Real-World Assets (RWA): Bridging the Gap Between DeFi and TradFi

Week in DeFi: Lending Protocols Ship, a Bustling Cosmos and Proof-of-Innocence

90 Types of Crypto Worth $160M Stolen in Wintermute Hack

Maple is a decentralized corporate credit market. Maple offers borrowers transparent and efficient financing completed entirely on-chain. For liquidity providers, Maple offers a sustainable yield source through lending to diversified pools of crypto’s premium institutions. The Pool Delegates that manage these pools perform diligence and set terms with Borrowers.

The protocol is governed by the Maple Token (MPL), which enables token holders to participate in governance, share in fee revenues, and stake insurance to Liquidity Pools.

Users can access fixed-income yield opportunities on Maple by depositing capital into Liquidity Pools. These Liquidity Pools are managed by experienced investors, known as Pool Delegates.

Institutional Borrowers looking for transparent and efficient financing on-chain can request capital on Maple and leverage their reputations to borrow under-collateralized without constant fear of liquidation and margin calls. Pool Delegates conduct due diligence and agree terms with Borrowers before funding loans from their designated Liquidity Pool. Liquidity Providers earn a sustainable yield through diversified exposure to crypto's premium institutions and enjoy a set-and-forget solution as diligence is conducted by Pool Delegates.

Maple

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

Aergo

Bella Protocol

Boson Protocol

Function X

Chainge

Enzyme

Clearpool

FUNToken

Onyxcoin

go fu*k yourself.

Launchpool

ZELDA 2.0

Dopex

Olympus v2

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

TrueFi

Ondo

Akash Network

Bittensor

Pendle

Dusk

Polymesh is an institutional-grade permissioned blockchain built specifically for regulated assets. It streamlines antiquated processes and opens the door to new financial instruments by solving challenges with public infrastructure around governance, identity, compliance, confidentiality, and settlement. POLYX is the native protocol token of Polymesh used to stake and secure the network, pay transaction fees, and engage in governance.

Polymesh integrates built-in financial primitives that enable users to operate the blockchain at minimal fixed costs. Additionally, it enables developers to create decentralized applications (dApps) on the platform. Polymesh also aims to effectively tackle critical concerns like rule enforcement, identity verification, regulatory compliance, data privacy and transaction finalization.

According to Polymesh's whitepaper, the project overcomes the flaws in Ethereum and other general-purpose blockchains that may impede the acceptance of security tokens by industries and institutions.

Polymesh

Ocean Protocol

Web3's Decentralised Commerce Layer.
Sell physical things as redeemable NFTs, everywhere, online, in-game and in-verse.
We have solved the hard tech problems of tokenizing and twinning physical items, so you can focus on creating innovative Web3 commerce experiences for your customers.
Our no-code, low-cost tools make it easy to tokenize and sell physical products as NFTs everywhere, including your own Web3 store, the Metaverse, or on NFT marketplaces.
Redemption can be integrated into your own website, giving your brand full control of the customer experience.
With Boson, you can create phygital assets and token-gate purchases, allowing you to effortlessly develop engaging and rewarding digi-physical commerce experiences.
Buyers can redeem the NFT for the physical with the assurance that either they will receive the item or their money back- all without the need to trust intermediaries or sellers, just code and independent dispute resolvers.  Alternatively, Buyers can transfer, gift, trade or hold the NFT - just like any other NFT.
Boson is a groundbreaking technology recognized as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. As a decentralized protocol, Boson is built for the benefit of and governed by its users. Consequently, Boson only charges a minimal 0.5% per transaction protocol fee.

GMX is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for trading perpetual cryptocurrency futures with up to 50X leverage on popular cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH and more. The platform launched in September 2021 as Gambit Exchange. To date, GMX has a total trading volume of over $130B and 283K total users, making it the leading derivatives DEX on Arbitrum and Avalanche.

GMX runs on the Arbitrum and the Avalanche blockchain. These ecosystems are connected to the exchange via Synapse — a cross-chain bridge.

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

Founded in 2017 and launched via IEO on Binance in March 2019, Fetch.AI is an artificial intelligence (AI) lab building an open, permissionless, decentralized machine learning network with a crypto economy. Fetch.ai democratizes access to AI technology with a permissionless network upon which anyone can connect and access secure datasets by using autonomous AI to execute tasks that leverage its global network of data. The Fetch.AI model is rooted in  use cases like optimizing DeFi trading services, transportation networks (parking, micromobility), smart energy grids, travel — essentially any complex digital system that relies on large-scale datasets.

