Mask Network

## What Is Mask Network (MASK)?

Mask Network is a protocol that allows its users to send encrypted messages over Twitter and Facebook. It essentially acts as a bridge between the internet and a decentralized network running on top.

Mask Network was initially launched in July 2019, with its first use case of allowing Facebook and Twitter users to encrypt posts on the social media platforms. It then raised $2 million in a funding round in November 2020, co-led by HashKey and Hash Global, and a further $3 million funding round in February 2021 with participation from Digital Currency Group and Fundamental Labs.

Now, Mask Network offers the ability to fund Gitcoin grant campaigns directly from Twitter, as well as plans to offer peer-to-peer payments and decentralized storage functionality. It is a decentralized portal that also allows users to use [DApps](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/decentralized-applications-dapps) like crypto payments, decentralized finance, decentralized storage, e-commerce (digital goods/[NFTs](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/non-fungible-token)) and decentralized organizations ([DAO](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/decentralized-autonomous-organizations-dao)) over the top of existing social networks without migrating, creating what is referred to as a decentralized Applet (DApplet) ecosystem.


### Who Are the Founders of Mask Network?

Mask Network is a startup founded by Suji Yan. Prior to founding Mask Network, Yan had founded Dimension.im, which is a series of products meant to advocate for social liberty along the cypherpunk movement, specifically “Right of Cryptography and Freedom of Interpretation.” 


#### What Makes Mask Network Unique?

The Mask Network allows users to add a level of privacy to their online interactions. By letting users send encrypted messages to friends, send and receive cryptocurrency and share files, and interact with DApps, all on a decentralized level. 


#### Related Pages:

Learn more about [Monero](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/).

Learn more about [Zcash](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/).

Learn more about the [anonymity of cryptocurrency](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/is-cryptocurrency-anonymous) on CMC Alexandria.

Take a look at the CMC [blog](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/categories/blog).


#### How Many Mask Network (MASK) Coins Are There in Circulation?

In February 2021, Mask Network launched their MASK governance token, which aims to help the Mask Network in its aim to build a bridge between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. 

The MASK governance token is governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called the MaskDAO. Token holders can vote on key decisions for the MaskDAO, where each one MASK represents one vote. At the genesis, 100,000,000 MASK tokens were created, and the rest of the supply will be unlocked over a three-year period. 

7% of the MASK supply goes to a “Community Public Offering,” while another portion of the tokens will go to the reserve (39.55%), early investors (14.25%) and the team (23%).


### How Is Mask Network Secured?

Mask Network runs on the [Ethereum](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/) network, which has transitioned to [proof-of-stake](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake) during the Merge.


### Where Can You Buy Mask Network (MASK)?

You can buy Mask Network (MASK) on some top ranked exchanges including [Huobi Global](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/huobi-global/), [OKEx](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/okex/), [Balancer](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/balancer/) and [1inch](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/1inch-exchange/).

For more information on turning your fiat currencies into cryptocurrency, check out [CMC’s guide here](https://coinmarketcap.com/how-to-buy-bitcoin/).

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Binance Chain Wallet

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

Marinade Staked SOL

Lido Staked ETH

Wrapped Beacon ETH

Threshold

Rocket Pool ETH

Renzo Restaked ETH

Orbler

Pixels

Reserve Rights

Fasttoken

Derp

EthXY

Landwolf

I love puppies

X2Y2

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS converts human-readable Ethereum addresses like john.eth into the machine-readable alphanumeric codes you know from wallets like Metamask. The reverse conversion -- associating metadata and machine-readable addresses with human-readable Ethereum addresses -- is also possible.

The goal of Ethereum Name Service is to make the Ethereum-based web easier to access and comprehend for humans - similar to how the Internet’s Domain Name Service makes the internet more accessible. Like DNS, ENS also uses a system of dot-separated hierarchical names called domains with domain owners fully controlling their subdomains.

ENS launched with a highly successful retroactive airdrop in November 2021 that rewarded users who had registered addresses before the project launched its token. However, in February 2022, it faced criticism over apparently homophobic tweets by its director of operations.

Ethereum Name Service

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that is able to take real-world data and supply it to on-chain applications, while also connecting APIs to smart-contracts to facilitate the exchange of information between on-chain and off-chain data sources.

By supplying reputable, verifiable real-world data to blockchains, Band Protocol unlocks a range of new use cases for developers to explore — since they can now use any type of real-world data as part of their decentralized application (DApp) logic, including sports, weather, random numbers, price feed data and more.

Band Protocol initially launched as an ERC-20 project on the Ethereum blockchain in September 2019, but transitioned to the Cosmos network in June 2020 with the release of Band Protocol 2.0. The new protocol is built on BandChain using the Cosmos SDK. Oracle nodes on BandChain not only relay data but are also involved in block production/validation, giving them a dual role.

BAND is the native token of the Band Protocol ecosystem and is used as collateral by validators involved in fulfilling data requests, as well as the main medium of exchange on BandChain — being used to paying for private data.

Band Protocol

Storj, pronounced as “storage,” is an open-source cloud storage platform. Basically, it uses a decentralized network of nodes to host user data. The platform also secures hosted data using advanced encryption.

