The end of March marks one year since much of the world went into lockdown, and the far-reaching effects of the pandemic were first felt.
Though it has been a difficult year the world over, the past 12 months have seen the cryptocurrency sphere flourish, with a record-setting bull run for Bitcoin and the DeFi phenomenon coming into maturity.
This past month, DeFi protocols locked in more than $43 Billion USD of value. Despite uncertainty over the expiration of $6 Billion worth of options expiring last Friday, Bitcoin is trading around the $59,000 mark at the time of writing and has now surpassed the market cap of the Canadian Dollar.
PayPal rolled out the much-anticipated support for crypto payments this month in the US, and Visa has begun to use the Ethereum blockchain to settle transactions via USDC, and institutional support for cryptocurrency is growing at a rapid pace.
March was an exciting month on the Bitcoin.com Exchange, with several new listings, trading competitions, and AMAs.
Listings
Chiliz
The beginning of March saw the addition of CHZ, the token renowned FinTech company Chiliz, to the Bitcoin.com Exchange. CHZ is the native token of Socios.com, a new platform that leverages blockchain technology to connect fans with their favourite sports and entertainment organizations. On Socios.com, organizations can engage users by issuing custom tokens, giving fans voting rights for key decisions, and purchasing power to acquire exclusive merchandise.
Chiliz made headlines this month for being one of the best-performing crypto-assets, with its price increasing more than 10-fold within less than a few weeks. While the price has since retreated from previous highs, the Chiliz team is continuously onboarding new sports organizations and users onto its platform.
CHZ can be traded against USDT and BTC.
Pastel
On March 5th, we launched PSL, the native currency of the Pastel platform on Bitcoin.com Exchange. Pastel provides a p2p solution for artists and art lovers to come together to create and buy art. Unlike most NFTs that are currently making headlines, PSL is built on top of proprietary tech, with the core of the technology is built on Zcash, a Bitcoin fork that uses equihash as a confirmation algorithm. Within this architecture, confirmation times are much faster than on the Bitcoin blockchain, and blocks are confirmed every 2.5 minutes. With no end in sight for Ethereum’s congestion issue, Pastel is poised to capture more interest from upcoming artists and collectors.
PSL is live for trading against BTC, USDT and ETH.
JulSwap and JustLiquidity
With interest in DeFi growing, the need for platforms that enable traders to swap their assets is increasing. JulSwap is providing a reliable decentralized exchange platform that is supplemented by its own Liquidity protocol, JustLiquidity, which ensures that traders will be able to access liquidity. Traders can also lock up some of their holdings to earn JustLiquidity tokens as a reward.
Both the token of the DEX as well as the token powering the liquidity protocol JulD and Julb are available for trading with BTC, USDT and ETH.
Curate
Curate is building a decentralized, peer-to-peer marketplace where users can gain inspiration and brands can build their audience. Unlike on other platforms, reviews can only be submitted by verified users and checked to ensure authenticity. The token enabling users to transact on Curate is XCUR. XCUR was listed on March 24th on our exchange and can be traded against USDT.
DeFi Tokens: POLS, ROOK, DODO, BAL, BAND
Polkastarter
Polkastarter is addressing one of the biggest challenges that remain in the DeFi space: interoperability. Polkastarter has built a cross-chain DEX on Polkadot, enabling token pools and auctions. Polkastarter offers a platform for upcoming crypto projects to crowdfund and start building their own community. The native token POLS serves to pay transaction fees as well as to facilitate governance.
PSL can be traded with BTC and USDT pairs.
ROOK
ROOK is the native currency of the KeeperDao platform. As the name suggests, it’s a decentralised autonomous organization that enables traders to participate in so-called liquidations. Liquidations take place whenever the collateralization ratio of loans falls below a certain threshold. They’re a lucrative affair but very capital-intensive. KeeperDao allows anyone to take part in them and benefit.
ROOK is available for trading with BTC.
DODO
Unlike the bird with that name, DODO is very much alive and growing. DODO is providing a whole product suite for DeFi, including a decentralized exchange as well as a liquidity protocol. Unlike most liquidity providers, DODO uses their own market-making algorithm named proactive market-making, which relies on using oracles for more accurate price representation. DODO tokens are used to pay transactions on the DEX, can be staked and are given as rewards to liquidity providers.
DODO is trading against BTC on our exchange.
Balancer (BAL)
Balancer is yet another liquidity protocol and DEX, but unlike many of their competitors, BAL allows liquidity providers to create pools with up to 8 different assets. Furthermore, pool creators have freedom over setting their own fees. This enables liquidity providers to set their portfolio up nearly like a reverse ETF.
The BAL token is used to pay for transactions and as rewards for liquidity providers. It can be traded on our exchange with BTC.
BAND
Band is powering the Band protocol, which is providing vital oracle services to blockchains and decentralized Apps. With its on-chain data provision, Band enables developers to build dApps that rely on real-world data without having to worry about tampering. Band is running on top of the Cosmos blockchain and is planning to enable its service on other networks as well.
The BAND token is used for governance, paying transactions as well as staking. BAND can be bought and sold for BTC on our exchange.
Competitions
10,000 Pastel Trading Competition
To welcome Pastel to our exchange, we ran a trading competition with $10,000 Pastel in prizes. Thanks to all traders that participated. We’ve already credited prizes to your accounts.
$17,000 Curate Trading Competition
For the listing of XCUR, we’re running a trading competition with $17,000 XCUR in prizes. The competition started on the 25th of March and will be running until the 4th of April at 23:59 UTC. The top 50 traders with the highest trading volumes will be sharing the XCUR prize pool. To see how you rank, simply go to our trading competition page.
AMAs
We also hosted several AMAs and just wanted to use this section to thank all our AMA guests and participants for a great and informative month!
You can find summaries of all our AMAs on the Bitcoin.com Exchange Blog.
