DeFi is making a comeback, and this time it’s on Ethereum’s competitors’ networks.
In early 2021, decentralized finance (DeFi) was all the rage, but it has since given way to more appealing areas such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), memecoins, and blockchain games.
Now that cross-chain bridges and interoperability have made it easier to migrate assets to competing chains, a new class of DeFi protocols is emerging to take on the protocols that will be phased out in 2021.
Here are three DeFi initiatives that have gained traction in the crypto world after launching on some of the most promising layer-1 blockchain networks.
VVS Finance is a company that specializes in financial services
VVS Finance is the most popular DeFi protocol on the Cronos network, which arose from the Crypto.com ecosystem and has now been rebranded as Cronos (CRO).
VVS Finance’s mission is to provide liquidity providers with quick swaps with minimal fees, little slippage, and attractive yields (LPs).
Two-thirds of swap fees received on the exchange are allocated to the LPs of the individual pools as a compensation for providing liquidity, and LP tokens can also be locked in the protocol’s Crystal Farms to generate VVS incentives.
VVS holders can also single stake their tokens in the “Glitter Mines,” where they can now auto-compound at a rate of 65.78 percent. VVS awards will be added in the future for those that swap tokens through the exchange.
The current TVL for VVS financing is $1.35 billion, according to DefiLlama data, accounting for more than half of the $2.37 billion in value locked on the Chronos network.
VVS has seen a continuous increase in TVL as additional assets such as Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIBA), TrueUSD (TUSD), and Cardano have been added to the protocol (ADA).
Solidly
Solidly is a Fantom-based decentralized exchange (DEX), claiming to provide “cheap costs, near-zero slippage on linked assets, and a major focus on secondary markets for tokenized locks as NFTs.”
Solidly, to put it another way, is intended to serve as a platform for exchanging stablecoins and other crypto assets.
Andre Cronje, DeFi architect and inventor of Yearn.finance, has now released the DEX, his latest brainchild. It began operations in January 2022 with the purpose of providing equitable and balanced access to decentralized finance.
The protocol’s concentration on stablecoins has thrown it into the Curve Wars argument, but with a unique spin. This comes at a time when the Fantom DeFi community is embroiled in Solid Wars, with the Solidex protocol accounting for 33.74 percent of all Solidly emissions.
Despite just having been live for a little over a month, the protocol’s total value locked (TVL) recently achieved a high of $2.19 billion and witnessed over $317 million in volume on March 3 as the crypto market as a whole experienced a sell-off.
Holders of SOLID, the native token, can stake their tokens for periods ranging from one week to four years on the network. They can also get vested equity nonfungible tokens (veNFTs), which are tokens that reflect staked assets and provide them voting rights.
Liquidity providers are likewise compensated with veNFTs, with earnings ranging from 40% to 100% depending on their ve-token balance. veNFT token holders receive fees produced by activity on the Solidly exchange.
Juno
Juno is a Cosmos ecosystem decentralized, public, and permission less network for cross-chain smart contracts. While Juno is not a DeFi-specific protocol, it has enabled the establishment of a number of decentralized applications (DApps) and DeFi protocols such as Junoswap, with more in the works.
The protocol was developed by a consortium of Cosmos developers, validators, and delegators to serve as a form of sister hub to the Cosmos Hub, helping to “preserve the Hub’s neutrality by offloading smart contract usage/congestion to a specified contract zone.”
CosmWasm, a tool that supports WebAssembly (WASM) virtual machines in the Cosmos SDK, is likewise based on Juno. WASM allows applications to be built in a variety of coding languages, removing the need for developers to learn a new language merely to build on Cosmos.
The JUNO token had a significant increase in activity near the end of December 2021, rising from a low of $7.70 on December 20 to a high of $45.85 on March 3.
Along with the protocol’s cross-chain smart contract features, investors have been drawn to it by a number of high-profile airdrops, such as the GovDrop for Neta (NETA) and Marble DAO, which were dispersed to JUNO holders and stakers.
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.