In a white paper published in December,2014, Storj was first introduced to the world as a concept. It was to be a decentralized peer-to-peer encrypted cloud storage platform.

Two years later, an updated white paper was published. Here, a decentralized network  — connecting users who need cloud storage space with those who have hard drive space to sell — was described. The platform was launched in late 2018.

People with hard drive space and good internet connectivity can participate in the network. They become a unit in the network, called a node. Space providers are rewarded by Storj tokens.

Storj

Launched in 2017, Livepeer is the first live video streaming network protocol that is fully decentralized. The platform aims to become a viable blockchain-based, economically efficient alternative to centralized broadcasting solutions for all new and existing broadcaster companies.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Livepeer.

As stated in the official Livepeer whitepaper, the live video streaming and broadcasting industry is growing at a rapid pace, and the company is looking to ride this wave and introduce decentralization to the environment. Livepeer aims to streamline the broadcasting process by allowing producers to submit their work on the platform, taking care of reformatting and distributing the content to users and streaming platforms.

Livepeer

MAGIC is the utility token that connects gaming communities in the Treasure Metaverse: a decentralized NFT ecosystem which sits on Arbitrum, one of Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solutions.

MAGIC is a cross-game currency that connects games, players, metaverses, and communities, all within Web 3.0. The token was launched in September 2021 so its community could buy and sell in-game NFTs on Treasure. It also acts as a reserve currency for Treasure’s metaverse.

Players can earn MAGIC tokens by gaming, mining, and participating in Bridgeworld, Treasure’s flagship game. Treasure now hosts twelve other games on its platform, some of which allow you to use and generate MAGIC tokens like in Bridgeworld. These include Beacon, a free-to-play fantasy action rogue-lite RPG; and Realm, a world-building and exploration game.

Treasure

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

Mina Protocol is a minimal “succinct blockchain” built to curtail computational requirements in order to run DApps more efficiently. Mina has been described as the world’s lightest blockchain since its size is designed to remain constant despite growth in usage. Furthermore, it remains balanced in terms of security and decentralization. The project was rebranded from Coda Protocol to Mina in October 2020.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Mina Protocol.

The Mina network has a size of only 22 KB, which is miniscule when compared to Bitcoin’s 300 GB blockchain.

Mina

UMA was founded in 2018 by Allison Lu and Hart Lambur, two ex Goldman Sachs traders, with the goal of making global markets universally fair, accessible, secure and decentralized.

The team drew inspiration from traditional finance derivatives to define an open-source protocol to allow anyone, anywhere, to design and build trustless financial contracts.

LRC is the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency token of Loopring, an open protocol designed for the building of decentralized crypto exchanges.

In 2020, the average daily trading volume of the entire cryptocurrency market fluctuated in the approximate range of $50-$200 million. Most of that trading is conducted on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges — online platforms operated by private companies that store users’ funds and facilitate the matching of buy and sell orders.

Such platforms have a number of downsides common to all of them, so a new type of exchange — decentralized— has emerged to try to alleviate these disadvantages. However, fully decentralized exchanges are not without their own flaws.

Loopring’s purported goal is to combine centralized order matching with decentralized on-blockchain order settlement into a hybridized product that will take the best aspects of both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

LRC tokens became available to the public during an initial coin offering (ICO) in August 2017, while the Loopring protocol was first deployed on Ethereum mainnet in December 2019.

Loopring

SKALE, described as a modular blockchain network, is designed to bring scalability to Ethereum. SKALE is the only blockchain network capable of running an unlimited number of fast, on-demand, pooled-security Blockchains with zero gas fees to end users. These individual chains are known as SKALE chains and can be dapp-specific or shared.

The project’s website says it wants to enable people to build and run DApps in a “decentralized modular cloud built for real-world needs and configured for your requirements.” This emphasis on decentralization isn’t at the expense of security.

According to SKALE, those who build on this platform can run Solidity smart contracts “thousands of times faster at a fraction of the mainnet cost” — with games and content streaming services among the projects that already take advantage of its infrastructure.

SKALE

Conflux (CFX) is a public layer-1 blockchain that was made to power decentralized applications (dApps), e-commerce, and Web 3.0 infrastructure by being more scalable, decentralized, and secure than existing protocols.

Conflux makes it easier to transfer valuable assets by making the process quick, effective, free of network congestion, and with low transaction costs. The platform is based on the Tree-Graph consensus mechanism, and it combines Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithms to achieve consensus. The protocol uses Turing-complete smart contracts written in Solidity, just like those on  Ethereum, and is compatible with the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine).

Conflux's growth is fueled by CFX, the platform's native token, which gives users financial incentives to participate and engage more. The token is used to pay transaction fees, govern the network, and is given as compensation to miners who help secure the network via staking.

Conflux

Balancer is an automated market maker (AMM) that was developed on the Ethereum blockchain and launched in March 2020. It was able to raise a $3M seed round by Placeholder and Accomplice. Balancer protocol functions as a self-balancing weighted portfolio, price sensor and liquidity provider. It allows users to earn profits through its recently introduced token ($BAL) by contributing to customizable liquidity pools.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Balancer(https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-balancer.

