## What is the project about?
zkSwap is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) that provides traders with greater control over the price ranges they provide liquidity to, enabling a more efficient trading experience.

## What makes your project unique?
zkSwap provides the infrastructure for creating and managing concentrated liquidity pools, which increases the capital efficiency for trading and liquidity provisioning compared to classical AMMs that utilize constant product formula. It leverages concentrated liquidity to improve capital efficiency and offers flexible fee structures, auto-compounding fees, and farming rewards.

## History of your project.
zkSwap is a relatively new project. It started out on zkSync Era Testnet and launched a testnet feedback campaign for the users. Upon receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback, zkSwap launched and sold $ZKSP tokens in a private and a public sale. After successful sale and testnet phase, zkSwap have deployed liquidity to a partner DEX for users to be able to trade right away. Next step is to launch zkSwap on zkSync Era mainnet.

## What’s next for your project?
Firstly, zkSwap will be audited and deployed on mainnet. Although the source code is already profesionally audited, zkSwap team is still insistent on another round of audit before mainnet launch to ensure the safety of their users.

Alongside with mainnet launch, zkSwap will be looking for new partnerships to cement its position in zkSync Era ecosystem and increase its TVL. zkSwap will offer liquidity mining rewards and will look into adding more features.

## What can your token be used for?
Initially token will be user for:
-Bootstrapping initial liquidity and promote the usage of the protocol
-Governance token within the zkSwap Protocol to decide about important protocol parameters
zkSwap team is considering to add more utility to the token in future

zkSwap

zkSync Era

zkSync

Nodle

zkSwap Finance

Long

Karat

Holdstation

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

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

Reserve Rights (RSR) is an ERC-20 token that will serve two main purposes for the Reserve Protocol: overcollateralization of Reserve stablecoins (RTokens) through staking and governing them through proposing & voting on changes to their configuration.

The Reserve Rights (RSR) token was launched in May 2019 following a successful initial exchange offering (IEO) on the Huobi Prime platform.

Reserve Rights

Kava is a Layer-1 blockchain that combines the speed and interoperability of Cosmos with the developer power of Ethereum.

Kava was built from the ground up to optimize its resources for protocol growth, strengthened by its Cosmos EVM technology that enables maximum scalability, speed, security, and developer support.

Builders on Kava earn a share of Kava Rise's $750M developer incentive fund via the program's blockchain-based distribution method, designed to reward the top protocols every month based on usage.

Kava

Self-described as "Polkadot's wild cousin," Kusama is an experimental blockchain platform that is designed to provide a massively interoperable and scalable framework for developers.

Kusama is built on Substrate — a blockchain building kit developed by Parity Technologies. Kusama has almost the same codebase as Polkadot — one of the most successful interoperable blockchains.

By deploying on Kusama, fast-paced projects gain access to a highly scalable, interoperable sharded network, with features that are not yet available on Polkadot. To that end, Kusama describes itself as a “canary network.”

The platform is designed to provide a testbed for developers looking to innovate and deploy their own blockchain and can be used as a preparatory network before launching on Polkadot — though many projects opt to stick with Kusama for their final product.

Kusama benefits from a low barrier to entry for deploying parachains, low bond requirements for validators, and is most commonly used by early-stage startups and for experimentation.

Kusama

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

The dYdX Chain is a proof-of-stake blockchain network built using the Cosmos SDK and leveraging CometBFT for consensus. The DYDX token is the L1 protocol token for the dYdX Chain, as agreed by the dYdX community through dYdX governance (Snapshot vote and an on-chain vote)

Holders of the DYDX token can use their tokens to run a Validator or stake their tokens to a Validator in order to participate in securing and governing the dYdX Chain network.

dYdX (Native)

Pyth Network

Bittensor

Stacks is a Bitcoin Layer for smart contracts; it enables smart contracts and decentralized applications to use Bitcoin as an asset and settle transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin is the largest, most valuable, and most durable decentralized asset. The Stacks layer unlocks $500B in BTC capital using the Bitcoin L1 as settlement for decentralized applications.

Stacks has knowledge of the full Bitcoin state, thanks to its Proof of Transfer consensus and Clarity language, enabling it to read from Bitcoin at any time.

All transactions on the Stacks layer are automatically hashed and settled on the Bitcoin L1. Stacks blocks are secured by 100% Bitcoin hashpower. In order to re-order Stacks blocks/transactions, an attacker would have to reorg Bitcoin.

Stacks

Ocean Protocol

Dog (Runes)

Quant launched in June 2018 with the goal of connecting blockchains and networks on a global scale, without reducing the efficiency and interoperability of the network. It is the first project to solve the interoperability problem through the creation of the first blockchain operating system.

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

The project is built as an operating system distributed ledger technology— and Overledger Network — for connecting different blockchain networks. The project is billed as the first OS to be built for blockchains.

