Real-World Assets (RWA): Bridging the Gap Between DeFi and TradFi

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Maple is a decentralized corporate credit market. Maple offers borrowers transparent and efficient financing completed entirely on-chain. For liquidity providers, Maple offers a sustainable yield source through lending to diversified pools of crypto’s premium institutions. The Pool Delegates that manage these pools perform diligence and set terms with Borrowers.

The protocol is governed by the Maple Token (MPL), which enables token holders to participate in governance, share in fee revenues, and stake insurance to Liquidity Pools.

Users can access fixed-income yield opportunities on Maple by depositing capital into Liquidity Pools. These Liquidity Pools are managed by experienced investors, known as Pool Delegates.

Institutional Borrowers looking for transparent and efficient financing on-chain can request capital on Maple and leverage their reputations to borrow under-collateralized without constant fear of liquidation and margin calls. Pool Delegates conduct due diligence and agree terms with Borrowers before funding loans from their designated Liquidity Pool. Liquidity Providers earn a sustainable yield through diversified exposure to crypto's premium institutions and enjoy a set-and-forget solution as diligence is conducted by Pool Delegates.

Maple

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

Numbers Protocol

NEOPIN

Moon Tropica

Bitcoin Palladium

Sweat Economy

tomiNet

Rally

Aergo

Streamr

Verasity

Arcana Network

Kermit

Open Platform

Dypius [Old]

Origin Ether

Centrifuge is a decentralized asset financing protocol. It connects decentralized finance (DeFi) with real-world assets (RWA) while trying to lower the cost of capital for small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) and provide investors with a stable source of income. The main goal of the project is to generate profits that are not tied to volatile crypto assets; the developers are pursuing the task of transferring real monetary value from fiat to cryptocurrencies.

Companies are using Centrifuge to access the liquidity that DeFi has to offer. They can tokenize real assets and use these tokens as collateral to access financing through Tinlake, a decentralized application (DApp) lending protocol. The Centrifuge blockchain is built on Polkadot (DOT) for speed and low fees, while its financial DApp Tinlake is built to access Ethereum (ETH) liquidity.

Centrifuge provides liquidity to everyone and investors receive income and rewards in the form of CFG tokens. Centrifuge links assets such as invoices, real estate and royalties with decentralized finance (DeFi). Additionally, borrowers benefit from the fact that they can finance their real assets without banks or other intermediaries.

Centrifuge

TrueFi

Dusk

Akash Network

Pendle

Polymesh is an institutional-grade permissioned blockchain built specifically for regulated assets. It streamlines antiquated processes and opens the door to new financial instruments by solving challenges with public infrastructure around governance, identity, compliance, confidentiality, and settlement. POLYX is the native protocol token of Polymesh used to stake and secure the network, pay transaction fees, and engage in governance.

Polymesh integrates built-in financial primitives that enable users to operate the blockchain at minimal fixed costs. Additionally, it enables developers to create decentralized applications (dApps) on the platform. Polymesh also aims to effectively tackle critical concerns like rule enforcement, identity verification, regulatory compliance, data privacy and transaction finalization.

According to Polymesh's whitepaper, the project overcomes the flaws in Ethereum and other general-purpose blockchains that may impede the acceptance of security tokens by industries and institutions.

Polymesh

Ondo

Bittensor

GMX is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for trading perpetual cryptocurrency futures with up to 50X leverage on popular cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH and more. The platform launched in September 2021 as Gambit Exchange. To date, GMX has a total trading volume of over $130B and 283K total users, making it the leading derivatives DEX on Arbitrum and Avalanche.

GMX runs on the Arbitrum and the Avalanche blockchain. These ecosystems are connected to the exchange via Synapse — a cross-chain bridge.

Ocean Protocol

Creditcoin

RenderToken (RNDR) is a distributed GPU rendering network built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, aiming to connect artists and studios in need of GPU compute power with mining partners willing to rent their GPU capabilities out. Conceived in 2009 by OTOY, inc. CEO Jules Urbach and launched in 2017, RNDR held its first public token sale in October of that same year, followed by a private sale period lasting from January 2018 – May 2018, wherein a total of 117,843,239 RNDR were sold at a price of 1 RNDR = $0.25 USD equivalent of token.
During the private sale period, early adopters were onboarded onto the RNDR Beta Testnet, where beta node operators and artists worked collaboratively with the RNDR team in building and testing the network, up until its public launch on April 27th 2020.

Render

Injective is a blockchain built for finance. It is an open, interoperable layer-one blockchain powering next-generation DeFi applications, including decentralized spot and derivatives exchanges, prediction markets, lending protocols and more.

