## What Is Genesis Shards (GS)?

Genesis Shards (GS) is a decentralized ecosystem based on Polkadot that reimagines non-fungible tokens ([NFTs](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/non-fungible-token)) as a decentralized finance ([DeFi](https://coinmarketcap.com/view/defi/)) option, creating a seamless cross-chain liquidity environment for pre-initial dex offering ([IDO](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/initial-dex-offering)) tokens.

Genesis Shards recognizes existing problems in the pre-IDO space, including the low liquidity of tokens due to the lack of a tradable market and inconsistent OTC trading practices, resulting in a high risk of defaults.

Genesis Shards aims to enable network members to access and trade pre-IDO tokens in an efficient and secure manner. Projects can leverage token liquidity early in the lifecycle with community support. This is due to the availability of NFTs in the OTC market and the transformation of NFTs into a liquidity facility for pre-IDO tokens.

Genesis Shards was created in 2020 and raised $2.7 million in March 2021 to launch a new pre-IDO market. The list of investors includes 3Commas, Axia8, OKEx Block Dream Fund, LD Capital, Spark Digital Capital, Momentum 6 and others.


### Who Are the Founders of Genesis Shards?

Garlam Won and Nilotpal Mukherjee are the co-founders of Genesis Shards.

Prior to founding Genesis Shards, Garlam Won served as head of marketing at Harmony and head of global partnerships at ICONIZ. He has also acted as an advisor for Kylin, PAID Network, Raze, PolkaFoundry, KPAD and SPLYT.

Won majored in finance at Garlam University. He has worked as an investment banker at JP Morgan and as a management consultant at Deloitte. He covered the blockchain ecosystem as the chief blockchain editor at Financial Street Media.

Nilotpal Mukherjee has held the position of an investment banker at Deutsche Bank and a strategic consultant at Accenture. In 2018, he joined Marlin Protocol as a business lead.


#### What Makes Genesis Shards (GS) Unique?

According to the team, Genesis Shards’ goal is to develop a comprehensive market for pre-IDO NFT liquidity and open up new opportunities for the DeFi market in general.

Genesis Shards provides a market for illiquid tokens by wrapping time-locked fungible tokens in NFTs.
and enables participation in the governance of the Genesis network.

In order for GS tokens to become a part of the Genesis network, they must be exchanged for Genesis Access NFTs. The number of tokens held determines the access rights for members.


Holders of the GS token have certain governance rights with their voting power directly dependent on the number of tokens they own.


#### Related Pages:

Read about [SushiSwap](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/sushiswap/).

Read about [Polkadot](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/polkadot-new/).

Learn more about the potential issues with the NFT space on [CMC Alexandria](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/could-there-be-a-missed-opportunity-in-nfts-vitalik-buterin-thinks-so).


### Deepen your knowledge of crypto with the [CoinMarketCap blog](https://blog.coinmarketcap.com/).


#### How Many Genesis Shards (GS) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The public launch of the GS token took place on April 14, 2021, on the decentralized fundraising platform Polkastarter (POLS). Genesis Shards is a dual IDO on Polkastarter, so the launch happened simultaneously on Ethereum ([ETH](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/)) and Binance Smart Chain ([BSC](https://coinmarketcap.com/view/binance-smart-chain/)). 

The total supply was divided between the ETH pool (70%) on Ethereum for POLS holders and the BSC pool (30%) on Binance Smart Chain.

As of April 2021, GS has a circulating supply of 12,030,988 tokens and a total supply of 218,911,248 tokens.


### How Is the Genesis Shards Network Secured?

Genesis Shards is a decentralized ecosystem powered by Polkadot which uses nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) as its consensus algorithm to increase chain security. All parachains that are connected to the Polkadot Relay Chain benefit from the economic security that Relay Chain validators provide.

Polkadot's data validity and availability scheme allows chains to interact with each other. The chains are independent in governance but united in security.


### Where Can You Buy Genesis Shards (GS)?

Genesis Shards (GS) can be traded on the following exchanges:



*   [Uniswap (V2)](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/uniswap-v2/)
*   [1inch Exchange](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/1inch-exchange/)
*   [DODO BSC](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/dodo-bsc/)

Read our step-by-step [guide](https://coinmarketcap.com/how-to-buy-bitcoin/) on how to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.


Genesis Shards

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Binance Chain Wallet

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

Uniswap

UNUS SED LEO

Triall

Mochi Market

404 Bakery

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Aluna.Social

TokenBot

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NAGA

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

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PERL.eco

Established in July 2020, TrustSwap is a diverse Web3 ecosystem creating secure infrastructure for blockchain builders and communities. The TrustSwap Launchpad is a leading Launchpad and IDO service, achieving the #1 spot on Cryptorank in 2023 for All-time High Returns and Average Returns. TrustSwap has launched over 55 projects with a collective fundraising of over $70 million.

TrustSwap is also the parent company of The Crypto App and Team Finance, which offer a suite of multi-chain services including crypto portfolio tracking, token and liquidity locks, minting, staking, and vesting-as-a-service.

SWAP token is the key to accessing guaranteed allocations in top-tier IDOs via the TrustSwap Launchpad. Staking more SWAP tokens longer increases your SWAP Score and unlocks higher allocations as well as other perks for top stakers.

TrustSwap

saffron.finance

Ruff

Polkastarter is a decentralized fundraising platform empowering Web3 projects to launch and raise funds through multi-chain token pools whilst significantly growing their communities.

The platform supports initial dex offerings (IDOs) across major blockchains, including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Polkadot, Polygon, Avalanche and Celo.

