Notional is the first decentralized, Ethereum-based protocol for borrowing and lending at fixed rates and fixed terms. With variable rate lending, DeFi can only serve a small segment of the crypto lending market because variable interest rates don’t provide the certainty that lenders and borrowers require. Notional fixes this by creating a true market for lenders and borrowers that democratizes and empowers individual investors, business owners and institutional investors.

Right now, users can borrow or lend USDC & DAI for up to one year, and ETH & WBTC for up to six months from Notional's on-chain liquidity pools. With Notional's V2 upgrade, liquidity providers enjoy a low-touch experience, and no longer need to roll their debts to new maturities as it is done automatically through the use of nTokens, ERC20 tokens that represent a user's share of the liquidity pool. 

After raising a $10 million Series A in May 2021 from some of the top VC firms, including Coinbase Ventures, Notional’s protocol relaunched on 11/1 with a host of new features as well as the NOTE governance token.

Notional Finance

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Notional is the leading fixed rate, fixed term borrowing and lending protocol on Ethereum with more than $650M in total fixed rate lending volume.

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

FLOKI

Immutable

Axie Infinity

Ondo

The Graph

The Sandbox

Quant

Lido DAO

Gala

JasmyCoin

Frax Staked Ether

Landwolf

DGI Game

Ten Best Coins

Any Inu

Opium is a new platform for launching and trading cryptocurrency derivatives.

Having begun operations in May 2020, Opium uses Ethereum to run a decentralized derivatives marketplace in which any cryptocurrency owner can participate.

The aim of the platform is to democratize access to financial derivatives while using the benefits that decentralization affords traders over legacy alternatives.

Opium’s in-house token, OPIUM, launched in January 2021 and will fulfil various roles mostly centered around platform governance. Active users will be able to vote on some of the most important decisions involved in the platform’s operations.

Opium

dHedge DAO

saffron.finance

Vega Protocol provides the derivatives scaling layer for Web3. It is a custom-built proof-of-stake blockchain, which makes it possible to trade derivatives on a decentralised network with comparable experience to using a centralised exchange.

VEGA is the network governance and staking token. It is used for:

Voting on the creation of new markets on the network

Running validator nodes on the network via staking VEGA tokens

Earning fees from traders through staking and delegation

Governing important network parameters which ensure markets are secure and fair

Vega Protocol

GuildFi

Radworks

Convex Finance is a DeFi protocol that allows Curve liquidity providersto earn a share of trading fees on Curve without staking liquidity there. Instead, LPs can stake with Convex and receive boosted CRV and liquidity mining rewards. This provides CRV stakers with better capital efficiency and positions Convex Finance as an important player in the Curve wars.

Convex has entered a competitive race to obtain as much control as possible of the Curve Finance stablecoin exchange. The more CRV tokens a protocol has, the more influence it has over interest rates on Curve, which is the largest DEX in the world by TVL. Consequently, the “Curve wars” are an ongoing race for influence over what is probably the most important protocol in DeFi.

Convex Finance

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

Handshake is a decentralized permissionless system that is intended to incentivize a distributed network of computers to operate a system for domain name ownership.

Under Handshake, every peer is tasked with validating and managing the root DNS naming zone, with the objective of providing an alternative to current certificate authorities and naming systems.

Different participants across the internet such as social networking handles and domains rely on a centralized approach. This means the systems depend on a system of honesty — and are still prone to cyber attacks and fraud.

Handshake aims to eradicate this problem by creating a decentralized internet that relies on a peer-to-peer system.

Handshake

ShapeShift is a borderless, self-sovereign, cross-chain crypto trading platform and portfolio manager. The platform enables users to buy, sell, track, trade, and earn with 10,000+  assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Doge, THORCHain, and Cosmos across 15+ chains via mobile or web. Users can connect with over 150+ software or hardware wallets, including ShapeShift, MetaMask, WalletConnect, KeepKey, and Ledger. MetaMask users can install the ShapeShift Multichain Snap to add support for Bitcoin, Doge, THORChain, Cosmos, and more.