The protocol operates a few types of pools:

Private pools give the owner governance over the pool, and make the person the sole contributor of liquidity to the pool. Also, all the parameters are mutable by the owner.

Shared pools are for those who want to become liquidity providers (LPs). The LPs are rewarded with the Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs).

Smart pools are similar to private pools but are controlled by a smart contract. They also reward using BPTs and allow anyone to contribute liquidity to the pool.

Balancer

Ethereum-based DYDX ($ethDYDX) is a governance token that allows the dYdX community to truly govern the dYdX Layer 2 Protocol built on Ethereum ("dYdX v3"). ethDYDX is currently undergoing a migration from Ethereum to the dYdX Chain. More information is available here. If you want to migrate ethDYDX to dYdX Chain DYDX, to enable staking, security and governance of the dYdX Chain you can follow the how-to-bridge guide here.

If you want to read about the new token utility for dYdX Chain DYDX you can read the blog here

ethDYDX (dYdX) is the governance token for the layer 2 protocol built on Ethereum. By enabling shared control of dYdX v3, ethDYDX allows traders, liquidity providers, and partners of dYdX to work collectively towards an enhanced dYdX v3.

Built on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine, layer 2 is used for trading of cross-margined perpetuals on the platform. The scaling solution allows dYdX to increase transaction speed, eliminate gas costs, reduce trading fees and lower​​ minimum trade sizes on the protocol.

A total of 1,000,000,000 ethDYDX have been minted, and started to become accessible over five (5) years, on August 3rd, 2021, at 15:00:00 UTC.

dYdX (ethDYDX)

Radworks

Ocean Protocol

Numerai is an Ethereum-based platform allowing developers and data scientists to experiment and create machine learning models with improved reliability. The platform’s main goal is to bring decentralization to the data science field and allow developers to compete in creating effective machine learning prediction models.

Founded in late 2015 in San Francisco, Numerai claims to be the first hedge fund to launch a cryptocurrency on the market. Unlike traditional hedge funds, however, Numerai relies on the data and predictions produced by tournament participants to participate in the stock market. They claim to be the first hedge fund to use machine learning so heavily in its investment strategy.

Numeraire

The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying data for networks like Ethereum and IPFS, powering many applications in both DeFi and the broader Web3 ecosystem. Anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL to retrieve blockchain data. There is a hosted service in production that makes it easy for developers to get started building on The Graph and the decentralized network will be launching later this year. The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, IPFS and POA, with more networks coming soon.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of The Graph.

To date, over3,000 subgraphs have been deployed by thousands of developers, for DApps like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, Decentraland and many others. The Graph usage has been growing at over 50% MoM and hit over 7 billion queries during the month of September 2020.

The Graph has a global community, including over 200 Indexer Nodes in the testnet and more than 2,000 Curators in the Curator Program as of October 2020. To fund network development, The Graph raised funds from community members, strategic VCs and influential individuals in the blockchain community including Coinbase Ventures, DCG, Framework, ParaFi Capital, CoinFund, DTC, Multicoin, Reciprocal Ventures, SPC, Tally Capital and others. The Graph Foundation also successfully completed a public GRT Sale with participation from 99 countries (not including the U.S.). To date as of November 2020, The Graph has raised ~$25M.

The Graph

Aptos is a Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that employs a novel smart contract programming language called Move, a Rust-based programming language that was independently developed by Meta (formerly Facebook)’s Diem blockchain engineers.

Aptos’s vision is a blockchain that brings mainstream adoption to web3 and empowers an ecosystem of DApps to solve real-world user problems.

The PoS blockchain can achieve a theoretical transaction throughput of over 150,000 transactions per second (tps) through parallel execution.

In March 2022, Aptos raised $200 million in a seed round led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Other crypto heavyweights like Tiger Global and Multicoin Capital took part in the funding round. Fast forward to July, the startup raised another $200 million in a Series A round with participation from Dragonfly, Apollo Global, Franklin Templeton, Animoca, Jump Crypto and others.

Two months later, Binance Labs made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in Aptos.

On Oct. 18, 2022, Aptos announced the mainnet launch, while the Aptos genesis occurred on Oct. 12, 2022.

Aptos

Curve is a decentralized exchange for stablecoins that uses an automated market maker (AMM) to manage liquidity.

Launched in January 2020, Curve is now synonymous with the decentralized finance (DeFi) phenomenon, and has seen significant growth in the second half of 2020.

In August, Curve launched a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), with CRV as its in-house token. The DAO uses Ethereum-based creation tool Aragon to connect multiple smart contracts used for users’ deposited liquidity. Issues such as governance, however, differ from Aragon in their weighting and other respects.

Curve DAO Token

Arweave is a decentralized storage network that seeks to offer a platform for the indefinite storage of data. Describing itself as "a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets," the network primarily hosts "the permaweb" — a permanent, decentralized web with a number of community-driven applications and platforms.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Arweave.

The Arweave network uses a native cryptocurrency, AR, to pay "miners" to indefinitely store the network's information.

The project was first announced as Archain in August 2017, later rebranding to Arweave in February 2018 and officially launching in June 2018.