The platform enables investors to secure early access to IDOs, NFTs and Gaming Web3 innovation. It is most commonly used by early-stage blockchain projects that want to raise capital and easily distribute their tokens at the same time.

Through Polkastarter, blockchain projects can easily create their own fixed-chain swap pools, which allow them to securely raise funds, while users can invest without risks, since swaps are automatically executed by smart contracts.

POLS is the native utility token of the Polkastarter platform. Its main utility is gaining access to pools and giving projects the option to give priority access to POLS holders. Users are incentivised to stake POLS, rewarding the most loyal members.

In Q4 2022, Polkastarter will release new community utility features, such as governance and POLS Power Boosters (increasing your allowlisting success). The platform first went live in December 2020, and has quickly grown to become one of the most commonly used platforms for initial DEX offerings (IDOs) operating on the Ethereum blockchain.

Polkastarter

Graviocoin

Pascal

BlockCDN

Bifrost Network is an EVM-compatible layer 1 blockchain network designed to achieve interoperability and bring Web3 to Web2 users. Equipped with advanced cross-chain functionalities, Bifrost seamlessly connects various blockchain networks, including the Bitcoin Network, and allow DApps to utilize a range of promising cryptocurrencies from any supported blockchain networks. Bifrost Network leverages the interoperability by utilizing native BTC to DeFi services. BTCFi is an asset management service that uses Bifrost Network to provide wide range of use cases for native Bitcoins.

Bifrost

TenX

Hifi (formerly Mainframe) is a Lending Protocol that allows anyone to borrow against their crypto. Hifi uses a bond-like instrument, representing an on-chain obligation that settles on a specific future date. Buying and selling the tokenized debt enables fixed-rate, fixed term lending and borrowing — something much needed in decentralized finance today. It is anticipated that a ticker symbol change will occur alongside future iterations on the Hifi Lending Protocol.

Mainframe Token (MFT) is the native utility token that is used for:

Governance votes

Staking to ensure the safety of the protocol

Rewarding contributors to the ecosystem

What can you do with the Hifi Lending Protocol:

Borrow:  Lock collateral in a vault to mint fixed-rate, fixed-term debt tokens.  These debt tokens can be swapped for instant liquidity allowing users to leverage long, yield farm, or pursue other strategic trades without selling their collateral tokens.

Lend:  Buy fixed-rate, fixed-term debt tokens for a discount.  When the term expires they can be redeemed for face value, earning lenders a predictable return on their investment.

Provide Liquidity:  Earn trading fees by providing liquidity between debt tokens and stablecoins on an Automated Market Maker (AMM).

Mainframe

BitShares Blockchain is a decentralized “Blockchain as Organization” (BaO); an industrial-grade decentralized open source platform built to run high-performance financial technology operations. It represents the first decentralized autonomous decentralized community that enables its core utility token (BTS) holders to decide the Blockchain future direction in order to develop and maintain a wide range of decentralized financial technology products, features and functions. BitShares Blockchain is a Blockchain that permanently records financial technology operations between different Blockchain accounts and facilitates a wide range of access controls across BitShares Blockchain user financial means.

BitShares Blockchain is a technology that supports the digital generation entrepreneurs, investors, and developers with a common interest in building and participating in free market solutions by leveraging the power of globally decentralized consensus and decision making. Consensus technology has the power to do for economics what the internet did for information. It can harness the combined power of all humanity to coordinate the discovery and aggregation of real-time knowledge, previously unobtainable. This knowledge can be used to more effectively coordinate the allocation of resources toward their most productive and valuable use.

BitShares looks to extend the innovation of the Blockchain to all industries that rely upon the internet to provide their services. Whether its banking, stock exchanges, lotteries, voting, music, auctions or many others, a digital public ledger allows for the creation of distributed autonomous companies (or BaO) that provide better quality services at a fraction of the cost incurred by their more traditional, centralized counterparts. The advent of (BaO) ushers in a new paradigm in organizational structure in which companies can run without any human management and under the control of an incorruptible set of business rules. These rules are encoded in publicly auditable open source software distributed across the computers of the companies’ shareholders, who effortlessly secure the company from arbitrary control. BitShares does for business what bitcoin did for money by utilizing distributed consensus technology to create companies that are inherently global, transparent, trustworthy, efficient and most importantly profitable.

BitShares has went through many changes and has done its best to stay on top of Blockchain technology. BitShares is using Consensus as the mechanism by which organized people decide upon unitary rational action. While not considered technology in the traditional since, consensus “technology” is the basis of democratic governance and the coordination of free market activity first coined by Adam Smith as the “Invisible Hand.” The process of consensus decision-making allows for all participants to consent upon a resolution of action even if not the favored course of action for each individual participant. Bitcoin was the first system to integrate a fully decentralized consensus method with the modern technology of the internet and peer-to-peer networks in order to more efficiently facilitate the transfer of value through electronic communication. The proof-of-work structure that secures and maintains the Bitcoin network is one manner of organizing individuals who do not necessarily trust one another to act in the best interest of all participants of the network. The BitShares ecosystem employs Delegated Proof of Stake in order to find efficient solutions to distributed consensus decision making.

BitShares

Abyss

Launched in 2020, Dego Finance is a decentralized ecosystem that offers a diverse combination of non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) tools. It is an independent, open NFT ecosystem.

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

Any user is allowed to launch an NFT and initiate mining, auctions and trading, covering the entire lifecycle of the product. Dego’s NFT protocol is a cross-chain, second-layer infrastructure for Blockchain projects that can be leveraged for user acquisition and token distribution.

Dego uses a modular combination design concept that combines various elements of a product to form subsystems with specific functions.