Fetch.ai

Injective 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 (10,000+ 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’s core exchange module provides state-of-the-art capabilities including an advanced on-chain order book and matching engine for spot, perpetual, futures and options markets, resistance to Miner-Extractable Value (MEV) through frequent batch auction order matching, and zero gas fees for users.

Injective natively uses IBC and is highly-interoperable with multiple layer 1s, including, but not limited to, Polygon and Solana (through an upcoming Wormhole integration). It is also uniquely built to be interoperable with Ethereum, through its own decentralized ERC-20 token bridge, making Injective the first network within the Cosmos ecosystem to natively support Ethereum assets.

Smart contracts are implemented on Injective through CosmWasm, allowing for multi-chain smart contract transactions to occur seamlessly. Injective, however, is the only blockchain that enables automatic smart contract execution. This capability serves as a powerful building block for developers to create novel use cases that would not be possible on any other chain.

The use cases intended for INJ include but are not limited to: protocol governance, dApp value capture, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) security, developer incentives and staking. Further details regarding each of these use cases can be found below:

Protocol Governance: The INJ token governs every single component of Injective, including chain upgrades. Since its mainnet launch, the Injective community has actively contributed to governance, with all proposals passing through a DAO governance vote. The comprehensive governance page is available here.

Protocol Fee Value Capture: 60% of all fees generated from dApps enter an on-chain buy-back-and-burn auction to maintain the deflationary nature of INJ. The burn auction page is available here.

Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Security: INJ is used to secure the Injective blockchain using a proof-of-stake mechanism. Validators and delegators can both participate in staking.

Developer Incentives: 40% of fees generated by users on dApps built on Injective go directly towards incentivizing new developers building on Injective which brings an ever growing funnel of builders to Injective.

Injective

OriginTrail is an ecosystem building a trusted knowledge infrastructure for artificial intelligence. It addresses the challenge of misinformation in the AI era by ensuring the origin of information and enabling discoverability of the world's most important knowledge and real world assets (RWAs).

OriginTrail is creating a Verifiable Web for decentralized AI by empowering world class brands and builders. It utilizes its unique Decentralized Knowledge Graph and OriginTrail Parachain to deliver AI-powered search and solutions for enterprises and individuals worldwide.

OriginTrail has gained support and partnerships with world-class organizations such as British Standards Institution, SCAN, Polkadot, Parity, Walmart, World Federation of Hemophilia, Oracle, and the EU Commission's Next Generation Internet. These partnerships contribute to advancing OriginTrail's trusted knowledge foundation and its applicability in trillion-dollar industries, while providing a verifiable web of knowledge important in particular to drive the economies of RWAs.

The best way to see the technology in action is by checking ChatDKG, which is an experimental, question answering bot on X (Twitter) based on trusted Knowledge Assets in OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph. The ChatDKG provides answers based on OriginTrail trusted AI.

The Metcalfe phase of the updated roadmap pursues an ambitious goal of creating the world’s largest verifiable web for AI consisting of 100 billion Knowledge Assets, bringing a 100.000x scalability increase. As the name of the phase suggests, it will seek to produce network effects across the OriginTrail DKG and use novel techniques to pursue autonomous DKG growth based on the genesis knowledge foundation being created by organizations and individuals alike. The genesis part of the Metcalfe’s phase also introduces knowledge mining and knowledge signaling capabilities to drive constant growth of the Verifiable Web.

Following the Genesis stage and the transition to an AI-native V8, further capabilities will become available in the Convergence stage. By leveraging the advancements in AI and the DKG, we will unlock autonomous knowledge mining which in turn leads to an autonomous DKG. At that stage, new knowledge gets added to the DKG with very limited human involvement. Services such as AI agents will be performing knowledge inferencing directly on the DKG to find any “blind spots” in the knowledge they can fill as well as search for new knowledge and bring it to the DKG in accordance with knowledge signaling.

OriginTrail

Synthetix is building a decentralized liquidity provisioning protocol that any protocol can tap into for various purposes. Its deep liquidity and low fees serve as a backend for many exciting protocols on both Optimism and Ethereum. Many user-facing protocols in the Synthetix ecosystem, such as Kwenta (Spot and Futures), Lyra (Options), Polynomial (Automated Options), and 1inch & Curve (Atomic Swaps), tap into Synthetix liquidity to power their protocols. Synthetix is built on Optimism and Ethereum mainnet. The Synthetix Network is collateralized by SNX, ETH, and LUSD, enabling the issuance of synthetic assets (Synths). Synths track and provide returns on the underlying asset without requiring one to directly hold the asset. This pooled collateral enables an array of on-chain, composable financial instruments backed by liquidity from Synthetix. Some of the most exciting upcoming releases from SNX are Perps V2, which hopes to enable low-fee on-chain futures trading through the usage of off-chain oracles, and Synthetix V3, which aims to rebuild the protocol to achieve its earliest goal, being a fully permissionless derivatives protocol. Learn more about Synthetix on their blog or by joining the SNX Discord.

