Swarm is a decentralised storage and communication system for a sovereign digital society.

The system is economically self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system enforced through smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Users remain sovereign owners of their personal data in alignment with fair data principles. The architecture makes the system resilient to connectivity issues, node churn, or targeted DDOS attacks, and enables a zero-downtime service.

### Swarm exists so the internet can again be decentralised.

Swarm’s longer term vision is to become the operating system of the re-decentralised internet. It provides a scalable and self-sustaining infrastructure for a supply-chain economy of data. 

#### Key Highlights

* **Unstoppable features for unstoppable dApps**: Privacy preservation, communication and redundancy are built in to ensure availability and continued data delivery even when individual nodes go offline. Any data, any device. On demand.

* **Radical data ownership and management**: Data is split up into small chunks that are stored throughout the network without vulnerable central hubs. Operators cannot know what content is stored on their nodes while still being paid for storing.

* **Enabling zero-cost economics**: No central party controls the data or can monetize it. Instead of relying on intermediaries to ensure the availability and integrity of data, all node operators participate in enabling a fair data economy.

Shifting the cost of access, hosting and execution to users removes the last obstacle to truly agile and adaptive application development to make web3 a reality.

### Tokenomics

BZZ is the Swarm Network’s native token. Users of the network’s services (i.e. bandwidth and storage) use it to compensate the providers, or node operators, for those services.

The network is designed to incentivise constructive behaviour. Node operators that provide more bandwidth and storage while quickly delivering popular chunks (files uploaded to Swarm are divided into 4 KB chunks) will get more traffic and consequently more rewards. Therefore, operators compete in providing high-quality services, which then grows, secures and maintains the network.

The token supply is not fixed and can increase or decrease via the bonding curve. You can read about Swarm’s bonding curve in detail [here](https://medium.com/ethereum-swarm/swarm-and-its-bzzaar-bonding-curve-ac2fa9889914). Put simply, if the supply goes up by one token, so does its price in the bonding curve contract, and vice versa. This makes BZZ neither inflationary nor deflationary in nature.

### Ecosystem

Having a vibrant ecosystem on top of Swarm is key. The Swarm Network already has a budding ecosystem growing on top of it. From decentralised marketplaces, art, NFTs, archives, to data stores, music streaming and everything in between is sprouting on Swarm. The Swarm Foundation actively supports this growth through grants.

Today’s cloud is still based on the concept of standalone computers, where data is stored and managed centrally on servers of trusted institutions. With the introduction of the BZZ token, Swarm is providing a key component to drive the transformation of the cloud as we know it. By collaborating with the web3 community, Swarm aims to create an autonomous system for storing information, private and unstoppable, for a digital self-sovereign society.

Swarm

HyperPay

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Render

Polaris Share

Shiba Predator

Ternoa

NFT Worlds

Nuco.cloud

Optimus AI

Cellframe

Aventus

Swarm Markets

Prime Numbers Labs Ecosystem

Houdini Swap

YOUR AI

Landwolf

Advanced Project

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

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

Covalent leverages big-data technologies to create meaning from hundreds of billions of data points, delivering actionable insights to investors and allowing developers to allocate resources to higher-utility goals within their organization.

Instead of painstakingly sourcing data from a small handful of chains, Covalent aggregates information from across dozens of sources including nodes, chains and data feeds. The Covalent API then sources end-users with individualized data by wallet, including current and historical investment performance across all types of digital assets. Most importantly, Covalent returns this data in a rapid and consistent manner, incorporating all relevant data within one API interface.

Having achieved product-market fit, we are now planning to execute the next phase of Covalent, which is a progressive decentralization that will enable the Covalent Network to be owned and operated by its users. Of course, a critical piece to this is CQT.

CQT is the native token of the Covalent Network. It has three primary purposes:

CQT is a governance token, whereby token holders vote on proposals to change the system parameters.

CQT is a staking asset. Validators will earn fees for answering queries.

CQT is a network access token that fulfills data queries for users of the API.

Developer resources include:

Covalent Knowledge Base for extensive guides on how to use the Covalent API. 

Covalent API Documentation.

Covalent

Efinity is a cross-chain NFT platform developed by Enjin and built on Polkadot. Efinity was created as the next generation blockchain for digital assets with the aim of adapting to the challenges of the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to the project.

The main specialization of the Efinity project is the NFT space. With the protocol, traders and gamers can create, distribute, transfer, sell and buy NFTs. Efinity aims to remove barriers to entry into the NFT space/decentralized gaming, and to simplify user experience and digital asset governance.

Efinity Token powers the entire Efinity ecosystem, EFI aims to prioritize the generation, transfer and purchase of tokens using an inter-chain infrastructure of protocols resulting in lower transaction fees. As for incentives, rewards on PoW blockchains with NFT functionality go to miners who create/trade tokens, thereby forming a community.

