The Crypto & Blockchain space moves fast.
And because of that, there are thousands and thousands of DApps, across many blockchains. It can be hard to keep up with all the projects coming out of the woodwork, and a lot of amazing projects can slip through the cracks.
This article will contain some of the coolest and most unique projects I’ve seen, and will be in no particular order. Enjoy!
1. Self-Repaying Loans | Alchemix
Alchemix is a protocol that lets you take out a collateralized loan, similar to Compound or Aave, but Alchemix will then pay that loan back for you. No liquidations, no interest rate. Here’s how Alchemix works:
- Deposit collateral in the form of ETH, DAI, USDC, or USDT
- Borrow up to 50% of it in the form of a synthetic token: alETH/alUSD
- You do whatever you want with your alTokens. Swap them, hold them, provide liquidity, etc.
- Alchemix uses the collateral in various yield strategies to pay back the alUSD/alETH over time
- You can now withdraw your original collateral and keep your alUSD/alETH
In the words of Alchemix: “Your only debt is time”
2. Inflation Resistant Money | Volt
Volt Protocol is a fascinating concept. What if you had a stablecoin, but instead of being pegged to the dollar, it was pegged to the Dollar + Inflation? This is what Volt does. It allows you to redeem VOLT for FEI, (A stablecoin) which you can redeem at a higher rate over time.
For instance, you could buy 1 VOLT for $1 at the beginning of the year, and if the inflation rate by the end of the year was 2%, you could redeem that VOLT for 1.02 FEI, or $1.02.
How does it get the money to pay for inflation? Well, VOLT can only be minted in 1 of 2 ways: Depositing FEI, which the protocol will use to earn yield, (Namely Fuse, Currently capped at $10M total deposits) Or the protocol will allow you to mint & borrow VOLT through Fuse. This means that all VOLT in existence will either have some productive capital behind them, or someone paying interest to borrow VOLT in the first place.
3. No-Loss Lotteries | PoolTogether
PoolTogether is a great twist on normal lotteries. Instead of buying a ticket, and losing that money when you inevitably don’t win, PoolTogether takes a different approach.
Instead of buying a ticket, you deposit money into the protocol, which essentially counts as your “ticket”. That money is deposited to earn interest, and the interest is what pays for the jackpot. Therefore, when someone wins, nobody’s deposit is lost, only the interest is paid to the winner.
If you ever want to leave the lottery, you can just withdraw your deposit. And if you’ve won a prize, you get to keep that as well!
4. Decentralized & Open Social Media | Lens Protocol
Lens is a fascinating project, just starting out, but with an ambitious goal: Decentralize social media, give people ownership over their data, and make it accessible through any platform.
Imagine if your social media account lived on the blockchain, owned by your wallet. No company or service owns it. You do. You can bring it anywhere, interact with the same profile through any number of different sites, and interact with everyone else on the same, shared platform. Your social graph is owned by you. Everyone you follow, the posts you’ve made, the things you’ve shared, all held by you.
Creators can monetize their content without a platform taking a massive cut, and you can rest assured that your account will stay under your control, no matter where you go.
Lens is still new, but it’s being built by some really great people in the space, and it has the potential to change social media as we know it.
5. Fighting Climate Change | KlimaDAO
KlimaDAO is a fork of OlympusDAO, which promises to create something similar to what Olympus is trying to create (Decentralized Reserve Currency) Except instead of making a normal reserve currency, it wants to create an asset (KLIMA) that is not backed by traditional assets, but by carbon.
By using on-chain carbon credits, and the unique bonding system created by Olympus, KlimaDAO is able to incentivize the purchasing of carbon credits, as well as the bonding of them, which reduces available supply, and moves the price of carbon up.
Carbon offsets are traditionally used by corporations to reduce their carbon footprint, not by reducing their own emissions, but by paying other people to reduce their emissions or remove carbon from the atmosphere.
By bringing the price of these carbon offsets up, the cost corporations need to pay to become carbon-neutral increases, incentivizing them to reduce their emissions directly. This also incentivizes people to build more systems that will reduce the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere, or actively remove it, through methods such as carbon capture.
This all benefits holders of their native token: KLIMA, and contributes to the removal of carbon from the atmosphere at the same time. Win-win!
While I don’t think the project is necessarily a very profitable or sustainable investment long-term in terms of financial gain, it’s a great way to contribute to climate impact while being able to retain some of your contribution in the form of KLIMA, and govern the most climate-positive protocol I’ve seen in crypto yet.
Honorable Mentions
These are a couple protocols that I think are cool, but don’t necessarily fit in the top 5 that I’ve listed above. They’re still really interesting, though!
Stream Money in Real Time | Superfluid
Superfluid is a protocol that can change how we spend money. Imagine if money was not spent, but streamed.
This can provide benefits to people such as musicians, who could get paid the moment someone listened to their song, or for pay-as-you-go plans for things such as mobile data. Or, imagine your salary beginning to flow into your account the moment you walk into work, and never needing to wait for your paycheck again.
Plus, streaming money in real time is just really cool :)
Investing Clubs | Syndicate
Syndicate is a protocol that lets people easily create a club where they can invest with their friends, community, etc. (You can check out a demo here)
Syndicate allows anyone to quickly and easily spin up a new investing club, where they can invite their friends, a group of strangers, an online community, etc. They can then issue a token, which represents a share in the club, and that token can be purchased with USDC or ETH, which funds the club with its initial assets.
Then, based on the amount of the token you have, you’re able to vote on where the money in the club gets invested, sent, spent, etc. They even let you link your club to real world companies/entities if you have one set up, which means your investing club could hypothetically enter into legal contracts, or buy off-chain assets such as stocks, gold, real estate, etc.
This is a fun way to invest as a group, and is a great way to get differing opinions on a new investment idea. Having a shared pool of money that you and your friends/community can govern and grow is honestly just a pretty fun thing to try out!
So that was my list of some of the coolest things I’ve seen in the crypto & blockchain space! If any of the projects I mentioned seem interesting, go check them out! There’s some super cool stuff being built out there!
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Cheers!