The main aim of Quant — using Overledger — is to bridge the gap that exists between different blockchains. The backbone of the project is the Overledger network, which Quant bills as the ecosystem on which the future digital economy ecosystem will be built.

Overledger allows developers to build decentralized multi-chain applications (known as MApps) for their customers. For developers to build a Mapp on the network, they must hold a certain amount of Quant tokens (QNT).

Quant

Celestia

The mission of the Worldcoin project is to build the world’s largest identity and financial network as a public utility, giving ownership to everyone.

The Worldcoin system revolves around World ID, a privacy-preserving global identity network. World ID enables users to verify their humanness online ("Proof of Personhood") while maintaining their privacy through zero-knowledge proofs.

To engage with the Worldcoin protocol, individuals must first download World App, the first wallet app that supports the creation of a World ID. Individuals visit a physical imaging device called the Orb to get their World ID Orb-verified. Most Orbs are operated by a network of independent local businesses called Orb Operators. The Orb uses multispectral sensors to verify humanness and uniqueness, with all images being promptly deleted on-device per default (absent explicit consent to Data Custody).

All Orb-verified World IDs holders are entitled to claim recurring grants of free WLD tokens (WLD tokens are not available in the US; see the Worldcoin Tokenomics section of the project's whitepaper for details). This has the potential to make WLD the most widely distributed digital currency.

The WLD token is designed as a utility token with governance properties, empowering users by giving them a say over the future of the protocol. Beyond conventional "one-token-one-vote" governance mechanisms, the introduction of World ID paves the way for "one-person-one-vote" mechanisms. These two mechanisms can also be combined to enable new ways of governance. After launch, the Worldcoin Foundation will solicit proposals and work with the community on how World ID and the WLD token should interact in Worldcoin's governance model (see the project's whitepaper for details on governance and decentralization).

The community of users will determine the token's utility, but a few other use cases in addition to governance could emerge. For example, users may decide to use the WLD token to pay for certain actions in World App or another wallet app, to make other payments, or to signal their approval for certain initiatives or causes.

WLD is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Individuals will receive their user grants on Optimism Mainnet. Therefore, most WLD transactions will likely take place on the Optimism network.

Worldcoin

Injective (INJ) 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 (25,000+ 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

Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer-two (L2) scaling solution. It uses optimistic rollups to achieve its goal of improving speed, scalability and cost-efficiency on Ethereum. Arbitrum benefits from the security and compatibility of Ethereum. Another benefit is the higher throughput and lower fees compared to Ethereum. That is made possible thanks to moving most of the computation and storage load off-chain.

Arbitrum’s native token is called ARB and is used for governance. Offchain Labs, the developers behind Arbitrum, announced the shift to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) structure — the Arbitrum DAO. ARB holders can vote on proposals that affect the features, protocol upgrades, funds allocation and election of a Security Council.

Arbitrum has an ambitious roadmap for 2023, which includes: Launching its own layer-three solution called Orbit; Enabling developers to deploy programs written in popular programming languages like Rust, C++, and more using Stylus; Expanding its validator set to include more independent institutional validators; Moving its protocol to layer two with Arbitrum One.

On March 16, 2023,  Arbitrum announced their highly anticipated airdrop of ARB. The token will be airdropped to early users and DAOs building on Arbitrum, with 12.75% of the total supply to be distributed. Recipients were rewarded on a point-based system depending on their interaction with the Arbitrum network until a cutoff date of March 1, 2023. The token generation event is on March 23, 2023.

Arbitrum

The all-new ZKBase platform consists of three main parts: ZKSwap, the innovative Layer 2 AMM DEX utilizing ZK-Rollups technology, payment service ZKSquare, and an NFT minting center and marketplace called ZKSea. With an all-new-look user interface, NFT support, unlimited token listing, smoother withdrawal, optimized efficiency, and multi-chain support, ZKSpace aims to implement EVM-compatible ZK-Rollups and bring the community more layer 2-based products in the near future.

ZKBase

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

Avalanche is a layer one blockchain that functions as a platform for decentralized applications and custom blockchain networks. It is one of Ethereum’s rivals, aiming to unseat Ethereum as the most popular blockchain for smart contracts. It aims to do so by having a higher transaction output of up to 6,500 transactions per second while not compromising scalability.

This is made possible by Avalanche’s unique architecture. The Avalanche network consists of three individual blockchains: the X-Chain, C-Chain and P-Chain. Each chain has a distinct purpose, which is radically different from the approach Bitcoin and Ethereum use, namely having all nodes validate all transactions. Avalanche blockchains even use different consensus mechanisms based on their use cases.

After its mainnet launch in 2020, Avalanche has worked on developing its own ecosystem of DApps and DeFi. Different Ethereum-based projects such as SushiSwap and TrueUSD have integrated with Avalanche. Furthermore, the platform is constantly working on improving interoperability between its own ecosystem and Ethereum, like through the development of bridges.