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Doom and gloom is no longer the headline when it comes to the blockchain. While the general atmosphere at the top of the year looked quite bleak, the industry has mostly stuck to its guns of hunkering down and reshaping what crypto and web3 projects should aspire to achieve.
Let’s not kid ourselves, there’s still a long way to go to achieve sustained, long-term success for the industry as a whole. But even now, we can see great strides being made in adjusting the values and ambitions of blockchain projects across many different sectors. If the last bull market was characterized by grandiosity and unsustainable growth, this one is more likely to be grounded in highlighting the actual usefulness and concrete benefits that blockchain brings.
This is illustrated by the kinds of projects and sectors that are climbing in prominence. Two years ago, you couldn’t log into Twitter without seeing hundreds of random NFT member clubs dominating your timeline. Now, your feed is likely more low-key, with the real, impactful projects and startups working behind the scenes to boost blockchain adoption.
All of the projects featured here demonstrate a different approach to growing the blockchain industry in each respective sector. By blending distinct perspectives with careful growth and considered development, these 5 projects illustrate what blockchain’s future should look like.
Spool: Reinventing institutional DeFi
Spool is a platform that lets institutions and individuals easily build customized, risk-managed DeFi yield protocols. Through a guided process that uses comprehensible language, risk assessment, and automated tools, institutions are free to explore the possibilities of decentralized finance on their own terms.
By enhancing accessibility to the decentralized ecosystem, Spool represents the qualities that have made the new wave of DeFi projects so appealing to those that previously ignored the sector. Spool aims to eliminate the unnecessary complexity that typically accompanies DeFi protocols while still retaining the amount of nuance and flexibility that institutions expect from it. And institutions have been taking notice. Spool’s year has been marked by a steady stream of activity, including collaborations with key crypto projects such as Staking Rewards and Rocket Pool, and an upgraded institutional investment-focused V2 platform update due later this year.
Kima: Bringing crypto and TradFi together without smart contracts
As crypto development pivots from being parallel to traditional finance and instead hones in on adopting its positive qualities, new tools and platforms are needed to easily bridge the two ecosystems. Yes, connectors such as smart contracts do exist now and remain widely used. But their convenience for developers doesn’t translate to user accessibility or security, making them a target for hackers and unappealing to the average person wanting to use crypto as a functional currency.
Kima, a startup that recently joined FinSec Innovation Lab, an accelerator powered by Mastercard and EnelX, is creating an alternative to smart contract overreliance. While smart contracts do work for certain situations, Kima fills in the gaps that they can’t cover in an effort to expand crypto adoption. Kima achieves this by creating a new financial primitive that is asset-agnostic and utilizes different trust mechanisms to those used by smart contracts. With the recent launch of its SDK for Web3, Web 2.0, and fintech institutions or projects to utilize, Kima sets the stage for greater crypto-fiat integration and ease of access for users around the world.
ShelterZoom: Expanding blockchain’s security might
Founded in 2017, ShelterZoom’s SaaS smart-document platform uses the power of blockchain’s immutability and traceability to secure documents, contracts, and sensitive information across a multitude of industries. With tools that cover sectors including healthcare, real estate, financial services, government, law firms, non-profits, and more, ShelterZoom gives companies of all sizes an enterprise-grade solution to protect their sensitive data.
ShelterZoom demonstrates the power of using the blockchain outside of its financial application in crypto—and how its foundational technology can help secure the most vulnerable sectors. Its tools such as DocumentGPS, for example, allow hospitals and healthcare organizations to keep operating in the event of a security breach. ShelterZoom also enables patients to have control of their medical records which allows them to more easily book appointments, leading to better healthcare outcomes. Demonstrating blockchain’s security potential, ShelterZoom’s tools have already been used in an extended trial run with Argentina’s largest private hospital in addition to recently receiving HIPAA compliance in the United States.
tomi: The internet of the future
What do you think of when you hear “dark web”? If you have any knowledge of its classic definition, it probably conjures up images of drug trafficking, terrorism, and all kinds of unsavory users. But what if certain characteristics of the dark web—user privacy, freedom of information, and community ownership—were to be used for good?
tomi, a web3 project introducing a new kind of internet, is doing just that. By building a surveillance-free alternative to our current internet infrastructure, tomi utilizes DAO governance and community guidance to emphasize user privacy, security, and freedom. tomi’s alternative internet also reinvents the concept of domain ownership that aligns closer with users than the domain hosting websites that dominate our web experience today. Its recent tDNS (tomi Domain Name Service) auction allows any user to bid on owning a tomi domain name that they could potentially earn money from. Yes, that includes sought-after domain names, such as Amazon.com.
As more internet users become cognizant and protective of their privacy, tomi creates an opportunity to use the blockchain’s inherent privacy capabilities to create an alternative for users to participate in and own a part of.
VAIOT: AI assistants using zk-SNARKs
How could we write a piece about the five projects reshaping blockchain without including an AI company? VAIOT, the developer of AI-powered digital services for businesses and consumers, just added zk-SNARKs to its AI Legal Assistant. VAIOT is powered by the company’s own machine learning (ML) algorithms—in addition to Microsoft CLU and OpenAI’s GPT-4—and is designed specifically to provide legal support to users.
With zk-SNARKS, VAIOT’s AI Legal Assistant empowers the user to verify information in a legal contract to the other relevant party without revealing specifics, enabling seamless and secure legal support for individuals and institutions.
“Blockchain, and particularly zk-SNARKs, opens a world of options to verify contracts to any party without disclosing sensitive information,” said Paweł Andruszkiewicz, COO of VAIOT. “In our case, users sharing data coming from legal and formal documentation generated through our AI Assistants can rest assured knowing only information that is required by a certain entity for a particular process will be shared.”
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