One of the long-term goals of Efinity is to become a hub for both fungible and non-fungible tokens, accepting tokens from any other chain, facilitating the pricing and exchange of NFTs, increasing transaction volume, and creating network effects.

In December 2021, the project won the Polkadot parachain auction, and in March 2022, Enjin launched their flagship parachain Efinity on the Polkadot Relay Chain — a blockchain platform that provides a decentralized parachain network where people havecontrol over their data and identity.

Efinity Token

Clover Finance (CLV), or simply Clover, is a blockchain operating system. It provides a one-stop, easy‑to‑use blockchain infrastructure and an ethereum virtual machine (EVM) compatible framework for Substrate‑based applications.

Clover Finance, another offspring of the Substrate-based Polkadot parachain aims at bridging the compatibility gap when building and operating across blockchains.

The project was founded in May 2020 and the mainnet of Clover Finance launched in July 2021.

Rally

Centrifuge is a decentralized asset financing protocol. It connects decentralized finance (DeFi) with real-world assets (RWA) while trying to lower the cost of capital for small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) and provide investors with a stable source of income. The main goal of the project is to generate profits that are not tied to volatile crypto assets; the developers are pursuing the task of transferring real monetary value from fiat to cryptocurrencies.

Companies are using Centrifuge to access the liquidity that DeFi has to offer. They can tokenize real assets and use these tokens as collateral to access financing through Tinlake, a decentralized application (DApp) lending protocol. The Centrifuge blockchain is built on Polkadot (DOT) for speed and low fees, while its financial DApp Tinlake is built to access Ethereum (ETH) liquidity.

Centrifuge provides liquidity to everyone and investors receive income and rewards in the form of CFG tokens. Centrifuge links assets such as invoices, real estate and royalties with decentralized finance (DeFi). Additionally, borrowers benefit from the fact that they can finance their real assets without banks or other intermediaries.

Centrifuge

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

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

Guild of Guardians is a multiplayer fantasy action RPG on Immutable X. The game’s vision is to become the world’s most popular RPG, where players can assemble a set of Guardians and earn rewards in the process. By combining fun gameplay that will be played on mobile with play-to-earn mechanics, Guild of Guardians aims to build an in-game economy that will be compelling for players to participate in.

The game will initially be accessible on iOS and Android and will be available in 2022. The gameplay revolves around training a team of heroes to collect resources and engage in challenges. The collected resources will be issued and distributed in Gems, the game’s in-game currency that can be redeemed for real money, spent on minting new assets or secondary purchases, and used to vote on game decisions. 20% of all primary and secondary trading fees must be paid for in Gems.

Since mid-2020, Guild of Guardians has racked up over 220,000 followers across different social media channels in its short time of existence. It also sold out its first NFT Founder sale, netting over $4.6 million that will be used for game development.

Guild of Guardians

Persistence One

NEST Protocol

PlatON

Gods Unchained is a free-to-play tactical card game that gives players true ownership of their in-game items. Led by the former game director of Magic The Gathering: Arena, the game focuses on competitive play, which means players must strategically outsmart their opponents by building decks that are able to combat a wide variety of tactics. In Gods Unchained players completely own their digital items, giving them the freedom to trade, sell and use their cards any way they like – just like owning real, tangible cards.

GODS is an ERC-20 token used as premium currency within the GU ecosystem. The tokens will be used to:

Create an NFT.

Used within the marketplace and for in-game purchases.

Distributed as a reward to players.

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

Gods Unchained

StaFi

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

DIA (Decentralised Information Asset) is an open-source oracle platform that enables market actors to source, supply and share trustable data. DIA aims to be an ecosystem for open financial data in a financial smart contract ecosystem, to bring together data analysts, data providers and data users. In general, DIA provides a reliable and verifiable bridge between off-chain data from various sources and on-chain smart contracts that can be used to build a variety of financial DApps.

DIA is the governance token of the platform. It is currently based on ERC-20Ethereum protocol.

The project was founded in 2018, while the token supply was made available to the public during the bonding curve sale from Aug. 3 through Aug. 17, 2020, where 10.2 million tokens were sold.

Lambda

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

Tranchess Protocol is the brainchild of Co-Founder Danny Chong and Team. The concept was incepted in 2020 with a team across diverse experiences and roles in tech firms such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft to Investment Banks such as Morgan Stanley, UBS and BNP Paribas.

Our tech team is particularly experienced with cyber security in trading and DeFi protocols, their knowledge in smart contract coding is additive to the maintenance and upgrades in years to come.

Danny himself had worked at both BNP Paribas and Societe Generale, holding positions across his career from trading, sales and management regionally in FICC space.

It is the team’s vision to empower users of DeFi with Omni Asset Management capabilities and contributing to the paradigm shift from Traditional Finance to DeFi. And in time, to offer a full product suite in Asset Management Protocols, tailored for DeFi users across risk capacities and appetites.