The past few months have been warped by the hot trend of DeFi,
yield farming, and now…yams? Stake your coins and earn more coins has been the
motto which we have all been hyped crazy about. The level of frenzy has also spurred
up the amount of activity and fees on the Ethereum network to fresh new highs and
have seen the TVL in DeFi smart contracts on Ethereum to an ATH of over $4.7
Billion. Simply insane considering that it was only back in May where when we
hit $1 Billion was considered a milestone.
But all of this is centered around the Ethereum blockchain
which has been the dominant public blockchain for quite sometime now. And it’s
no mystery why many DeFi projects want to use the Ethereum blockchain as their
designated layer 1 protocol. But what about the other smart contract public
blockchains? They too have also been diligent in forming their own DeFi ecosystem
albeit at a slower pace within the shadows of Ethereum. But we’ll take a quick
glimpse of what the other major public blockchain DeFi ecosystems look like
before they start to experience the craze we are seeing today.
TRON
Although including the Tron blockchain network into this
article could be divisive and would incite controversy mirroring CT’s fondness
of the project, we’d figure why not include it as there efforts should not be overlooked
regardless of intent. And at the end of the day, we’re all trying to pique
adoption within this space at the same time being inundated by the rapidly
developing daily feeds of what’s hot and not. It was just recently that Tron’s
colorful founder, Justin Sun, took to Twitter in announcing Tron’s efforts into
the DeFi space with 3 new projects self named after him: JUST Lend, JUST SWAP, and
JUST BTC. Although the apathy of Tron’s DeFi activity over the past years have
been overshadowed by pervasive gambling dApps, there are a few DeFi dApps that
make up this minority.
POLKADOT
Despite the founder of Polkadot, Gavin Wood, being a
co-founder of the largest DeFi platform, Ethereum, the former is also starting
to make waves in the DeFi space with its own niche DeFi ecosystem sprouting up.
And just recently it was announced that the platform will create a Bitcoin
backed token named, PolkaBTC, enabling Bitcoin HODL’ers to use their BTC on Polkadot.
Another well anticipated DeFi project called Stafi has also been hot recently.
EOS-based Equilibrium has also decided to set up an interoperable network on
Polkadot as well due to its high throughput with its higher degree of decentralization.
Once Polkadot completes the rollout of sharding and parachains, except more
DeFi projects to hop on the bandwagon.
EOS
The rise of EOS DeFi has also been, for the most part,
runner up to Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem. Considering that the EOS platform has
launched a bit over 2 years ago to the frenzy of a large ICO fundraising, it
has made strides on many fronts and has gained a substantial fan base out in
Asia. Their biggest DeFi platform unequivocally is still REX (Resource
Exchange). And to further promote EOS, Newdex has recently set up the EOS
ecological DeFi special development fund. The fund is named "Newdex
Seed", which is used for the incubation of EOS ecological DeFi projects
and the developer support to promote the prosperity of EOS ecology.
COSMOS
The sudden emergence of Cosmos in the DeFi space has
obviously turned heads onto the project with many digging deeper into its
origins (including the recent breakup for the founding team earlier this year)
rather than focusing on its disparate model in relation to Ethereum’s. Although
its hub-and-spoke model have been egg’ed on for potential future inter-hub wars
versus Ethereum’s more centralized values and incentives, Cosmos does boast
faster throughput with lower fees. But the infrastructure has definitely been
grounded with the projects of Kava, Terra, ThorChain, Anchor, and even Bancor
leading the way.
Bytom also launched the DeFi protocol cluster MOV, which is
a decentralized value exchange ecosystem with products including loans,
stablecoins, synthetic assets, derivatives, etc. In June of this year, MOV
launched the superconducting exchange, followed by the introduction of
innovative mechanisms such as oracles and grid transactions.
Ontology’s DeFi layout includes the issuance of stablecoin
PAX based on the Ontology blockchain platform, cooperation with DeFi
application providers such as SALT Lending and LendChain, and the provision of
DID solutions by Ethereum and Polkadot’s DeFi projects. The ecology mainly
involves stablecoins, insurance, lending, payment and other fields. And just
recently a new DeFi project on Ontology was just launched called The Oin
platform. The Oin platform is based on the Ontology network and is first linked
to the Ontology ecosystem, thus forming the initial platforms: OINSwap, OIN
wallet, OIN-DAO, USDO stable currency and OIN-Lend.
The high-performance public chain platform Solana has also
begun to deploy in the DeFi ecosystem. In addition to cooperating with the
decentralized oracle Chainlink and the decentralized exchange DDEX, the
cryptocurrency exchange FTX also announced that it will launch Solana-based
decentralization in the next one or two weeks for Serum.