ShapeShift is a 100% self-custody platform, meaning users always control their keys. ShapeShift does not collect personally information and stands on the pillars of decentralization, privacy, and self-custody. The project’s governance and utility token, FOX, makes trading more competitively priced than going directly to DEXs through ShapeShift's bespoke aggregation.

ShapeShift was founded in 2014 as a privately held company based in Switzerland. However, in June 2021, the organization announced that it was becoming a fully decentralized project, open-sourcing all of its source code and turning ownership and governance over to the community of FOX Token holders. It’s founder, Bitcoin pioneer Erik Voorhees, stated this decentralized model “is the only way to maintain user sovereignty.”

Shapeshift FOX Token

ThunderCore

Liquity

Router Protocol

RARI

Enzyme

C.R.E.A.M Finance is a decentralized  DeFi lending protocol for individuals, institutions and protocols to access financial services. Part of the yearn.finance ecosystem, C.R.E.A.M. Finance is a permissionless, open source and blockchain agnostic protocol serving users on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain Polygon and Fantom.

Users who are passively holding Ether or wBTC can deposit their assets on C.R.E.A.M. to earn yield, similar to a traditional savings account. For more information visit https://app.cream.finance/.

The C.R.E.A.M. Finance protocol was created as a Compound Finance fork.

C.R.E.A.M Finance is open-source, permissionless, blockchain-agnostic and offers yield farming rewards to its users in order to inclusively develop its network.

The project (which stands for Crypto Runs Everything Around Me) was launched unexpectedly on the Ethereum network on Aug. 3, 2020 through the YOLO liquidity pool. In September 2020 it went live on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

The CREAM token allows users to lend, borrow, stake assets and help govern the network, allowing them to vote on assets to support or delist.

Cream Finance

Boba Network

Gitcoin creates technologies and opportunities that empower communities to fund, build, and protect what matters.

Through the Gitcoin Grants Program, there has been over $54 million distributed to early-stage builders that champion public goods initiatives in decentralized finance (DeFi), climate, open sourcing, and beyond.

Core products include Gitcoin Grants Stack, the end-to-end grants management solution, Allo Protocol, an open-source funding protocol, and Gitcoin Passport, an all-encompassing decentralized identity management tool.

GTC is Gitcoin’s governance token, launched in late May 2021. The token is needed for the creation and funding of the DAO that will govern Gitcoin.

Gitcoin

Biconomy is a multichain relayer protocol that aims to improve the user onboarding and transaction experience on decentralized applications (DApps). The project’s declared goal is to make web3 products as intuitive and easy to use as web2 products. Biconomy offers an infrastructure to solve several web3 bottlenecks:

Protocols can onboard users without paying gas fees.

Users can pay gas in an ERC-20 token of their choice.

Users avoid blockchain complexities like a change of network.

Transactions are confirmed much faster.

In short, Biconomy focuses on transaction management and gas optimization and can reduce gas costs by up to 40%. To achieve that, the protocol utilizes meta transactions, allowing users to submit a transaction with zero gas and having a third party pay for the transaction fees for the user. By providing a non-custodial and gas-efficient relayer infrastructure network, Biconomy is able to do this at scale.

Biconomy

Smart contracts often struggle to access dependable data, but application programming interfaces (APIs) have been touted as a solution to this problem.

API3’s stated goal is to allow decentralized versions of APIs to be built, managed and monetized at scales. As blockchain technology plays an ever bigger role in the economy — from decentralized finance to supply chain management — the team behind this project says it has never been more important for smart contracts to provide “timely, reliable real-world data.”

The whitepaper for API3 was unveiled in September 2020 and set out the main problem that’s associated with APIs at present: connectivity. At present, there’s no way for smart contracts to establish a direct connection with APIs for the latest data — and this has led to an explosion in the popularity of oracles.

Although this has helped solve the problem to some extent, the industry has since been grappling with the “Blockchain Oracle Problem.” Oracles are a form of middleware that sit in between APIs and smart contracts — increasing costs and centralization. API3 intends to get around this problem by enabling API providers to operate their very own nodes.

API3’s token went live at the start of December following on from a token sale that generated tens of millions of dollars.