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

Maker

Render

Gala

SingularityNET

Aave

Lido DAO

Axie Infinity

Pendle

Ondo

Worldcoin

QANplatform

Digital Asset Rights Token

Nova

Scotty The Ai

RAYN

saffron.finance

dHedge DAO

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

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

MobileCoin (MOB) is a decentralized payment platform established in 2017 by MobileCoin Inc. However, the network went live only in December 2020. A privacy-focused cryptocurrency, MOB, was created to be used as digital cash on mobile. Secure and easy payments, along with fast and encrypted transactions, are claimed to protect personal data. The developers aspire to revolutionize the P2P payment system where transactions are stored on a blockchain ledger.

The project was designed to be integrated into messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Signal. How does it work: a user enters a PIN code to send or receive funds. No one but a sender/a receiver can check the details of transactions. Users can always recover their keys with a recovery PIN. Confidentiality is a priority, and the platform applies ring signatures to authenticate the ownership and use of digital assets. The benefits of the ecosystem also include security and speed of transactions, environmental friendliness, and intuitive optimization for mobile devices.

MobileCoin is open-source. Users have the option to verify the programming techniques.

In addition, MobileCoin is not only user-friendly but also planet-friendly, claiming to be one of the first negative carbon cryptocurrencies in its niche.

MobileCoin

Ribbon uses financial engineering to create structured products that deliver sustainable yield. Ribbon's first product focuses on yield through automated options strategies. The protocol also allows developers to create arbitrary structured products through combining various DeFi derivatives.

Structured products are packaged financial instruments that use a combination of derivatives to achieve some specific risk-return objective, such as betting on volatility, enhancing yields or principal protection.

Theta Vault is a new product that automates a covered call strategy to earn high yield on ETH. The vault runs a covered call strategy and sells out of the money call options on a weekly basis for yield.

The primary risk for running this strategy is that depositors could potentially give up upside in exchange for guaranteed yield. By selling a call option, users are basically promising to sell the asset at the strike price, even if it goes above it (a.k.a selling early). Because of this, if the price of the asset moves up significantly in a short period of time, it is possible for depositors to have "negative yield" on their ETH.

However, this only happens if ETH/USD appreciates significantly, so depositors will still be up in USD terms. The vault also sells call options that are very out of the money, which means there is a relatively low chance of the options getting exercised.

Ribbon Finance

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

Rally

RARI

Karura is an all-in-one decentralized finance (DeFi) hub and stablecoin platform built on Kusama (KSM) and integrated into Polkadot (DOT). Karura was created by the Acala Network, which has won four Web3 Foundation grants and founded the Substrate Developer Academy.

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

Both Karura and Acala are backed by multiple funds, including Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital and Hypersphere. Karura and Acala operate in parallel. Specifically, Karura is implementing DeFi on Kusama in the same way that Acala is offering DeFi on Polkadot. The network is built with almost the same codebase as Acala: the two platforms provide scalable, convenient and fast DeFi cross-chain ecosystems for Kusama and Polkadot.

Parachain Karura is a platform that allows users to create effective, low-cost and complex financial applications, saving time and increasing trading efficiency.

The platform itself provides a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets (kUSD), a trustless staking derivative (liquid KSM), and an automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX) for unlocking liquidity and supporting financial innovation.

Karura is the decentralized financial hub of Kusama, a scalable multi-chain network for radical innovation and early-stage Polkadot deployments. Karura is the sister network to Acala. It hosts multichain liquid staking token (LST) protocols (such as liquid KSM - LKSM), an AMM decentralized exchange, and an app platform that is EVM-compatible and highly customizable (based on Substrate). Karura is secured by Kusama, and is the liquidity gateway of Kusama parachains, Acala and L1/L2 blockchains

Karura

Liquity

Acala Token

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

Radworks

BRCP TOKEN

OCP introduces an innovative relayer mechanism that seamlessly connects applications to a modular permissionless custody protocol. OCP operates a protocol that acts akin to a mesh network, enabling an end-user to leverage a diverse set of key management protocols. We call this “Keychain Aggregation”. Building a protocol that solves for Keychain Aggregation not only simplifies the way developers can build, abstracting risk and complexity, but it also harmonizes and aggregates the economics associated with having multiple bilateral commercial relationships.

With OCP, we have a new custody primitive that embraces (1) modularity, in connecting key management solutions, and (2) decentralisation, in the way users can access key generation and transaction signing services. We are particularly excited to pioneer this, witnessing existing security and custody solutions struggle to adapt to the ongoing proliferation of chains. Additionally, with the impending tokenization of Real World Assets (RWAs) - potentially mobilizing over trillions of dollars into the blockchain ecosystem - the demand for versatile and modular solutions is clear and present.

Open Custody Protocol

DODO is a DeFi protocoldecentralized finance (DeFi) protocol and on-chain liquidity provider whose unique proactive market maker (PMM) algorithm aims to offer better liquidity and price stability than automated market makers (AMM).

The PMM pricing mechanism, which mimics human trading, utilizes oracles to gather highly accurate market prices for assets. It then provides enough liquidity close to these prices in order to stabilize the portfolios of liquidity providers (LP), lower price slippage and negate impermanent loss by allowing arbitrage trading as reward.

DODO also caters for new crypto projects with a free ICO listing through its Initial DODO Offering (IDO) which requires issuers to only deposit their own tokens.

DODO’s smart contract operates as an ERC20 token on the Ethereum network.

DODO

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

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.