We peek into the crystal ball of blockchain innovation to look at some crypto projects that are gaining attention as the potential next big thing.
The cryptocurrency and broader blockchain industry is in a constant state of flux. First movers often secure dominance in the market but can be displaced by ambitious startups with a better product, stronger community and/or better leadership.
There is also the potential for further growth, expansion and improvement as pioneering developers invent new decentralized financial primitives and make them available to an increasingly diverse range of users — which now includes individuals, organizations, institutions, governments and artificial entities.
Given that some of the best-performing projects in 2021 (Avalanche, BNB, Dogecoin and Solana) yielded upwards of 1,000-10,000% returns in a year, there is a good reason why savvy investors are looking for the next big thing now.
Here, we will take a look at seven crypto projects that are gaining traction among crypto users that may have the makings of something special in the next bull market.
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Open Campus
Open Campus is a blockchain-powered educational initiative designed to help users drive real change in the world and empower individuals with knowledge.
The platform provides simple no-code tools that can be used to create gamified lessons, courses and more. It hopes to provide a user and creator-centric education ecosystem that helps teachers monetize their educational resources and learners access high-quality educational materials on any topic of interest.
At the heart of this new education ecosystem is the $EDU token, which is used to govern the Open Campus Protocol, as payment for creators and publishers, and for minting educational content as NFTs.
In essence, it uses blockchain technology to democratize access to educational resources, while providing a more equitable environment for educators and publishers.
Open Campus has already partnered with TinyTap, Animoca Brands, Highstreet, The Sandbox, and other prominent edutainment studios that will use the protocol to build their own content and curriculums.
The project was the latest to launch on Binance Launchpad, an IEO platform that has launched many successful projects.
Historically, several Binance Launchpad projects have gone on to achieve meteoric growth after launch, including the likes of Axie Infinity, The Sandbox, Polygon and STEPN — each of which went on to define their respective niches.
Learn more about Open Campus, here.
Sui
One of the most anticipated layer-1s since the recent launch of Aptos, Sui is an L1 that prioritizes true asset ownership, performance and a simplified development and user experience.
Sui is unusual among layer 1s in that it's object focused. Each programmable object on the blockchain is owned by a single address, which can update and modify these objects by submitting transactions.
It is unique in that consensus is only required when transactions involve shared objects. Transactions exclusively-owned objects can be processed without consensus using Byzantine Consistent Broadcast.
The platform boasts "infinity scalability" using horizontal scaling, allowing multiple bundles of transactions to be processed in parallel, helping it achieve a throughput of ~300,000 transactions per second (TPS) with just 100 validators.
Sui is designed to maximize security and protect asset ownership using an efficient delegated proof-of-stake model (DPoS). Users can lock their SUI tokens to help secure the network by delegating their tokens to their chosen validators. These users are rewarded in the form of a share of the network’s gas fee revenue.
The platform is designed to cater to the next billion Web3 users by providing a fast and massively scalable base layer for decentralized applications.
The platform conducted its token generation event on May 5, 2023, and was immediately listed on many of the most popular centralized exchanges — including Binance, OKX, KuCoin, Bitfinex and Huobi. It’s backed by heavyweights including Binance Labs, a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto and Circle, and is now operating on its mainnet.
According to the official Sui ecosystem directory, there are now more than 200 projects building in the Sui ecosystem. This includes wallets, synthetics, games, NFT marketplaces, exchanges and more.
XCAD Network
XCAD Network was first launched in 2021 with the goal of enhancing creator-fan interactions through the use of Zilliqa-based blockchain technology.
The platform was the first to introduce the concept of Watch2Earn, allowing users to earn rewards in the form of creator tokens for watching and interacting with content from their favorite creators.
The platform helps creators better monetize their content and form a more direct relationship with their audience using blockchain technology. Through XCAD Network, creators can launch and distribute their own creator tokens and sell provably rare NFT moments.
XCAD Network is currently used by dozens of popular creators, many of which have tens of millions of subscribers — including the likes of Renato Garcia, Niko Omilana, Lance Stewart, AM3NIC, etc.
In an attempt to simplify user acquisition, XCAD Network provides a simple browser plugin that allows users to begin interacting with the network. This keeps blockchain elements behind the scenes, helping to make participating in the network an intuitive and seamless process.
With over 100,000 combined app and plugin users, XCAD Network is currently one of the most popular Web3 applications and on-ramps. The XCAD exosystem also encompasses one of the most popular DEXs in the Zilliqa ecosystem, providing key infrastructure for other DeFi builders.