Injective uniquely provides powerful core financial infrastructure primitives that applications can leverage, including a fully decentralized MEV-resistant on-chain orderbook. In addition, all forms of financial markets such as spot, perpetual, futures and options are fully on-chain. The decentralized cross-chain bridging infrastructure is compatible with Ethereum, IBC-enabled blockchains, and non EVM chains such as Solana.

Injective also provides a next-generation, highly interoperable smart contract platform based on CosmWasm, with advanced interchain capabilities. Injective is custom built with the Cosmos SDK and utilizes Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, providing instant transaction finality with the ability to sustain lightning-fast performance (10,000+ TPS).

The Injective ecosystem includes 100+ projects and over 150,000 community members globally. Injective is backed by a group of prominent investors such as Binance, Pantera Capital, Jump Crypto and Mark Cuban.

Injective’s core exchange module provides state-of-the-art capabilities including an advanced on-chain order book and matching engine for spot, perpetual, futures and options markets, resistance to Miner-Extractable Value (MEV) through frequent batch auction order matching, and zero gas fees for users.

Injective natively uses IBC and is highly-interoperable with multiple layer 1s, including, but not limited to, Polygon and Solana (through an upcoming Wormhole integration). It is also uniquely built to be interoperable with Ethereum, through its own decentralized ERC-20 token bridge, making Injective the first network within the Cosmos ecosystem to natively support Ethereum assets.

Smart contracts are implemented on Injective through CosmWasm, allowing for multi-chain smart contract transactions to occur seamlessly. Injective, however, is the only blockchain that enables automatic smart contract execution. This capability serves as a powerful building block for developers to create novel use cases that would not be possible on any other chain.

The use cases intended for INJ include but are not limited to: protocol governance, dApp value capture, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) security, developer incentives and staking. Further details regarding each of these use cases can be found below:

Protocol Governance: The INJ token governs every single component of Injective, including chain upgrades. Since its mainnet launch, the Injective community has actively contributed to governance, with all proposals passing through a DAO governance vote. The comprehensive governance page is available here.

Protocol Fee Value Capture: 60% of all fees generated from dApps enter an on-chain buy-back-and-burn auction to maintain the deflationary nature of INJ. The burn auction page is available here.

Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Security: INJ is used to secure the Injective blockchain using a proof-of-stake mechanism. Validators and delegators can both participate in staking.

Developer Incentives: 40% of fees generated by users on dApps built on Injective go directly towards incentivizing new developers building on Injective which brings an ever growing funnel of builders to Injective.

Injective

Synthetix is building a decentralized liquidity provisioning protocol that any protocol can tap into for various purposes. Its deep liquidity and low fees serve as a backend for many exciting protocols on both Optimism and Ethereum. Many user-facing protocols in the Synthetix ecosystem, such as Kwenta (Spot and Futures), Lyra (Options), Polynomial (Automated Options), and 1inch & Curve (Atomic Swaps), tap into Synthetix liquidity to power their protocols. Synthetix is built on Optimism and Ethereum mainnet. The Synthetix Network is collateralized by SNX, ETH, and LUSD, enabling the issuance of synthetic assets (Synths). Synths track and provide returns on the underlying asset without requiring one to directly hold the asset. This pooled collateral enables an array of on-chain, composable financial instruments backed by liquidity from Synthetix. Some of the most exciting upcoming releases from SNX are Perps V2, which hopes to enable low-fee on-chain futures trading through the usage of off-chain oracles, and Synthetix V3, which aims to rebuild the protocol to achieve its earliest goal, being a fully permissionless derivatives protocol. Learn more about Synthetix on their blog or by joining the SNX Discord.

The platform aims to broaden the cryptocurrency space by introducing non-blockchain assets, providing access to a more robust financial market.

Synthetix

OriginTrail is an ecosystem building a trusted knowledge infrastructure for artificial intelligence. It addresses the challenge of misinformation in the AI era by ensuring the origin of information and enabling discoverability of the world's most important knowledge and real world assets (RWAs).

OriginTrail is creating a Verifiable Web for decentralized AI by empowering world class brands and builders. It utilizes its unique Decentralized Knowledge Graph and OriginTrail Parachain to deliver AI-powered search and solutions for enterprises and individuals worldwide.

OriginTrail has gained support and partnerships with world-class organizations such as British Standards Institution, SCAN, Polkadot, Parity, Walmart, World Federation of Hemophilia, Oracle, and the EU Commission's Next Generation Internet. These partnerships contribute to advancing OriginTrail's trusted knowledge foundation and its applicability in trillion-dollar industries, while providing a verifiable web of knowledge important in particular to drive the economies of RWAs.