The platform aims to broaden the cryptocurrency space by introducing non-blockchain assets, providing access to a more robust financial market.

Synthetix

Immutable positions itself as the first layer-two scaling solution for NFTs on Ethereum. According to Immutable, its blockchain does away with Ethereum’s limitations like low scalability, a poor user experience, illiquidity, and a slow developer experience. Instead, users benefit from instant trading and massive scalability while enjoying zero gas fees for minting and trading NFTs without compromising user or asset security.

Thanks to this technology, users will be able to create and distribute assets like ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens on a massive scale. Chris Clay, the game Director of Gods Unchained, a project already building on Immutable, stated that Immutable allows Gods Unchained to implement a new meta-system that was previously impossible. In this fashion, Immutable aims to create a world-class experience for users and developers alike.

Immutable

SingularityNET is a blockchain-powered platform that allows anybody to easily "create, share, and monetize" AI services, thanks to its globally-accessible AI marketplace.

Through the SingularityNET marketplace, users can browse, test and purchase a huge variety of AI services using the platform’s native utility token — AGIX. Moreover, the marketplace represents an outlet AI developers can use to publish and sell their AI tools, and easily track their performance.

With the benefits of LLMs and generative AI are increasingly exciting, their limitations are also becoming increasingly apparent. The convergence of structured knowledge with neural networks is emerging as the key to overcoming their shortcomings.

Uniquely positioned at the heart of this convergence, SingularityNET will prioritize the integration of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and comprehensive Neural Symbolic tools for LLMs, with the goal of empowering developers to create the next generation of AI systems on the SingularityNET Platform.

SingularityNET is strategically positioned to become the Knowledge Layer of the Internet, leading the evolution of the emerging AI landscape while also laying the foundations for the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) of tomorrow.

The team behind SingularityNET pioneered the development of an AI known as Sophia, which is described as the "world's most expressive robot". SingularityNET’s goal is to enable Sophia to be able to fully understand human language, and continue developing “OpenCog” — an AI framework that is hoped to eventually achieve a state known as “advanced general intelligence,” i.e. human-level artificial intelligence (or beyond).

The platform was first announced in 2017 and completed an initial coin offering (ICO) in December the same year, raising $36 million in just one minute.

SingularityNET

Axelar claims to deliver “secure cross-chain communication for Web3.” The project provides a decentralized network and tools to help builders of decentralized applications (dApps) with seamless cross-chain communication through its protocol suite, tools and APIs.

Axelar features three core components – a decentralized network, a software development kit of protocols and APIs, and a set of gateway smart contracts for cross-chain connectivity.

Powered by a decentralized network of validators, anyone can join the network, build on it, or use it. Apps builders can interact with a simple API atop a permissionless network that routes messages and ensures network security via proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

AXL is the native token of the Axelar network. The protocol also supports the cross-chain transfer of several native tokens via their wrapped ERC-20 versions, including AVAX (Avalanche), ETH (Ethereum), FTM (Fantom), GLMR (Moonbeam), and MATIC (Polygon).

Meanwhile, Axelar has raised capital from top-tier investors, including Binance, Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital and others.

Axelar

Illuvium is an open-world fantasy battle game built on the Ethereum blockchain. Often touted as the first AAA game on Ethereum, Illuvium looks to provide a source of entertainment to both casual gamers and hardcore DeFi fans through a range of collecting and trading features.

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

The world of Illuvium is inhabited by creatures known as Illuvials, who can be captured by players that best them in battle and nurse them back to health. From then on, they become a loyal part of the player’s collection and can be used when battling other adventurers as part of Illuvium’s auto battler gameplay.

The game is a fusion between an open-world exploration game and a PVP battle game. Players can spend their time exploring the expanses of the game world or building up their team of powerful beasts.

Illuvium has been in development since 2020, and is being built by a worldwide team of more than 40 individuals, including the co-founders; serial entrepreneur and early cryptocurrency adopter Kieran Warwick, and experienced game designer Aaron Warwick, who are brothers. (And who are coincidentally also the brothers of Kain Warwick, the co-founder of DeFi platform Synthetix).

The ILV token has a number of uses within the Illuvium ecosystem. It’s the main token used to reward players for their in-game achievements, entitles players to their share of the Illuvium Vault and is used for participating in the governance of the game via the Illuvium decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).