-optimised liquidity to power iGaming innovation. Royale-supported platforms will use provably fair algorithms to instill trust in platform users. “Provably fair” applies blockchain technology to ensure beyond any doubt that the game is not skewed in favor of the operator. Royale’s native utility token ROYA acts as a coordinating mechanism for the self-governing protocol DAO that navigates the relationship between liquidity providers and iGaming entrepreneurs that seek liquidity.
Royale will conduct its public sale on December 21st as the third official project to launch on Polkastarter’s new decentralized fundraising platform. The inaugural project on Polkastarter earlier this week saw over 30,000 interested users, selling out almost instantly. Royale is backed by notable entities such as FOMOcraft, AlphaBit, Vendetta Capital, Kyros Ventures, and more.
2. Fire Protocol
Fire Protocol is the first infrastructure to Huobi (Smart) Eco Chain (HECO), which helps onboard non-Huobi Chain assets via our cross-chain solutions, an integrated trading and money market with lending and borrowing services. Fire Protocol will help support hundreds of digital assets from various chains on to the Huobi ecosystem using cross-chain wrapping.
Fire Protocol will also be launching its exchange, which will be an AMM dex with high scalability, multi-asset exposure, and liquidity mining. Additionally, the project will have a loan platform that will give traders the ability to access a wide range of credit types quickly and easily. Keep an eye out for Fire Protocol’s launch in December 2020.
3. UNION Finance (UNN)
Fresh off of a $3.9 million raise, UNION Finance is on a mission to create a vibrant ecosystem of risk management and asset protection products on Ethereum that will help DeFi users hedge their various types of risk. Some of the initial products that UNION will launch include transaction gas protection, collateralization ratio protection, smart contract coverage, and a multitude of other capital protection pools and products.
By building out the tooling that addresses many of the major barriers of entry to DeFi currently, UNION believes that its personal success can also help fuel sustainable growth for the entire DeFi space. The same tooling that lowers the barrier of entry for retail users will serve a dual purpose of laying the foundation for institutional capital to comfortably flow into the crypto ecosystem. UNION will be listed on Uniswap on December 17, 2020.
4. Frax
Frax is the world’s first fractional-algorithmic stablecoin attempting to be the first stablecoin protocol to implement design principles of both to create a highly scalable, trustless, extremely stable, and ideologically pure on-chain money. The Frax protocol is a two token system encompassing a stablecoin, Frax (FRAX), and a governance token, Frax Shares (FXS).
The protocol also has pool contracts that hold collateral (at genesis USDT and USDC). Pools can be added or removed with governance. Frax’s highly-anticipated launch announcement is expected by the end of the month, with an anticipated TGE and additional announcements about their roadmap.
5. MahaDao
MahaDAO is a stablecoin platform for cryptocurrency collateralization and issuance that will be the second project to launch an IDO on Polkastarter on December 17. MahaDAO is a community-focused DAO with a governance ecosystem that utilizes a 2-token system. The MAHA token serves as the protocol’s governance token and ARTH as its “valuecoin”.
While stablecoins diminish in value due to inflation, ARTH maintains its value due to being backed by a basket of uncorrelated assets. Based on the reverse vaults pioneered by MakerDAO, the MahaDAO vault acts as a regulator to manage collateralized assets and govern the issuance and redemption of ARTH.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