The best way to see the technology in action is by checking ChatDKG, which is an experimental, question answering bot on X (Twitter) based on trusted Knowledge Assets in OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph. The ChatDKG provides answers based on OriginTrail trusted AI.

The Metcalfe phase of the updated roadmap pursues an ambitious goal of creating the world’s largest verifiable web for AI consisting of 100 billion Knowledge Assets, bringing a 100.000x scalability increase. As the name of the phase suggests, it will seek to produce network effects across the OriginTrail DKG and use novel techniques to pursue autonomous DKG growth based on the genesis knowledge foundation being created by organizations and individuals alike. The genesis part of the Metcalfe’s phase also introduces knowledge mining and knowledge signaling capabilities to drive constant growth of the Verifiable Web.

Following the Genesis stage and the transition to an AI-native V8, further capabilities will become available in the Convergence stage. By leveraging the advancements in AI and the DKG, we will unlock autonomous knowledge mining which in turn leads to an autonomous DKG. At that stage, new knowledge gets added to the DKG with very limited human involvement. Services such as AI agents will be performing knowledge inferencing directly on the DKG to find any “blind spots” in the knowledge they can fill as well as search for new knowledge and bring it to the DKG in accordance with knowledge signaling.

OriginTrail

Founded in 2017 and launched via IEO on Binance in March 2019, Fetch.AI is an artificial intelligence (AI) lab building an open, permissionless, decentralized machine learning network with a crypto economy. Fetch.ai democratizes access to AI technology with a permissionless network upon which anyone can connect and access secure datasets by using autonomous AI to execute tasks that leverage its global network of data. The Fetch.AI model is rooted in  use cases like optimizing DeFi trading services, transportation networks (parking, micromobility), smart energy grids, travel — essentially any complex digital system that relies on large-scale datasets.

Fetch.ai

Immutable positions itself as the first layer-two scaling solution for NFTs on Ethereum. According to Immutable, its blockchain does away with Ethereum’s limitations like low scalability, a poor user experience, illiquidity, and a slow developer experience. Instead, users benefit from instant trading and massive scalability while enjoying zero gas fees for minting and trading NFTs without compromising user or asset security.

Thanks to this technology, users will be able to create and distribute assets like ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens on a massive scale. Chris Clay, the game Director of Gods Unchained, a project already building on Immutable, stated that Immutable allows Gods Unchained to implement a new meta-system that was previously impossible. In this fashion, Immutable aims to create a world-class experience for users and developers alike.

Immutable

Arcblock

Rocket Pool is a decentralized Ethereum staking pool offering up to 4.33% APR for ETH2 staking. Users can join the Rocket Pool with its decentralized node operator network or run their own nodes with only 16 ETH. In the latter case, they can earn a commission from staking ETH and earn additional RPL rewards from providing RPL collateral, amounting to up to 6.36% APR for ETH and the additional RPL rewards.

Rocket Pool provides liquid staking, meaning users benefit from an increasing exchange rate instead of adding on to their initial staked collateral, which would be a taxable event. Furthermore, Rocket Pool offers smart nodes: a custom node software allowing anyone to run a node on its network. With losses from bad nodes distributed across the network, individual users minimize their risk of facing penalties. This is supported by the pool’s open-source and audited smart contracts, which guarantee fully non-custodial staking and a maximum degree of decentralization.

Rocket Pool

The Frax Protocol is the first fractional-algorithmic stablecoin system. Frax is open-source, permissionless, and entirely on-chain – currently implemented on Ethereum (with possible cross chain implementations in the future). The end goal of the Frax protocol is to provide a highly scalable, decentralized, algorithmic money in place of fixed-supply digital assets like BTC. The protocol incorporates the following concepts:

Fractional-Algorithmic – Frax is a unique stablecoin with parts of its supply backed by collateral and parts of the supply algorithmic. The ratio of collateralized and algorithmic depends on the market's pricing of the FRAX stablecoin. If FRAX is trading at above $1, the protocol decreases the collateral ratio. If FRAX is trading at under $1, the protocol increases the collateral ratio.

Decentralized & Governance-minimized – Community governed and emphasizing a highly autonomous, algorithmic approach with no active management.

Fully on-chain oracles – Frax v1 uses Uniswap (ETH, USDT, USDC time-weighted average prices) and Chainlink (USD price) oracles.

Two Tokens – FRAX is the stablecoin targeting a tight band around $1/coin. Frax Shares (FXS) is the governance token which accrues fees, seigniorage revenue, and excess collateral value.

Before Frax, stablecoins were divided into three different categories: fiat collateralized, overcollateralized with cryptocurrency, and algorithmic with no collateral. Frax is the first kind of decentralized stablecoin to classify itself as fractional-algorithmic ushering in the 4th and most unique category.