The platform recently expanded its feature set with a secondary token, known as $PLAY. This helps to power the new Play section of the XCAD ecosystem, allowing users to mint NFTs and earn additional rewards in the form of PLAY tokens when watching videos.
Sweat Economy
In 2022, move-to-earn (M2E) became one of the most popular use cases of blockchain technology, with dozens of platforms emerging to help users earn token-based rewards for staying fit.
By directly tying health milestones to token-based rewards, the move-to-earn system helped to boost fitness motivation dramatically, and it quickly became one of the most popular uses of blockchain technology.
But Sweat Economy is currently by far the most popular move-to-earn application — with over 10 million users worldwide.
The project distinguishes itself from other M2E apps by its user-friendly interface. By keeping most of the blockchain elements behind the scenes, it is easier to get to grips with, helping more people experience the capabilities of blockchain technology without the typical hurdles — like managing seed phrases or understanding gas fees.
Sweat Economy initially launched as a Web2 platform known as Sweatcoin, but integrated blockchain technology and tokenized rewards in 2022. This helped it become the most downloaded Health & Fitness app of 2022 — with over 65 million downloads worldwide.
The platform has partnered with multiple health organizations, reward partners and charities, and is constantly building new utility for the $SWEAT token. By driving adoption through utility, Sweat Economy hopes to become a defining app for the Web3 space.
Worldcoin
Worldcoin is an ambitious upcoming project that aims to provide a worldwide financial and identity network, helping to democratize access to crucial financial services.
Long-term, the platform wants to provide a truly government-free fiat alternative and use artificial intelligence to provide a universal basic income (UBI) to its users.
Worldcoin has been in development since 2019 and was co-founded by tech industry heavyweights, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. It has reportedly secured ~$100 million in funding.
The platform consists of three primary components:
- The Worldcoin token: A digital asset used for payments, governance and participation in the Worldcoin ecosystem.
- World ID: A privacy-preserving digital identity system. The platform uses iris-scanning technology known as the Orb to verify the identity of individuals.
- The World App: A mobile wallet application used for conducting transactions and identity proofs.
The $WLD crypto is designed to be simple, intuitive and immediately understandable to fiat users — keeping typical blockchain features hidden behind the scenes.
Worldcoin recently released the World App, allowing users to easily authenticate their identity and begin participating in the ecosystem. More than 1 million users worldwide have already signed up to begin using the platform.
The wallet is gas free and can only be used by verified humans.
Fuel Network
Billed as the "world's fastest modular execution layer", Fuel Network is designed to provide a powerful execution environment for modular blockchains — such as Celestia.
The platform allows blockchains to benefit from massive transactional scalability, thanks to its parallel execution capabilities. It provides a resource-efficient virtual machine implementation, known as FuelVM. This is designed to be incredibly fast, allowing smart contract operations and state changes to be performed quickly.
It does this while keeping fees low, helping to tackle the fee inflation currently seen by popular existing L1s — like Ethereum and BNB Chain.
Fuel applications can be built using the domain-specific programming language known as Sway. This is based on Rust and is highly simplified, allowing developers to get to grips with the language with minimal barriers to entry.
By providing a friendly developer experience and a generous grant program, Fuel Network hopes to help bootstrap its DApp ecosystem — which already includes a variety of promising and useful projects. This includes the NFT marketplace ‘Thunder’ and DEX ‘SwaySwap’.
Fuel Labs has been developing Fuel Network since 2018 and the platform is now in its testnet stage of development with its mainnet expected to launch later this year.
Learn more about Fuel Network in our full deep dive.
Celestia
On the topic of modular blockchain infrastructure, Celestia has been garnering a great deal of attention in recent months as a minimalist blockchain that separates data availability, consensus and execution.
The platform is designed to dramatically increase the scalability and flexibility of blockchains, allowing anybody to deploy their own blockchain with minimal overhead. By providing on-demand consensus and security, Celestia minimizes the costs associated with bootstrapping a blockchain and maintaining its security.
Celestia is not involved in transaction validation and only ensures transaction data is made available through a novel process known as data available sampling (DAS). This innovation allows Celestia to avoid the throughput bottleneck faced by legacy blockchains while reducing the burden on nodes — helping with decentralization.
The platform also leverages a technology known as Namespaced Merkle Trees (NMTs) which helps make data queries for specific applications far more simple and efficient.
Celestia is widely considered to be a potentially foundational piece of blockchain infrastructure that could potentially boost the performance of dozens of layer 1s by acting as an efficient data availability layer.
It currently has a growing ecosystem of applications and services, many of which either leverage Celestia's modular architecture or act as accessory modules — such as execution environments or settlement layers.
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